Terry, I somehow missed this when you first posted it. (I may not have even known to follow your blog back in 2017!) But, it resonates DEEPLY with me right now! I'm in the middle of a multi-year audit and overhaul of the volunteering work I do in and beyond academia. I've been an "over-committed" service-leadership person since I was a kid, and the fact that there's actually a job description slot for it in academia has probably compounded the challenge for me. Actually documenting what I do (including time-tracking) has helped a lot, as has a dedicated process of goal setting (and regularly revisiting those goals) and then comparing the time spent to my stated goals. It's all helping me refine how I spend my time in ways that have helped me to feel a great deal more satisfaction in what I do at and beyond work. (I have written up some of the stages of this whole process on my blog, along with a lot of citations about the imbalance of who does academic service, etc. I'll link to that here in case these tools are helpful for anyone else: https://www.commnatural.com/blog/tags/no-for-it.) But, there's one thing that I would add to the "service is actually leadership" reframe. That is, we need collective and especially administratively managed accountability. Calling service leadership will just be a euphemism if the same people keep opting out of their responsibility to the collective good.
Terry, I somehow missed this when you first posted it. (I may not have even known to follow your blog back in 2017!) But, it resonates DEEPLY with me right now! I'm in the middle of a multi-year audit and overhaul of the volunteering work I do in and beyond academia. I've been an "over-committed" service-leadership person since I was a kid, and the fact that there's actually a job description slot for it in academia has probably compounded the challenge for me. Actually documenting what I do (including time-tracking) has helped a lot, as has a dedicated process of goal setting (and regularly revisiting those goals) and then comparing the time spent to my stated goals. It's all helping me refine how I spend my time in ways that have helped me to feel a great deal more satisfaction in what I do at and beyond work. (I have written up some of the stages of this whole process on my blog, along with a lot of citations about the imbalance of who does academic service, etc. I'll link to that here in case these tools are helpful for anyone else: https://www.commnatural.com/blog/tags/no-for-it.) But, there's one thing that I would add to the "service is actually leadership" reframe. That is, we need collective and especially administratively managed accountability. Calling service leadership will just be a euphemism if the same people keep opting out of their responsibility to the collective good.