Listen to Episode 05: Reflecting on time

Release date: April 29, 2025. Length: 65:58 minutes.

In which we talk with Michelle Reale about about a whole constellation of things around reflective time management–how to manage your workday, based on your immediate needs and on your long-term goals for your career. She also talks about self-care and self-advocacy when structuring your time, as well as the practice of reflection in general.

Listen to Episode 05 in the UMN Digital Conservancy.

Read the Episode 05 transcript.

Show Notes

Guest Bio

Our current awareness highlights

In this episode, we reflected on the ACRL 2025 conference in Minneapolis. You can view our poster and also check out our more complete podcasting quick-start guide. And, here is further information on the sessions we mentioned:

• "Academic Freedom Under Threat: Stories from Librarians and How to Fight Back," a panel session with Jessica Simpson, Martin Brennan, Danya Leebaw, Brea Henson, Heather Bush, and Maria Atilano

• "Mapping Social Work’s Strengths Perspective to the ACRL Framework: Ideas for Inclusive Teaching," a poster session by Sarah McCall

• "Navigating the Perseverance Plateau: An Examination of Intentional Planning for Sustainable Outcomes," a panel session with Lauren Pressley, Rebecca Miller Waltz, and Rachel Rubin

• "Democratizing Power: Exploring the Radical Potential of Mid-Career Librarians," a panel session with Jenny Wong-Welch, Jordan Nielsen, and Mara Cota

• "The conversation we can have: Emergent Strategy in library teaching," a panel session with Hazel McClure, Leah Morin, Liz Chenevey, Vanessa Arce Senati, Brianna Chatmon, and Sheila Garcia Mazari

  • Note: Their forthcoming book is Emergent Strategy in Library Instruction: Stories, Reflections, and Imaginings from Litwin Books & Library Juice Press.

Transcript

[intro music begins (instrumental, laid back rhythmic strings, drums, and piano)]

STEPHANIE: Hello, and welcome to Library Table Talk. I’m Stephanie Sparrow, one of your hosts.

HANNAH: And I’m Hannah Cabullo, your other host. In Library Table Talk, we’re two librarians exploring what academic librarianship looks like in the day-to-day, across different types of institutions and roles.

STEPHANIE: Nothing is off the table. We’re happy to have you here.

[music fades out]

HANNAH: Our last two episodes of the season, as we approach the summer, are about time management. Maybe you are eagerly awaiting that expanse of less structured time, or maybe you’re panicking just a little bit about what you’re gonna fill it with. Or some other delightful or less delightful array of emotions. For this episode, we talked with Michelle Reale about a whole constellation of things around reflective time management–how to manage your workday, based on your immediate needs and on your long-term goals for your career. She also talks about self-care and self-advocacy when structuring your time, and also just about the practice of reflection in general. We did record this interview last summer, and oh my goodness, Stephanie, especially coming straight out of ACRL at the beginning of April, I am so glad from a time management standpoint that we had this recording in our back pocket.

STEPHANIE: Oh, for sure! Mentally I’m still in semester scramble-mode, and I just know that I could not have gotten another episode out this month. I'm really thankful for past Stephanie, Hannah, and Michelle, that they were able to record when time was on their side. So thank you, past us, we appreciate you. Even though we framed this conversation around preparing for summer, Michelle had some really sound advice for any time of year. So with that, let's turn over the virtual floor to her.

MICHELLE: My name is Michelle Reale, and I am the Access Services and Outreach Librarian at Arcadia University, which is in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I'm also a poet and a scholar, and I teach in the MFA program also here at Arcadia. So that's me in a nutshell right there.

HANNAH: Alright, great. So you have a lot of different things going on. Can you tell us a little bit more about, I don't know… The typical week question is like, never a great question. But, um. [laughs] What are the main things that you spend your time on?

MICHELLE: Oh, gosh. Like you said, there are so many things that I do, and I feel lucky to be able to do so many things. But a typical day or a typical week will have me, you know, going out to the access services desk, overseeing things out there, teaching information literacy sessions, having meetings with professors, having one-on-one consultations with students. In the fall, I'm also embedded. I'm an embedded librarian, and have been an embedded librarian for about 13 years. I teach English thesis class, co-teach English thesis class with another professor. I am also kind of the steward of the library building, so I'm always making sure that things are okay in the building. I'm doing walk-arounds, going to meetings across campus. So it's kind of like this, this vegetable stew of all of these different things that I do, and every day is kind of different. Every day demands something different of me. There are days when the library is busy. That's a whole ‘nother activity for me when the library is very busy. When the library is not busy that gives me time to, you know, spend a little time in my office and get things done there. So it's always different. I like that, actually. 

HANNAH: Yeah, I think that's one thing that I have enjoyed about librarianship so far is the variety. 

MICHELLE: Yeah. That's right. Yeah, that's right. 

STEPHANIE: There's the element where you can really make what you want from it

MICHELLE: Absolutely.

STEPHANIE: And pursue the collaborations and projects that are of interest, which is really fun and empowering too, in your job.

MICHELLE: It really is. To be, to be able to have your hand in a lot of different things, for me keeps me motivated. It keeps me interested, and I think, I hope, it keeps me interesting as well. Knowing, knowing just a lot of different things that are going on. I think campuses in general are vibrant places. You know, there's a debate about whether the library is the heartbeat of the campus. I, I happen to think that it is. A lot of things go on here. So my workday involves really being in a community center that happens to be a library, because people come here for lots of different reasons. So part of my day is serving those needs, or attending to those needs, or making sure that those needs are being attended to.

STEPHANIE: So for this episode, we're really talking about, we're really interested in time management, especially when you have a lot of projects going on, or your role has a lot of flexibility and freedom in where you put your time and energy. And hearing you talk about it, it's very clear that you are involved in a lot. You have a lot of projects going on.

MICHELLE: Yeah, yeah.

