Drop everything... for something new

Our last episode for this season will be an open Q&A. Send us your questions, ideas, puzzles and dilemmas by November 22, and we’ll fit in as many as we can for the December 2 episode! 

There's a whole sticky mess of having time vs. making time, and it can drag you down, make you question your sense of accomplishment, and even put you at odds with folks you care about. This week, we tackle some ways of re-thinking time, timelines, and commitments. 

There’s the friction of timelines in scicomm: 

• Nanosecond turnarounds in the media sector. 
• Agonizing over messaging at the institutional level. 
• Possible micromanaging and bottlenecks associated with message control. 
• Calibrating your own brand as a scicommer, wherever you work. 

There’s likely not a magic solution to this tension, because the stakeholders for a given product often have mutually exclusive needs. For example, fine-tuning a statement may satisfy an institution’s PR personnel while scrubbing the personality off of something ultimately destined for distribution via social media, where personality is key. 

And then there are short-notice opportunities, too! When we’re trying to juggle those, we keep in mind: 

• Does this help me meet a professional metric? 
• What do I have to say no to in order to say yes to this? What actions must I take to avoid being the bottleneck in someone else’s workflow? 
• What’s the balance between “done” and “done enough”? 

Take stock of what’s demanding your time: 

Is there an ongoing thing that you’re letting linger? Could you wrap it up? And if you’re not doing so, why not? What would saying “good enough, done” help you say yes to next? 

*** Join this conversation: follow us here and say hello (tell us what you're making time for!) on Twitter with @MeteorSciComm (https://www.twitter.com/meteorscicomm).

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