None of This Is Reading: Balance Behind the Many Hats We Wear

On some days, leading a library feels like living several professional lives at once. Some days, balance feels impossible.

This week, in the span of a single day, I toggled between being a coder, an advisor, a budget negotiator, a teacher, a committee member, and a trainer. The night before, I had already been in the classroom, teaching a capstone course and guiding students through their projects. By the next morning, I was buried in technical services, fixing the footer code on the library’s webpage to update the link to the college’s privacy policy. A few minutes later, without warning, I was sitting with one of those same capstone students, helping them refine a broad idea on artificial intelligence and the stock market into a 6–10 page paper.

From there, the day moved quickly: signing up marketing students for access to the AI tools the library licenses for everyone, heading into a budget meeting with the VP of Finance and the Provost, returning to the library to teach first-year students how to prompt a chatbot and use Grammarly to revise their essays, and closing with two external committee meetings, the weekly operations meeting, and training four brand-new student workers on LC call numbers as we relabeled books whose spines had faded.

It is at moments like this—when someone asks me, “So what do you specialize in?”—that I think of Ken in the Barbie movie. His job is just “beach.” And mine? Some days it feels like my job is just “library.”

The problem is not simply that there is a lot to do. The harder part is the constant switching between kinds of work. One hour requires technical precision, the next empathetic listening, the next persuasive leadership, and the next classroom energy. A coding problem asks me to concentrate on syntax and structure. A student conversation requires me to slow down and listen for the idea underneath the question. A budget meeting requires an entirely different vocabulary of priorities, resources, and institutional strategy. Teaching asks me to shift again, this time toward explanation, engagement, and improvisation. The tasks may all fit under the word library, but cognitively and emotionally they are very different kinds of work.

Julian Birkinshaw and Jordan Cohen found that knowledge workers spend approximately 41% of their time on discretionary activities that offer little personal satisfaction and could be handled competently by others. Their recommendation was not simply that people become more efficient, but that they examine their work more intentionally and identify what can be dropped, delegated, or redesigned. That finding has stayed with me because libraries are especially susceptible to accumulation. We add services, committees, technologies, assessment requirements, instructional responsibilities, and new forms of outreach, but we are much less practiced at deciding what should end.

In libraries that have experienced staffing reductions while their responsibilities have continued to expand, that accumulation becomes especially visible. A new AI platform may save time for a student or faculty member, for example, but providing it also creates new work involving licensing, privacy, training, classroom instruction, assessment, troubleshooting, and policy. An institutional repository improves the visibility of faculty scholarship, but someone has to locate publications, clear rights, create metadata, upload files, and maintain records. Innovation may be worthwhile, but it is rarely workload neutral.

That is why I have become increasingly skeptical of treating balance as a purely individual responsibility. When someone is overwhelmed, the usual advice is familiar: prioritize better, protect your calendar, practice mindfulness, learn to say no, or become more resilient. Some of those strategies are useful. I use many of them. But there comes a point when better self-management cannot solve a structural problem. If ten responsibilities have become fifteen while staffing has moved in the opposite direction, the solution cannot simply be becoming more skilled at carrying fifteen responsibilities.

As I have written elsewhere about managing oneself in downsized environments, self-knowledge still matters. We need to understand our strengths and weaknesses, recognize how we work best, maintain professional values, build relationships, and plan with purpose. Those practices help us navigate complicated organizations. But self-management works best when it is paired with organizational practices that make sustainable work possible. Increasingly, I think about those practices through the CALM framework: Communication, Adaptability, Learning, and Management.

Communication: Making the Work Visible

Communication is not simply about telling colleagues what we are doing. It is also about making workload, capacity, and competing priorities visible. Much of library work disappears because it occurs in small increments. The hour-long class is visible on a schedule, but the preparation before it and student questions afterward may not be. The budget meeting appears on a calendar, but the research and follow-up surrounding it may not. Fixing one line of website code sounds trivial until the five-minute problem becomes a forty-minute problem. Advising a student may begin as a quick question and become the most important half hour of the day.

When these tasks remain invisible, organizations can easily assume that new responsibilities can simply be added. Better communication means being able to say not only, “Here is the new initiative,” but also, “Here is what this initiative will require.” It means asking what existing work will be reduced, delayed, delegated, or stopped if something new becomes a priority. Without that conversation, strategic priorities become additions to the workload rather than actual priorities.