STEPHANIE:  A lot of different roles and kind of like threads throughout your, your job, but also your writing and your involvement in the community on your campus. So I was wondering with that in mind, can you share a little bit about your philosophy, or approach to time management? Like, what are the factors that you consider when you are allocating your time or having to make decisions about where to focus your time? 

MICHELLE: That's such a great question. And it used to be something that I struggled with when I first became a librarian. I, I think that I used to squander a lot of time, and by squandering time, not necessarily wasting time, but putting my energy and time to things that were not as impactful. And I like to, now, really focus on what is most impactful, and I've decided that is where I will put my time. So I had a mentor here at the library. She's now retired. But my mentor, Dr. Jean Buckley, who is still a mentor to me, used to tell me to ask myself a question every time I was asked to do something or participate in something. She would say, “Is it worth your professional time?” And on the face of it I remember thinking, well, why does it have to be worth my professional time? Maybe it's just something I want to do. And she would tell me, if you want to make an impact in your career, the things that you do must be impactful. Because we all only get 24 hours a day. So I had been doing a lot of diverse things that I thought, you know, a starting out librarian needed to do to get street cred, or whatever you want to call it, right. Like I'll do this. I'll edit, I'll edit this newsletter. I'll do this. Doing those things may have had some value to the person to whom I was doing them for. But what they did was sapped my energy and ate away a lot of time and really ended up putting me nowhere on the professional map that I wanted to be on. But even more than being on some, some professional track, I wanted to make an impact with the things that I was doing. So now I do take a step back, and I, and I say to myself, who will this impact? How will I help? And in the long run will it make a difference? And I've really started to really feel not as, I don't know, overcome by exhaustion or resentment, you know. We have to do a lot of community service at my university, and I was even careful with choosing which committees. You know, I've been on Faculty Senate for four years. This is my first time in four years I won't be in Faculty Senate in this semester coming up. But I feel like that was a lot of time that it took that was impactful. And I didn't have to be on other committees while I was on Faculty Senate. And during my day, I'm very careful with my schedule. You know, I've had to make tough decisions. If a student shows up 20 minutes late for an appointment, I tell them they need to reschedule. I reclaim my time, and I use that time to do something that really needs to be done. I make sure that meetings that could be, that are scheduled that really could be emails become emails. I've had to streamline a lot of those things for myself. I just had to think of time in a different way. We think of time expanding throughout the day, like I have all of this time in front of me. I think of time in terms of shrinking in front of me. So how will I actually use that time to get things done? I also am a very reflective person, so I'm a reflective practitioner, and keeping, I keep a reflective journal for work, and it gives me a chance to look back and see what I've spent time on, what I could have spent more time on, even things that I could have spent less time on. So I've kind of employed all of the strategies. Every day isn't perfect, but I'm always trying to make the time for what's most important.

HANNAH: I might jump ahead to a different question that is not next, cuz you mentioned the reflective practice. So, um, so you've intentionally committed time in your career to reflective practice. Can you give a little description or definition of reflective librarianship or reflective practice, and any further thoughts on how you make sure you incorporate that into your schedule?

MICHELLE: Sure, I'm going to explain, I'll give a definition of reflection in its simplest form, because I think the practice has really been mechanized. In fact, I wrote a book for ALA on reflective librarianship, and I tried to make it real down to Earth. You know, in our technology- driven society, you know, we want to mechanize everything with steps and theories. And basically what reflective practice is, is reflecting on an action or actions, and you know, detailing them not so much what you did, but how you felt about what you did. That's the reflective part, right? So you can reflect in action, and a lot of times I'll do that during my day, especially when I'm teaching. I will be saying to myself, Oh, wow! You know, everyone seems to look confused. Maybe that wasn't the best way to explain it. So, a lot of times I'm reflecting in action, right, as I'm acting. Mostly I'm reflecting when I come back to my office. Maybe after a session, I'll start writing about it. I might, I might write about how, for instance, a professor might have been checked out when I kind of counted on their help to get participation in class. I might reflect on the way that I presented material that seemed to be not as clear as I could have. I reflect on how I might circle back with students. I even reflect on my own state of mind going into the class. I mean, sometimes I feel fully prepared, and sometimes, even though I've actually prepared something, I will walk into a class, and group dynamics are off, or students are tired, or it's a Monday morning, or anything, and that affects me also. And I might reflect on how I can prepare for those types of situations, right? In fact, I come to work every morning and my boss walks into… I come, I'm at my desk by 8. My boss walks in every day at 9 o'clock, and finds me writing in my reflective journal. I start the day, I also start the day with some intentions of, I reflect on what I'd like to accomplish, how I'm feeling, if I'm feeling poorly, or I didn't have enough sleep. I like to reflect on how I might work through that. And sometimes just writing about it is enough to get me to the next step. I'm, I'm a huge preacher of reflective practice. I think it is a worthwhile way, a worthwhile tool to use in your professional life. 

HANNAH: Yeah, I think that sounds like a really wonderful way to start the day, cuz often, just like, you come into your office and check your email, you're like, everybody's emails are what you're faced with. Or, I don't know if your commute hasn't helped you transition. 

MICHELLE: Right.

HANNAH: And to be the frame of mind of taking the time and to be like, Okay, I don't need to jump into everything right at 8:01, or whenever you start your day.

MICHELLE: You really, you really don't. We think we do, and this is how we kind of let our day dictate to us rather than dictating our day, right. And I tell this to, to people all the time, ground your-, for me, it's a grounding activity or exercise. I ground myself. I have my reflective journal right here. I ground myself, and I set intentions, and I might look over yesterday. Yesterday,

I didn't get whatever done, because, here's why that made me feel uneasy. I went home. Felt, you know, it was nagging at me. Why was it nagging at me? I kind of explore, and then I'm ready. I open my computer. I look at my emails. I take a deep breath and I'm ready to start the day. But it has the potential to be an extremely grounding activity. I go to my reflective journal. I'm also an inveterate and voracious journal keeper in my civilian life also. But I go to my reflective journal for everything, whenever I'm working out something. You know, it's just a very reflexive thing for me to do. It's just very helpful for me. It’s, it's proven to be very helpful, and it's very much helped me to become the professional, and I'm always growing. No one ever arrives, but it's helped me to become the professional that I am today.

