**What is it about Fall approaching?**

I can see the lightest yellowing of the trees out back. It is the tail end of Labour Day weekend. I am gearing up to teach at the insane hour of 8 AM tomorrow (or at least that is how my students will describe the time of class on the course evaluations, specifically under "factors that inhibited your learning"). I have a to-do list of more than 40 things to do. It would be longer if I remembered to add things to the list (adding them is also on my to-do list). I am sitting here on my last day off, working and sensing the impending craziness I have brought on myself by COMPLETELY over-committing this year.

Now I know myself well enough to realize that I do work best under pressure. I finished the Ph.D. as a single parent with small children in a community where I had no family to help. I moved said kids across the country to a town even further from family just to see what it was like to live in a new place (and learn to snowboard, as promised to #1 son). I took a one year book contract and procrastinated so that I had to write it in two months. Done. I moved to another completely new part of the country (3000 mile jump), started a new job and went up for promotion 4 months after arriving. Success.

So yes pressure = performance for me.

So it makes sense that I would set myself up for a series of fall and spring deadlines and challenges that are near impossible to meet. The second I come off a crazy high pressure schedule of deadlines (assuming I don't crash and burn this time), I tend face the inevitable restlessness that seems to result in my browsing through the job advertisements, daydreaming about cool places to live. So I have learned that I have to stay in this hi pressure mode or I will find myself accepting yet ANOTHER job and moving across country AGAIN.

So on top of the current, to-do list, there is the ongoing plan to write my second book (actually there are two more books to do, but my head will explode if I seriously contemplate more than one at a time. Worse than childbirth. Okay, not really). I want to plan thoughtfully (hah) for a Fulbright year in New Zealand or Australia. I want a sabbatical, but have learned that I don't have the patience to stay somewhere long enough to enjoy one (and how crazy it that?!).

First thing to tackle on my list - dump most of the 3000+ emails in my in box. It is an exercise in serial apologizing as I come across the numerous important emails I never responded to because the inbox is so overwhelmingly full. This has become a 2-3 time a year ritual. You would think I'd learn. Must add reading a book on being an efficient manager to my to-do list.