My name is Robin, and I have email anxiety.
Ok so some of this (dare I say) fear of my inbox comes from a reasonable place. While I was writing my dissertation and applying for jobs, emails were often life-changing, soul-crushing, and heart-rending. There were also times that I missed extremely important, time-sensitive information because it got buried in my inbox or I waited too long to work myself up to open it.
But I’m also finding that these days a big part of my email anxiety comes from the time dealing with emails demands of me. Emails are not just messages. They are reminders for action, they contain important instructions that need to be followed carefully, and they are delicate communications that set the tone of professional and personal relationships. There are also so many of them.
When I started working from home in 2019, I began to break up my day by types of tasks. I knew that I did my best writing between 10 and 2 and that I’d be most emotionally prepared to deal with other people before or after that. So I dedicated the first hour of my morning to emails. Back then, it was just thoughtful messages – me asking other people for advice or opinions, other people asking me to set up meetings, and the occasional communication about my writing. Now my emails are event invitations, course content from my past self, endless back-and-forth exchanges to set up meetings and trade information, and of course mountains of cc’s. Dealing with my email is no longer an hour a day, but days worth of triaging leading up to twice-weekly 2-hour sessions where I can sit at my computer (as opposed to my phone) and do all the important actions my emails demand of me, like submitting grades or using my benefits. And this is simplified from last year, when I had three separate work emails, between my grad school, my teaching job, and my fellowship.
I’m not kidding myself, either. I know that this is just the beginning. I try to imagine how many emails my graduate advisor or my department chair gets. I’m amazed they can keep their heads on straight. But as with all aspects of the profession, I know this is a skill that will improve in time as long as I don’t run from it. The first step has to be letting go of the fear of emails. I let go of the fear of academic criticism (or maybe I’m just numb to it) and it’s making me a better writer. Now I need to get out of my own way and just answer my goddamn emails.
In my circles, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is one of those deep losses that aches dully for a long time. Among the women I know, there is a feeling that RBG was one of us, whatever that means. To a certain subset, it means that she was a working mother.
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One of the things that’s actually helpful about applying for funding to support me in my final year of dissertation writing is that it forces me to be reflective about the process of writing and take stock of where I am and where I still need to go. I just submitted what is likely my final application, my fifth since October, and I found myself adjusting my completion timeline yet again. As part of the application, most organizations require a timeline of the work you still need to do. I’ve used the same timeline for every application, organized by dissertation chapter, and tweaked it as time has gone on and I’ve actually checked some items off the list. But mostly, I’ve just kept pushing back the date that I’ll finish Chapter 2. My first version of this timeline, back in October, said that I would finish Chapter 2 in November. Now, here I am at the start of February and I just pushed the estimate to mid-February. Have I been kidding myself about how much work I still have to do?
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I’m lucky enough to have a dedicated home office. This was by design – it’s been a requirement for every space I’ve lived in during grad school, at the expense of living spaces that were cheaper, or more private, or in more interesting areas near people I knew. But just because my office belongs to me doesn’t mean it’s not full of all kinds of weird shit that probably shouldn’t be in there.
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Lately I’ve been telling myself that if I could just set aside a big chunk of time – I always arbitrarily think of it as 4 hours – I would be able to focus and get over the hurdle of the chapter I’m trying to write. Read More
A running list of things/people that have been sustaining me for the past year, in no particular order: Read More
Like procrastibaking, but you shouldn’t eat the results. Read More