STEPHANIE: Do you find yourself going back to read earlier entries, or is like the reflection mainly in the writing and the, the being as you're doing it?

MICHELLE: That's a great question people actually ask that, have asked that of me a few times. Do I ever look back? I do look back, because, I, I look back, I remember things that I've written, and I look back to remind myself I overcame it, right. Cuz sometimes, you know, in librarianship, especially if you're teaching information literacy, there's always that push-pull with faculty. And you're not the, you know, you’re not the instructor of record. We're always teaching classes that aren't ours, right? So things arise. And I, and a lot of times, it's a cycle. Things will arise cyclically, you know. And I do like to look back in my reflective journal and say, Okay, now I remember how I felt. I feel the same way now. What did I do then? Worked it out, worked it through. It's never perfect. But that awareness that you experienced something, you got through it, and you can get through it again has been really career-changing for me. And it showed me also that I can trust my inner wisdom, that I don't always have to look outside of myself to learn something, that I can look within myself, and I can trust myself to make right decisions, or even trust myself to recognize when I've been wrong, when I took a wrong approach, and when I failed. And the reflective journal can really be uncomfortable when you need to recount failures. You know, I remember coming back from one session that I taught. And I walked past the paraprofessional that sits outside of all of our offices, and I said to her, “I don't know why anyone thought I was capable of teaching information literacy,” and she said, “No, no, no, it can't be that bad.” I said, “It was that bad.” And I remember going back and, and writing about it, and realizing I went in with a bad frame of mind. I was not as, um, I didn't have as much contact with the professor that I needed. I was just ill-prepared all the way around, and that was my responsibility. I took ownership for that, and took steps to, to repair. Because I think at that, I remember that incident very well, that the professor seemed a little bit disappointed. The students were unenthralled, and, um, but I think you have to, you have to be, really, it forces you to be really honest with yourself. And that's a, that’s a hard pill to swallow sometimes. But there's no point in reflecting if you're not going to be honest. I mean, lying to other people is bad enough, but lying to yourself is just like, yeah, we don't, we don't want to do that. It's not helpful.

STEPHANIE:  It seems like reflective practice, at least as hearing you describe this, it's for one, it sounds like a helpful tool against perfectionism, which I think of as like this feeling that shuts you down as opposed to having the space to think about it and reflect, and then also like, have the dose of compassion for yourself as well to be like, oh, there were reasons why. I'm not just a failure. There are, next time I can do something different. And it sounds like that's a way to kind of push past that just thinking and feeling of oh, god, I can't do this. Oh, my god, like I failed this.

MICHELLE: I agree. I mean, I think, what you say makes so much sense to me. It really helps to rewire the brain, right? Because I think we're, we all tend to be so hard on ourselves. Right? You know, I know that I am. I'm my own worst critic. I always tended to beat myself up a lot. What reflective practice did was made me aware of my shortcomings or my failings or things I could do better, but in a constructive way, and I think you used the word compassion, having compassion for yourself, right? And I think of, I think of younger librarians, and just starting out, how intimidated it is to approach faculty, right, and go up in front of a class. I feel very strongly that when you are aware and you are having compassion for yourself and realizing no one is perfect, you are going into that class because you're the person that knows how to deliver this lesson, right? You know, having that awareness and reminding, reminding yourself, right. But also at the same time constructively working on things that you honestly need to get better at.

HANNAH: So in your early career as a librarian, how did you approach things like self-direction, time management, and deciding what projects you wanted to pursue?

MICHELLE: I'm lucky, because, as I've mentioned before, I had a terrific mentor. My mentor, Dr. Jean Buckley, was so instrumental, I think, in shaping me as a person, and I would urge young librarians to find someone who, or starting librarians, not everyone who's starting to be a librarian is necessarily a young librarian. She really taught me to be aware of what is, what is a good use of my professional time when choosing committees or librarianship that was very meaningful to me, that could, that a research agenda could coalesce around. And I did that. So I'm very interested in embedded librarianship, and I'm very interested in critical reflection. And I'm interested in other aspects of librarianship also. But those were the two that I really, that I meaningfully connected with them. And when I would have my weekly meetings with Dr. Buckley, she would say, “What are you doing in those two areas that are going to advance your knowledge of those things, and advance your, your impact on the profession in those things?” And we used to talk about it. She was encouraging me to write articles, and get articles published, and I am a writer anyway. And I remember saying to her one day, “I want to write books. I really want to write books.” And I remember her laughing. She's like, so write books! And now today, after writing 7 ALA titles, I remember the first book I wrote for ALA was on mentoring and managing student workers in the library. It was what I knew best. I began that way, and that was my foray into becoming interested in other aspects of librarianship. So her advice to me was, find something that you know a lot about, or that you want to know a lot about. Dive in. And I did that. I've talked to a lot of librarians in a lot of places, and not all, but some of them do suffer from some fatigue in the profession if they don't have a particular focus. You know, if you're a reference librarian in a university, and you still have a reference desk. We don't. We abolished our reference desk about 10 years ago. If you still have a reference desk, and you're spending a lot of time sitting at a desk, and, and not a lot of people are coming up to you, you could feel like, what, what am I, what am I doing? So I think that that was one of the mainstays of my early career, was just reading endlessly about topics I was interested in. Making notes for writing. Keeping close, I believe in being proximate to things that you're interested in. Stay close to them. Don't allow yourself to veer far from where your interests are, and it can just add so much joy to the profession.