Communication also matters because people experience role switching differently. Some people can move rapidly between meetings, instruction, technical work, and interpersonal conversations. Others need more transition time or longer stretches of uninterrupted concentration. Neurodivergent colleagues may experience interruptions, sensory demands, or abrupt changes in context differently from their peers. An inclusive workplace does not assume that one working style is the professional norm. It creates enough transparency and flexibility for people to understand expectations and organize their work in ways that allow them to contribute effectively.

Adaptability: Redesigning the Work

Libraries often talk about adaptability as something employees need to demonstrate, but organizations should be adaptable too. If the same task repeatedly creates a bottleneck, the answer cannot always be for the person doing it to become faster. The process itself may need to change.

I find it useful to think in terms of dropping, delegating, and redesigning. Some activities can simply stop because they no longer provide enough value to justify the effort. Others can be delegated once someone else has the training and authority to handle them. Still others remain important but need a different workflow. The point is not to strip work away indiscriminately. It is to ask whether the way we have always done something is still the best use of limited human capacity.

Training student workers is one small example. Teaching four new employees LC call numbers takes time, especially when they have never worked in a library before. But training does not always have to flow from one professional to every new employee. Experienced student workers can help newer workers learn shelving, circulation routines, or common troubleshooting. That does more than save time. It gives experienced students responsibility, creates peer learning, and builds capacity into the organization instead of locating all expertise in one person.

Adaptability can also mean deciding that a good service no longer needs to be delivered in exactly the same way. A frequently repeated explanation might become a guide. A manual process might become automated. A meeting might become an email. Two overlapping services might become one. The question shifts from “How can I fit this in?” to “Does this work still need to happen this way?”

Learning: Building Capacity Instead of Dependency

Learning is particularly important in a period when libraries are taking on rapidly changing technologies. Artificial intelligence is the obvious example. If every question about an AI tool, privacy concern, prompt, database feature, or classroom application ends up with the same person, expertise quickly becomes a bottleneck. The organization may appear efficient because the person with the most experience can usually solve the problem quickly, but that efficiency creates dependency.

A more sustainable approach distributes learning. Faculty partners can help introduce tools within their disciplines. Student workers can develop expertise and teach one another. Librarians can document what they learn instead of solving the same problem repeatedly. Workshops can be designed not merely to demonstrate a tool but to help participants compare systems, verify results, and make their own judgments. The goal is not for everyone to become an expert in everything. It is for the institution to become less dependent on any single person being the answer to every question.

Learning also requires creating room for uncertainty. That is especially difficult in libraries because so much of our professional identity is tied to helping people find answers. Yet new technologies, new policies, and new expectations often arrive before anyone fully understands them. Sustainable organizations create room to experiment, compare, question, and sometimes decide that a new tool or service is not worth continuing. Learning includes the ability to stop.

Management: Making Subtraction Part of Leadership

Management is where all of this comes together. Leadership cannot consist only of identifying what an organization should start doing. It must also include determining what the organization no longer needs to do, what can be done differently, and what simply cannot be accomplished with the resources available.

This is particularly important because innovation has its own workload. AI is often discussed in terms of efficiency, but adoption creates responsibilities involving evaluation, instruction, ethics, policy, privacy, licensing, assessment, and organizational change. The same is true of many initiatives that libraries have embraced over the past decade. Institutional repositories, digital scholarship, data services, open educational resources, accessibility initiatives, learning analytics, and new forms of student success work may all align strongly with the mission of the library. That does not mean they can be added indefinitely without consequences.

The managerial question I increasingly return to is simple: If this is now a priority, what will no longer be one? That question does not oppose innovation. It makes innovation more likely to succeed because it gives new work actual space rather than placing it on top of everything that came before.

This may also be one of the most important ways managers can address burnout. Burnout conversations often focus on the individual employee: taking breaks, creating boundaries, becoming resilient, or managing time more carefully. Managers can support those practices, but they also have control over systems, expectations, meetings, workflows, staffing decisions, and priorities. Sometimes the best burnout intervention is not helping someone carry the workload more efficiently. It is removing something from the workload.

Finding CALM in the Messy Middle

I still use individual strategies to navigate days like the one I described at the beginning. I identify the two or three things that genuinely need to move forward. I try to create small transitions between radically different kinds of work. I delegate where it makes sense, and I increasingly ask whether recurring tasks can be redesigned. At the end of especially chaotic days, I think about what worked, what drained energy, and what should be handled differently the next time.

But CALM has helped me think beyond those individual techniques. Communication makes the full scope of work visible. Adaptability gives us permission to change processes rather than simply asking people to move faster. Learning distributes knowledge so that expertise does not become dependency. Management creates the conditions for subtraction as well as addition.

None of those practices eliminates the wond