R&R were struck down, one week after each other at the end of September. R1 then returned back into the workplace far too early in my own opinion as she was still not fully recovered from the dreaded Oink oink. A result of her early return R1 was then knocked off her perch by a nasty super virus that the students have thoughtfully shared with her. Then being the lovely person she is, R1, shared the virus with me. The outcome of this situation was that I ended up with most of the month off with pleurisy and then bronchial pneumonia. There are two weeks there where I have no memory other than feeling absolutely rotten with a cough and playing Darth Vader. I think the doctor was tempted to send me to hospital but I would not go thanks to all the other illnesses that were running round the region at the time.
I think in away this situation was another reminder that although we have been talking about changing the cooperative teams work life balance initiatives we have been repeatedly sucked back into our old ways of working. We still have not resolved the administrative issues and we are only likely to resolve that when we get a better funding stream. We cannot get a better funding stream until the local Authorities actually start paying their bills which means we have to do some debt collection. The problem is we are in a Catch 22 situation we are going out to do the work but we all do not having the time to chase the bills.
Teaching wise this semester we have a number of dissertation students who we have been counselling to be proactive and work on developing the time and project management skills. For some students we provide the guidance but it returns to the classic situation we can lead a horse to water but you cannot force it to drink.
Action plan
- Finish the implementation of a DMS
- Get the billing requests uptodate
- To stay on top of the workload
- Review the work/life balance load of all staff members
- Schedule specific sessions for organisational tasks.