HANNAH: So approaching that from the angle of time, of how would you like, make time to make sure that you're pursuing those things that you're interested in? 

MICHELLE: Sure. I would say, put it on your calendar, right? We were encouraged to do that. Like I said, we're very lucky here still, even with my boss, he will often say, please put your writing time on the calendar. If there's something that you want to pursue professionally, block out that time. It's easy to say, and I've heard people say this, no, I'm here for the, you know, I'm here for the students. I'm, you know, if a student, if I have to have meetings all day, that's what I'll do. Well, I don't see a lot of wisdom in that, because there's a finite amount of physical and emotional energy we have in doing one-on-one meetings. And I would say one of the things to make time for the things that you want to pursue is to literally make time for the things you want to pursue, even if it's a half hour. If you need to make notes or read an article, put a half hour on your calendar, but do not allow anyone to encroach. I used to have people that would actually request meetings during blocked out times. And I'd have to email them and say, Um,  I know you looked at my calendar, that time is not… But, and I also realize how hard it is for new librarians to say that. You know, Emily Dickinson said, “If your nerve denies you, go above your nerve.” You have to be able to say, “No, I'm sorry. That time is occupied,” right? You have to just come out and say it. I think that people will eat up your time. You have to realize you are in charge. Sometimes there are things we can't control. There are meetings we have to attend. There are things we just have to do. But I think we have a lot more control than we've ever wanted to believe.

STEPHANIE: So, Michelle, now that you're much farther into your career, with many years of reflective practice under your belt, are there lessons you've learned the hard way or things that you would have liked to have done differently in terms of balancing your priorities, maybe earlier in your career, or time management?

MICHELLE: I think there are a few things, so hopefully, I'm on the right track in answering this way. I think I wish I would have realized when I became a librarian that was teaching information literacy and liaising with faculty, I wish I realized, I wish I asserted myself as the professional that I was, and the professional that I am. And what I mean by that is that I wished I would have earlier on, when meeting with a professor who was telling me, I want you to come in on the first day of class. I want you to show them, show them how to find articles and things like that. I wished in the early days I could have said, Hold on, that’s  probably not, not the way we want to do this. We want, we want the lesson tied to a, you know, an assignment, You know, we, we want, the first day they're not going to remember anything. They're still getting acquainted. But I didn't do that. I didn't see myself as the, um, I don't know how to put it, the independent professional that I was. That it was professional meeting professional, rather than professional, in the form of a faculty member, meeting the person in servitude to them. I would have saved myself a lot of time. I would have saved myself a lot of energy. I would have felt better about myself earlier on, and what I was contributing. Unfortunately, on a lot of college campuses, that's the way the faculty-librarian relationship goes. I'm the most senior librarian here. I preach to every librarian we have that you absolutely must assert your professionalism. They are coming to you to deliver a service to their students because you know best. And you are not that professional if you are not advising them. And, and I would also say, just talking to a professor is not collaboration. I wish I was more clear about that. You know, at meetings I used to say, Oh, yeah, I'm collaborating with Dr. So-and-so. And someone would say, Oh, how are you collaborating? And I would say, Oh, well, we exchanged emails. And this is what he wants me to do. Well, that's not collaboration. That's not even parallel play. That is having a directive from someone that doesn't know best. Right? Collaboration, and I will, I will always talk to faculty about this, is you and I getting together, talking about what kind of students you have, what the makeup of the class is, what they respond to, what they don't respond to, what you would like me to not only do but what result do you want it to have. Getting to the point is a real time-saver. You know, when I talk about the way to be in librarianship, being the way we should be is a great time-saver. It saves you time from beating yourself up. It saves time from having to, to go back over and back in and do another lesson, because the first was ill-timed, or you didn't agree on what should be taught, or whatever. So those are things I just wish that I had, I wish the culture of librarianship was different, in general. This is a long-term problem of, of librarianship in general that I hope is changing, because I don't hear newer librarians complain about it as much as I did. But of course I'm around librarians, and I'm always saying, no, assert yourself. You know, it was very hard for me to do that. I'm not the most assertive person, but I had to go beyond the fear that I had. And I think when a librarian in an academic library does that, he or she or they do it not only for themselves, they do it for all of the librarians, right? Because when you can stick up for yourself and, and be a good steward of your time, and, you know, direct your energies to things that are impactful and meaningful, it sets an example for everyone. And it really ups the value of what you do, and the way people on campus perceive you.

STEPHANIE: Michelle, you are just, wow, you, I feel like in the moment I'm like, oh, I cannot wait to reflect on this later! I have so many thoughts that I want to just think about!  Oh, thank you.

MICHELLE: Great. That's great. Yeah. This has, this has been, this has been like a, you know, years of me figuring this out with no one to tell me. You know, my, my, as, as good as my mentor was, once she became the dean of the library, she was no longer doing the types of things we were doing. So she was out, she'd say, “I sympathize. I'm a little out of touch with, you know, what you're all dealing with on a daily basis.” I had to find my own way. I had to, I had to go beyond that fear that I felt, and that, that timidness that I felt, and some people received it well, and some people didn't. You know, that's just, just the way it was. You know, and I'd say, Well, that's the way it is. You know, I can't run out and do a class at five minute’s notice. Not even in 12 hour’s notice, I can't do that. But, more importantly, I won't do that, because it won't make me look good. And it doesn't serve me or my students to be ill-prepared for something.

HANNAH: Thinking about, like, career trajectory, and maybe once you gained more confidence through your early career, are there mid-career pitfalls in terms of time management that you see that you feel like you've learned from, or…?

