Now to share what I have learned about myself this week-I am most content when I have so much work to do as to almost put over the edge into a crying heap, but it doesn't. Let me explain with the story of my Friday.
When I got to my desk on Friday I had these tasks to complete by end of day:
-finish numbering and sorting the 50 pictures of the galleries and sync them to the building plan to create a visual guide to the spaces in the museum for a contemporary artist that is going to be doing something at some point in there
-get my curator supervisor a copy of an exhibition catalogue from 2006 that seemed to somehow not have been catalogued in the library
-find a picture of Frederick Macmonnies sculpture "Pan of Rohallion" (which we just bought a bronze cast of) either in its original location at the Rohallion estate or of the cast in the courtyard of the MET and email it to a different curator for the wall plaque
-go over all the membership information that I assembled for the development department to find a way to organize it
Although there are a lot of bullet points there, I got all of this done by 10:30am and got a bunch of new stuff:
-retake half of the pictures of the galleries because once on a computer they turned out to be slightly blurry (I may have had too much coffee giving me the shakes....oops)
-after finding the catalogue, it turns out it didn't have the info needed so I had to make a photocopy of the exhibition checklist from the registrar
(the picture I found of Pan was good-woop woop!)
-create an excel spreadsheet of the membership info so that comparisons could be made
-help with folding and stuffing a mailing that development is sending out (sidenote: when I started helping with this, I wasn't paying close attention and didn't realize that the letters I was folding and stuffing into addressed envelopes were also addressed so they had to sync up. YEAH. So I stuffed 50 or so which had to then be unstuffed, sorted and re-stuffed. After fixing this I bowed out and went back to the spreadsheet)
Again I got all this done (really the spreadsheet was the hardest part because I am an infant when it comes to excel-it just doesn't do what I want because I don't know how to make it do anything). I even had time to slip away from my desk and go to the newly set up "tea station", yeah that's right the public programs women whom I love teamed up with reservations and set up a station with mugs and easily 20 varieties of tea. It will be my new haven when I mess up stuffing envelopes. I haven't even mentioned my ongoing projects i.e. the wallpaper notes need to be typed up, I need to assemble all articles of Sam Gilliam (artist), edit my writing about Marisol, research the Bauhaus and the new Macmonnies sculpture. I am a busy girl.
At some point amidst taking pictures and photocopying and researching, I realized that I wasn't overwhelmed or worried about getting these things done. Instead I was invigorated with the amount of things that needed completing and cranked it out. I think it has to do with my competitive nature-I see the giant to-do list as a challenge and can't wait to start defeating it. I know, it's twisted. It's like when I was 10 chapters behind in Business Law reading 2 weeks before the exam a year ago and read them in 1 week then studied my notes the next week. It's a personal challenge that makes me super motivated. Or maybe it's that I love the feeling of accomplishment when I finish everything. Whatever the reason I certainly do thrive when I am so loaded down with tasks as to flirt with the edge of disaster and weeping in the fetal position. From what I can tell, this is a good thing because working in an arts organization guarantees I will often be in this environment of borderline project overload. As long as there is a coffee maker I can't imagine a better fate.
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