Under Pressure

Monday, I was in meetings all day, but Tuesday I ran head first at organizing my research and preparing a demo. For four hours I tried spreadsheets, tables, images, words, outlines...

It didn’t matter. None of it was clean, simple or meaningful.

Wednesday, a project that I anticipated eating two hours of my day, took my ENTIRE day. As if that weren’t stressful enough my boss called with a large list of projects that needed to be completed. My boss was going to be out of the office for the next three days, and as a reflexive, nervous twitch, he eased his qualms about a growing to-do list by delegating to me.

The reality of a demo and research AND a method for displaying learner growth and progress loomed large in my fears.

On Thursday, I was in full procrastination mode. I tackled every project that my boss gave me.

Before I knew it, I was kissing my family and sending them off for their last work/school days and heading to my computer with 9 hours to create a multi-lesson demo, organize a summary of research and rationale for my work, and offer mock-ups of data displays for a student dashboard.

Tangent: 

In college, my husband had this annoying habit of waiting until the night before a paper was due to write it. I would have had the paper written, edited and revised with a week to spare - JUST IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. He would swear that he was just more creative under pressure. He would also assert that his writing was best edited as he wrote.  The word “draft” was not in his vocabulary.  Who creates quality work like that?

And We’re Back:
I won’t even begin to wax romantic over my amazing husband who never once uttered “I told you so” as he sat next to me wordsmithing my demo at 4:30 PM Friday night. And, while I haven’t had any feedback on the demo yet, I feel great about my work. I “kept it simple”. I used charts and images instead of a lot of words. I also opted to storyboard in Google Slides instead of authoring in our LMS.

The demo goes to the executive leadership team on Tuesday, I will know more about presenting to the Kern Family Foundation. For now, I’ll enjoy my weekend and try to slow my pulse at my near miss this week.