MICHELLE: Yeah, I think mid-career can be a time where you find yourself, um, repeating patterns. That you’re mid-career, you’re midpoint, you're kind of in, in some sort of flow that's not really flowing. It's, it's, it's the flow that you've done over and over again. You're not,

you know, it's probably the time, well, it was for me, where I wasn't really thinking of new strategies for myself, as far as time management. I was kind of doing the same things I always did. And it wasn't until I got a little bit beyond that midpoint where I realized I was going deeper and deeper into my career and the things that I wanted to do, when I realized that I needed to find different structures, because if I was going to pursue new and different things that required newer structures for me. And that's when I really started blocking off time and things like that. You know, you work on a campus, and a campus like this is very social. You know, people always want to get together for lunch, and people always want to, you know, an hour stretched into hour and 15 minutes, and I I looked back on that. And I thought, Oh, yeah. And while I was in the cafeteria I grabbed five more cookies. And I just, things like that, I realized, yeah, probably don't want to eat all this food. Probably don't want to take over an hour for lunch, not because I don't deserve to take an hour. Because I simply didn't need an hour for lunch. You know, time to take a walk outside, eat my sandwich, eat my apple, drink my bottle of water and get back to work was a better use of my time. So that's particular to me. What I'm advocating for other people is to look at the way you're spending your time, right? And mid-career is that time when you can find yourself really comfortable. And I would say, shake that up a bit. That is the time to start looking back and saying, you know, what have I done? What do I want to do? What haven't I finished, and, and why? Right? And, and take a good look at the way, the way you schedule your time. If you like to sprinkle your one-on-one consultations all throughout the day, it's going to break up your day. It's really going to break up your day a lot. Where are you allotting time for concentrated thinking and quiet? A lot of times my office isn't even quiet. We have a wheel, you know, “do not disturb,” “in a meeting,” whatever. We just spin our wheels. But even when I have “do not disturb,” people are knocking on my door, just opening my door, coming in. Sometimes I'll just take my computer and go to a different building, find a quiet space somewhere else, just to get things done. Time is something you have to try to harness. You can't let other, this is probably the, the, all of the talking I've done, the one message is, you have to control your time. You cannot allow other people. I always say this, so much so that my colleague next door, John, in the next office, put the sign on the door. I always say, there are no bibliographic emergencies ever, and he has that sign on his door. So if someone says, I have a paper due tomorrow, I really need to see you at 3 o'clock, and that time has been allotted for myself, I will, I will ask another librarian to see them. Because if we don't do that we will never, we will always allow something to encroach on our time, always. So that's my main message, is have the agency, feel the agency for yourself to know that you get to dictate what your daily schedule looks like. 

HANNAH: And I think that definitely seems like it would be a process of being able to set firm boundaries and being comfortable setting firm boundaries. Like it's not gonna happen overnight.

MICHELLE: It doesn't happen overnight. It certainly didn't with me. But I will tell you, the sooner someone learns, the easier life gets. You, you absolutely, even if it, even if your face turns red, even if you're slightly shaking, I'm speaking of myself here, even if you get a catch in your throat, you've got to set those boundaries. People, people will always know when your boundaries are porous. They will know. They will know by the way you carry yourself. They will know by how quickly you answer their emails. They will, that's another thing Dr. Buckley always said, You can put people on ice for, for a little bit. You don't need to get right back to people. You are not at their beck and call. That sounds harsh, but it's not harsh. It makes perfect sense. You will get back to them when it is convenient for you to do so, unless it is something that absolutely requires an immediate response. All of these little things eat up time. You know, if you, if you are just sitting down to reflect or work on an article, or read an article or prepare a lesson plan, and bing, you get an email, and you're like, [sigh], let me just answer this, get it out of the way. What you've done is literally pulled yourself and your attention that you were gently trying to focus on something meaningful, you have now pulled that energy to put on something that is not meaningful and not impactful and not important and did not need an immediate response. Now, when you get back to what you were doing, it's that much harder, because now you've got to put yourself into that space. And that's not an easy thing to do. This is all part of rewiring the brain also. And this is something society doesn't want us to do. There's so many things that compete for our time and attention. You have to resist the urge to keep looking at everything around you and just focus down. How many times have you taken out an article and went to read it, and you're reading the same paragraph over and over? It’s happened to me so, so many times. And what I do is say, okay. I am obviously not in the frame of mind. I am not going to waste my time trying to read this very turgid article that I really need to understand. I'm going to put it aside. I'm going to do something else. So I've also learned that when I'm not in the right frame of mind for something to stop doing what I'm trying to do. It's not going to turn out well. I will end up having to read the article a second or third time. So I've learned these things all along the way, and I, they were setbacks for me. I had a lot of setbacks in my day-to-day work life. A lot, mostly because of my own habits. And I don't have a lot of patience for, for people who say, “But, but, but…” You, you control more than you think. You, you control more than you think you do. You will know, you will know your own hierarchy of what needs to be done first, or who needs to be responded to, or when you need to make student appointments. You will, you will know. And you have to follow that inner… You know, if you're not good in the morning, you know, if it takes you longer to get started in the morning, simply don't schedule consultations with students in the morning. And you could say, oh, yeah, but between 9 and 12 I've got all that time. If you’re not good, that's when you read. That's when you reflect. That's when you're catching up on work at your desk, right. If you have more energy once the caffeine has kicked in in the afternoon, then you do your appointments. We think that we have to, if a student emails us and says, Can I meet you at 10 o'clock, that we have to do that. You can say, How about one? And if they say no, I have a class then, how about if we meet tomorrow, or or the next day, or the day after that, right? Make it work for you. If you make it work for you, it works for everybody. I can guarantee that, yeah. I'm a real hardliner about that, as you, as you can tell. 

