Service

I'm drowning in departmental service right now. It's never-ending.

The saddest part of that is that it won't do me any good for tenure. As one of the few women in my department, I tend to wind up doing more committee work than other people. I think this is due mostly to my difficulty in saying no to things. I have trouble not doing something that I know I can do better than others.

But, my contract is supposedly 60% research, 40% teaching. No service listed there. The word on the street is that service is a maximum of about 10% for tenure. My read on the situation is that the 10% comes out of the teaching side. So that is not going to help me. The research will help me, but how do I find time to do it? I'm so busy putting out fires that there's very little time to set aside for anything else. This frustrates me -- all these great ideas, just going to waste (or flying off to be had by somebody other than me!).

A friend told me awhile back that we had 6 years for tenure so that we had time to learn how to schedule; she might be right. But what I need to learn is how to say "no!" and stick to it.