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Graduation is over. The banners have been folded up for another year, the tide of new graduates has ebbed from the campus, along with frenetic waves of proud parents. Stoical folk from hospitality are retrieving the last of the wine glasses from their resting places around the public statuary, while pigeons pick tentatively at the remains of the canap\u00e9s.<\/p>\n
Yet, just above the horizon, the administrative tsunami that presages the new term already looms menacingly. Or perhaps a Hollywood shark would be a better marine metaphor, stalking the helpless protagonist with cold malice. By September, the full-on horror of its process-centric reality will obsess my waking hours and invade such fitful rest as I can manage with half-remembered clerical tasks and the visceral worry of my paperwork being ill prepared.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t help that I\u2019m rubbish at administration and always have been. Don\u2019t get me wrong, I really want all this stuff to be off my desk \u2013 both literally and figuratively. It\u2019s just that whatever system I try to impose on myself always gets overtaken by events. A few of my attempts have been quite creative \u2013 and, I maintain, showed early promise \u2013 but have ultimately collapsed under the barrage of bureaucratic bullshit that has characterised my career.<\/p>\n
The handwritten list of daily priorities, designed to give me an endorphin rush when I strike things from it, helps tactically but not strategically. It is too easy to go for the quick win, pushing back the larger, nastier and less tractable elements of my guilt list. These fragrant, steaming piles of ordure lie heaped against the dark prison walls of my conscience, growing and festering until they threaten to engulf me completely.<\/p>\n
Structuring my week, blocking out chunks of time to address these larger issues, worked for almost 10 days \u2013 after which the messages stuck around my computer screen threatened to obscure the desktop completely, forcing the resumption of fire-fighting. Shutting the office door might have worked if it wasn\u2019t a space shared between four of us; my practice of gently ignoring envelopes in the coffee-room pigeonholes was thwarted by overly helpful colleagues bringing them down the corridor and dropping them on to my keyboard (adding bewildering typos to the document I was halfway through composing). Turning off my email for a chunk of each day also helped briefly \u2013 right up to the point when folk started phoning me to ask if I\u2019d received their email.<\/p>\n
If you have read this far, you will have realised that these are the ravings of an ageing academic who is wildly out of his depth and just about at the end of his rope. Yes, of course I\u2019m whining. But I\u2019m probably not the only one in similar circumstances who has almost been convinced that the inability to deliver such futile and divisive metrics as \u201cinbox zero\u201d and a clear desk are personal failures second only to squandering a research grant on online poker.<\/p>\n
Professional administrators, knowing a challenge when they see one, have tried to help me over the years. These fine folk, motivated alternately by sympathy and horror, have done their best to explain the arcane rituals of the academy \u2013 leading me through paper trails and sequences of cluttered screengrabs in an attempt to shave a few hours off the time I spent trying to secure some surely trivial transaction with the registry, HR or finance systems. But what is an open book to them is, to me, a terrifying expedition through some mysterious labyrinth whose central treasure is protected by evil spirits, poisoned darts and stone slabs that suddenly tip \u2013 casting the supplicant on to the skeleton-covered spikes below.<\/p>\n
They smiled indulgently when I first explained this to them, but I think they are starting to believe me.<\/p>\n
Clearly, I distrust \u2013 even fear \u2013 many of the data structures I\u2019m forced to use in academic life. I do, however, have some suggestions that would help folk like me to avoid the spikes and reduce our backlogs of guilt.<\/p>\n
First, I want to provide each piece of data only once \u2013 not every time I have an interaction with an administrative function. Hold it in the right place, in the right form, and its quality will be secure \u2013 but store it multiple times and there is a real risk of ambiguous or conflicting information.<\/p>\n
Second, throw out any spreadsheet that was written more than three years ago, or whose original author is no longer directly maintaining it. Trust me, if you don\u2019t understand in detail how they work, you aren\u2019t going to know when they are broken. And they are probably broken right now.<\/p>\n