STEPHANIE: I want to be. Hearing you, I'm like, oh, I want this for myself, too. Stephanie, be better. [laughs]

MICHELLE: You'll get there, right. You'll, you'll get there, I promise. You know, the more you do it, the easier it becomes. For me, it's automatic. I'm just, now I'm trained, I'm trained that way. It works, definitely. But then, you know you also tailor it for yourself. Everyone has different personalities, different thresholds. We all have different thresholds of what we're willing to put up with, where we'll allow things to slide. It's very personal. It's a very personal thing. Do I let people encroach on my time on some days when I'm like, Eh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, if it works, if it works for me, I do that. If it doesn't work for me, and I'm going to be upset and resentful, and that means I have to take work home with me, no, then I won't, I won't do it. And that's how you don't get burnt out. That's, you know, people always talk about burnout. What do you do once you're burnt out? I want to talk about, what do we do so we don’t get burnt out? Right? So all of the things that I'm talking about are also preventative measures from overwhelming yourself needlessly. There's no reason, there's absolutely no reason to do that. You know, it's, we have to realize that taking care of ourselves means that every hour of every day we're thinking of our time in a way that makes the day sustainable for us, not a day in which we're going to feel so submerged we can't come up for breath. It's not healthy. It doesn't really help anyone, if it makes you tired and grouchy, and if it fogs your thinking, and if you've got to keep hitting the coffee pot, it's not worth it, right? It's just not. I'm a proponent of caffeine, but there's a limit to everything. [laughs] There's a limit to everything. You know, you have five cups of coffee, and then you go home, and you can't sleep at night, which compounds the problem the next day. Right? So you're trying to power through, and you're, you know. These are all things, these are all time-related issues, right? You’re trying to drink coffee, trying to get more done. We actually get less done, because we're not focused, we're trying to do too many things at one time. I would like to murder the person that came up with multitasking. [laughs] I just, it's just, we still ask that question. How well do you multitask? During interviews. Stop already! 

STEPHANIE: Not well.

MICHELLE: Right! Not well. Nobody does. No one should have to do five things at one time. No one. It's, you know, there are, there are limits to everything. 

STEPHANIE: So we're planning on releasing this episode next spring. So it's a little far away. But we wanted to do it then, because, as folks are starting to think about their summers as semesters are winding to an end, the question kind of pops up as like, ooh, more free time over the summer. So how do you approach your work in the summer? Are there particular challenges or opportunities at this time of year that you face?

MICHELLE: One of the challenges is too much time ahead of me, right? The summer is at least in this library, notoriously, notoriously quiet and slow. It doesn't mean there aren't people in the library, but they don't need our help. We're not teaching classes. We're not doing anything like that. Two things that I do: I still plan my time, and I diversify my tasks. So in the summer, you know, during the semesters, I can never get to weeding my subject areas. I do weeding. I work with the circulation supervisor, and we go over the handbook. We go over training manuals. We get academic reserves in order. I will also do, I know this sounds, I also do some shelf reading to be familiar with other aspects of other collections that are not my own. I like to, I consult with the acquisitions librarian, to see what's coming in that's new. I look at the curriculum. I do all of these things that I don't have time for when we're all teaching and doing reference and one-on-one consultations. So I plan my day. Usually the first half of my day is writing. I now just found out that my newest book I have to index myself. [laughs] It's with a different publisher, and I'm like, okay, I hadn't planned on that, but I will work that into my schedule. So that's something I'll be learning how to index a book. How many years of my life I've looked at indexes and pitied the person that had to do this and never understood how it gets done. So I have to do that. So, I plan time to research. I actually do, I do a lot of research on things that I want to learn, aspects of librarianship, new teaching theories, pedagogy, all of those things, right. I also work some time in to walk around campus, just time to, you know, just be out of my office, take my eyes off the screen. We're encouraged to do that. We're encouraged to go take a walk, go see what someone else is doing. So I would say, look at your summer and, and use the time to work on things you never get a chance to do once the semester begins, right. But really plan that. You know, the thing about the summer is that, I think, I think both of you two told me that you are still busy. You're very busy, right? 

STEPHANIE: [laughs] Yeah.

MICHELLE: Okay, right? So it's, it's different for every library and whichever department you, I know, Hannah, you're an engineering librarian, right? So it may be different. It's different here for the sciences librarian, because all of our science, our graduate science programs go year round. So we all have a different flow. Do not think summer's not the time to schedule your time. You're still going to schedule your time. I would also like to advocate for what I call a process notebook. I like to keep a process notebook where I keep a, it's right here, where I keep my notebook of everything that I'm doing or have done during the day. So I'm just kind of listing like, worked on weeding Shakespeare, worked on, you know, weeding, you know, liner notes in music, read two articles, um, put in interlibrary loan request, whatever. So I have a process journal. So that helps me to see what I've done day-to-day. At the end of the day I look at my process journal, and I kind of, I add and subtract. Well, I didn't get to do this, and I've got to add on this. That goes on for the next day, right. It’s just my way. Being able to visually see what you're doing helps you to plan your time, like, what did I spend my time on yesterday? Oh, that was too much time on that, not enough time on that. I'm all about awareness of what we're actually doing at any given time. I'm also aware of how fiddling around wastes minutes, turn into half hours, that turn into hours, and it's so easy to waste time. I've, I've done it. Everything I'm telling you, or advising our listeners not to do, I've done, I've done. So I feel like I have the credibility to say, don't do that. You know, do not do that. There will be days, there will be days when you will come in and just say I'm not feeling well. I'm in the wrong frame of mind. My cat is sick. My child has a cold. Whatever it is, and you give yourself grace that day. Say not, I'm not a machine. I don't have to be productive every minute of every day. I just need to be a good steward of my time. You know, and some days, if, if all you can do is just read an article because you're not feeling well, or you're feeling mentally out of sorts, then you've had a good day. So, taking care of yourself, being in tune with yourself, and how you want to spend your time, that's the sweet spot. 

HANNAH: I think a lot of what you're saying sounds very, very positive. And like making sure you're taking care of yourself throughout the day and integrating self-care into the workday, and not just as, oh, that’s something that I need to do on my personal time. I imagine a lot of this also would be dependent on workplace culture, so there are probably plenty of workplaces where this would be easy to do, and probably plenty of workplaces where it would not be easy to do, so. 

