I work in technology in a very high scale environment. Tons of people, lots of new faces all the time, hundreds of emails, social media pings, birthdays, need to change the cat box, car overdue for an oil change, organizing a conference, my direct reports are being lazy and I have to find a good way to motivate them, oh shit I agreed to send that guy that thing in the mail, the sales guy is pissed at me because I accidentally talked to his customer and didn’t loop him, oh shit haven’t been into the office this week need to put in face time, ten LinkedIn invitations, oh what about that webinar....

Jesus just found a stack of business cards from that conference two weeks ago and this one person wanted to meet and I never got around to it. Did I complete that sexual harassment training? I just got four reminders saying I need to read some new policies. Oh look three calendar invites for meetings tomorrow I didn’t see earlier. Did we get that vendor under NdA? My admin in the back office is on vacation I need her to finally sort the statement of work. Fuck it’s almost Friday I need to write that monthly report. My boss calling me about that thing hold on...

Like me, A college professor is defined by having hundreds of students pinging them with shit all the time and it is a rolling cast of students and faces you can’t remember with a monotonous list of shit you can’t possibly keep track of.

A younger me wouldn’t have understood what this does to my brain. The older me walks around in a state of being near to burn out and fried all day long.

It’s the volume of requests and things to think about. Keep in mind most of these things aren’t event my job, they are just overhead I have to deal with before I can even do my job.

I’m with the professors on this one. It’s brutal.