24 - Managing yourself and your time

Summary

I wish I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.

– Bernard Berenson

Teaching careers have many wonderful features. We get to spend our lives studying things we want to study, working with bright young people whose lives we can influence and edify; we have enormous freedom over the way we spend our time; we often have immediate access to excellent physical fitness facilities at reduced rates, and we have a summer schedule that can be adapted to meet our own needs. The corollary in the corporate world may not have quite as much summertime freedom, nevertheless most of the other benefits still apply. The job of teaching business management has great variety: We alternately act as teachers, researchers, writers, counselors, administrators, consultants, expert witnesses, representatives, and public speakers. Personally, we are hard-pressed to imagine a more rewarding, worthwhile, stimulating profession.

These same features, though, can be overwhelming. The work is never done, it is hard to leave it at the office, students come and go, making it easy to lose sight of their individual growth and development. Pressed by the desire or the demand to publish and/or design the next dynamite class or program, we often work long hours and ignore other dimensions of life. The university tenure system places heavy pressure on young faculty to produce or face the prospect of being let go. Peopled by self-confident and independent individuals, the ranks of academe and corporate training departments are often rife with political battles and unfortunate jealousies of fame and fortune.