MICHELLE: I agree. I would like to give some advice for that. For the places in which it may not be easy to do, I would negotiate with your primary supervisor. If you have weekly meetings, or even maybe in, in staff meetings, push the boundaries of what might be acceptable. You know, you might in a one-on-one with your supervisor, say, Hey, how do you feel about this? Or, I know it's not the culture around here, and I don't really want to, you know, be a bulldozer about anything, but this helps me personally. How would you feel if I… Right? Those are the first steps towards making inroads to what you need. And I do realize place cultures are very, very different. When I worked in the public library, a library that was so busy that when it was your time to go off the circulation desk, you were already looking for the person that was replacing you, right? It was that busy. So like someone saying, Yeah, I want to go out for awhile… that would have been like, they would have laughed you out of the place. And you stood. We didn't sit. We stood for hours and hours at a shift. Right? So I understand cultures are different. It doesn't mean that we can't ask and advocate for ourselves. If the answer is “no,” you can accept that, but ask if there might be a time when that might be negotiable. Right? And can always ask that in the nicest of ways. I've asked for things that were not possible, or that at the time my boss felt that because I was working on something, and if she gave me that leeway it wasn't fair to the other librar-, and I understood that, and I understood her reason for needing to be fair. So what I did was at one of our all librarian meetings, I said to everyone, I have a dilemma. Everyone's like, What's that? What can we help you with? And I said, There's this thing I want to do, and I don't want people to perceive it as me taking something and everyone else not getting it. How would you all feel if I… And everyone was very supportive. They said, go for it. Do what you need to do. You know, how can we help? How can we support you? So there are ways around everything. And I really believe that when you are part of a team, you're part of a team. So a lot of the things I've been talking about sound very individual, and they are. But I always remember that I'm one among many, and I understand the responsibility of that. So it's not all about the rights that I have, right. It's also about the responsibility that I have for others. I certainly don't want to do anything for myself that is going to be an inconvenience for someone else. Right? So you balance your personal needs with that of your department or your other librarians.

[musical transition]

HANNAH: This time around, instead of a Current Awareness segment, and kind of in the spirit of how Michelle talked about reflective librarianship, we’re devoting this chunk of time to some of our reflections from ACRL. So, Stephanie, what are some of the things that stood out to you or that you’ve been reflecting on from your first time attending ACRL?

STEPHANIE: Whoof! That is a big question. Like, where do I even begin? I'm still processing, first of all. I know it's been like, what, two weeks? I'm still planning on mass downloading posters. I'm going through all of the slides and sessions that I couldn't get to, to download resources. And I also really want to watch those recorded sessions. There was so much to see and do. It was my first time. It was overwhelming. It was fun. So it's kind of hard for me to pick just a few things that really stood out to me. But, I loved every session I went to. I think I started off really strong with the panel called “Academic Freedom Under Threat: Stories from Librarians and How to Fight Back.” Just pause for relevancy. [laughs] It's a panel session featuring librarians from primarily universities in Texas and Florida, though there was a Californian, shout out, about the experiences they've had on campuses with censorship attacks due to harmful DEIA legislation. And just important to note that, like this was all before they became a series of executive orders targeting. And so this panel featured librarians Jessica Simpson, Martin Brennan, Danya Leebaw, Brea Henson, Heather Bush, and Maria Atilano, and they shared all of their experiences as well as how they've been fighting back. It was just such a great way to start the conference to, for one, be together as a packed auditorium, and also to hear that motivation from other folks. But there are also so, so many really good sessions. There were some about librarians who have unionized, which was really cool to hear about. And I loved the poster sessions. Oh, my god. Like, it's like window shopping, but for research, which is kind of wonderful. And so, while there were so many that I really love talking to people about their research, hearing about their projects, one in particular that stood out was called “Mapping Social Work’s Strengths Perspective to the ACRL Framework: Ideas for Inclusive Teaching” by Sarah McCall, who's a librarian at the University of Kansas. I had a really great conversation with Sarah, and it was so cool because, although I'm not a social work librarian, I work with a lot of, um, I work with family social science as a discipline, and there's lots of students who eventually go into either counseling or social work. And so there's a little bit of overlap there. And so what Sarah did for this is, she took the strengths-based principles, which is a core tenet in social work, and Sarah mapped it to, you know, the classic ACRL frames. But I really loved, I had never heard of the strengths-based principles, but some of these were like, honor goals, hold high expectations, but also we are more than what we've survived, as well as, every student brings strengths and our knowledge systems need them, care is the foundation, and recognize the richness of every environment. I just found that even in conversation with Sarah, how she was mapping these perspectives to information literacy, and honestly just showing up in the classroom with students, I really appreciated it. And so I'm looking forward to spending some time going through her poster, as well as some of the references she linked, and we exchanged business cards, so I hope that we can connect and maybe have some projects in the future together. So those were some sessions that really stood out to me. But, as I said, it was overall so overwhelming, but also wonderful. So, that's my first ACRL. 

HANNAH: Thanks, Stephanie, for sharing that. And as you were talking, I was just thinking about how we attended the same conference, and I think we were at some sessions together. But just, you know, based on all the choices… Um, yeah, we just had different conferences 

STEPHANIE: [laughs] Yeah.

