Diving headfirst into the semester

The upcoming semester promises to be quite busy.

I have two conference trips, which naturally take time from what I am working on.

We are working on putting the cherry on the cake of our accreditation.

I am working on a number of research proposals, one of which with a hard deadline in November.

There are a fair number of papers to write, and students to supervise.

When I was looking at my planning for the upcoming semester, I got a bit worried. Perhaps, maybe all of this is too much and I am going to drop the ball here and there.

Then, I let these thoughts sink for a moment.

And I decided to do two things:

1. Ruthlessly prioritize to focus on the main achievements I want to obtain this semester.
2. Dive in headfirst. Don’t agonize. Don’t fret. Just jump into the pool and do the very best I can.

So I dove headfirst into the semester – with perhaps less preparation and clarity on what to do than usual, and many more overlapping timeblocks on my calendar, but full of hope and plans for doing my very best.