HANNAH: based on which sessions we go to, so it's cool to hear what you went to. This was my second time at ACRL. I went back in 2017, when it was in Baltimore, and I was less than two years into my first professional librarian job. So eight years feels like a long time ago to look back and remember and try to compare. But I think this time around I felt a lot more comfortable and confident, and just like established as a librarian, and I think the past few years I've kind of been waffling around whether or not eight or nine or ten years in the profession is, quote unquote mid-career. But coming out of ACRL, and where I was attending sessions about mid-career librarianship, and they really spoke to me, I feel like, yes, I have arrived! So a special shout out to the presenters of “Navigating the Perseverance Plateau: An Examination of Intentional Planning for Sustainable Outcomes.” And those panelists were Lauren Pressley, Rebecca Miller Waltz, and Rachel Rubin. And the panel "Democratizing Power: Exploring the Radical Potential of Mid-Career Librarians,” and that was Jenny Wong-Welch, Jordan Nielsen, and Mara Cota. I think these panels really helped me more positively reframe where I am in my career right now. For me, that initial excitement and energy of being a new librarian has faded a lot, and now I’m a mom with a toddler and work-life balance feels even more important than ever. Um, I’m in a role I hope to just stay in for awhile, and these sessions helped me focus more on the strengths of where I’m at, and being okay with just sitting where I’m at for awhile, rather than thinking about like my eager young self who stayed late on a Friday afternoon to finish putting up my first Banned Books Week display. I’m ten years in, and I’m feeling a sense of stability, as much as higher ed can feel stable right now, and I’m feeling some freedom to really pause and think about what I want to do with the experience I’ve acquired, how I want to keep growing, and how I want to make an impact. So, long story short, this ACRL rejuvenated me at a point where I really felt like I needed it. And I guess it’s probably no surprise that here as a co-host of a podcast about librarianship as a career, I really liked the sessions about career stuff. But kind of on the flip side, as wonderful as it felt to be in community with academic librarians from all over the U.S., and some from Canada and other countries, I’ve kept thinking about all our academic librarian colleagues who couldn’t be there. In the opening and closing remarks, they mentioned how there were almost 3000 registrants in-person and online, like “wow, what a big number.” But even with a theme “Democratizing Knowledge, Access, and Opportunities,” going to an in-person national conference is inaccessible to so many. Um, I didn’t go to them, but there was at least one session about the cost of professional engagement. Even the early bird registration, I was going back to look, even early bird registration for the virtual conference was $279 for ACRL members. Which is a hefty chunk of money. So, of course, in person conferences do cost money to put on, but it’s a sense of community you just don’t get from ACRL publications, webinars, ALA Connect discussions, and those kind of things that happen throughout the year. One of the main themes of the conference that really stood out for me was the fundamental importance of community, and so some of my post-conference reflections have kind of been like, oh, is that what I should really lean in on here in my mid-career. And it’s made me even more excited about continuing our podcast into a second year. And, excited for our local academic libraries conference here in Minnesota in May. I think there’s something really joyful too about bridging those institutional boundaries with colleagues who are otherwise geographically really close. Um, one last thing I wanna share, and on a much more specific note, kind of in the spirit of our current awareness segment, a book I will be looking out for in 2026 that there was a panel session around is Emergent Strategy in Library Instruction edited by Leah Morin and Hazel McClure. Some of the chapter authors shared about their chapter, and it was just a really lovely affirmation of being human as a teacher. And I will link to more information about the book in our show notes. And with that I think we're about ready to wrap up. I just want to add that it was super fun to meet some of our guests, listeners, and other podcasters in person here in Minneapolis for ACRL. We've put our poster up on our website. If you want to take a look, it is about the process of making a podcast, which, that process is still in progress.

STEPHANIE: [laughs] Thanks for sharing out about all of your reflections and the sessions you went to, Hannah. I feel like I am just so happy to be working on this project with you. I just really appreciate you and all of your thoughts, reflections, and you sharing what you experienced at the conference. I also wanted to give a shout out to how fun it was to not only just meet new people, but to see our podcast friends in real life! Friends of the pod! Library Table Talk pals in the wild! Fun fact, in the academic freedom panel I mentioned, one of the panelists was one of our guests on our very first episode, Maria Atilano. So it was really cool to see her in action, and to hear a little bit more about her work on campus. She did in the interview we had with her on our Episode One, “Becoming a liaison,” she talked about the anti-DEI legislation in Florida, and how it impacted her role, and it was really cool to hear more about it in a different context. Plus, Hannah and I got to meet up with our friends from last episode, Mallary, Xochitl, and Lacey. It was so fun. It was, I was kind of nervous at first, being like, oh, my gosh, I've only seen their face on zoom. Will I even recognize them? And immediately was like, oh, my gosh, friends! And it genuinely felt like we've been long lost, separated, and finally back together. So it was a blast. And it was also, I really loved having all the conversations during our own poster session with everyone who came up. I wasn't expecting, I was really nervous for it, because I haven't done a poster session before. But it was really fun, and I loved the questions people were asking. I loved even just talking to other early and mid-career librarians about what it's like in their workplace, the questions they have, even about like this podcast as a project with potential for like future collaborations with folks. And so if any of you are listening to this, thank you for making my very first poster session really lovely. It was a pleasure to chat with you.

[outro music begins (instrumental, upbeat xylophone, clapping, and bass)]

STEPHANIE: And that brings us to a close here, folks! Thank you for listening. We hope you'll consider subscribing. You can also find us on our website at z.umn.edu/librarytabletalk.

HANNAH: Library Table Talk is produced by me, Hannah Cabullo,

STEPHANIE: and me, Stephanie Sparrow.

HANNAH: This episode was edited by Hannah. 

HANNAH: Thanks to our employer, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and University Libraries for making this work possible.

STEPHANIE: Music is by Blue Dot Sessions, Town Market, and Dirt Bike Lovers.

STEPHANIE:  Talk soon! Stephanie,

HANNAH: and Hannah.

[short musical interlude]

STEPHANIE: Core tenant in, um… Is that how I say it, tenant?

HANNAH: Tenant?

STEPHANIE: Like pillar? Like?

HANNAH: Tenet. Tenet.

STEPHANE: Tenet?

HANNAH: T-E-N-E-T. Core tenet.

STEPHANIE: Tenet. 

HANNAH: Yeah.

STEPHANIE: Okay.

[music fades out]