About a Certain Morning | Motohiro Tsuchiya, Vice-President and Professor, Graduate School of Media and Governance
October 24, 2023
I'm sorry. I can't write anything interesting. I suppose since this is a diary, I should just write about what happens every day, but so many different things happen daily that I can't narrow down what's interesting, so I can't write.
I used to live by the motto of submitting manuscripts on time and replying to emails as quickly as possible. However, in the last few months, I've stopped feeling guilty about missing deadlines and not replying to emails (if I did, my spirit would break). Then, I get additional angry emails saying, "I'm still waiting for your reply!" which makes my inbox overflow even more. Every time I access it, I feel a sense of despair and quietly close my email client.
Then, I get pinging messages from Slack. I glance at them, think, "I can't answer that right away," and mark them as unread. As a result, the number of unread messages piles up. I despair again.
When I became a dean four years ago, I vowed not to sacrifice my sleep time, so I sleep at night even if I've missed deadlines. While I know I shouldn't, I often end up replying to emails on weekends, which is disliked by the administrative staff (the faculty members don't seem to mind much). I have learned to schedule messages on Slack to be sent at "9:00 a.m. on Monday morning."
I've decided to focus on understanding what the person in front of me is saying. If I worry about deadlines and emails, I can't even comprehend what the person right in front of me is saying. But sometimes, I can't even do that.
On the morning of the deadline for this diary entry I'm writing, a group of seven visitors from a foreign university arrived. While the President next to me was explaining about Keio University, I was unfortunately engrossed in their university's campus map and wasn't listening. Suddenly, the President asked me, "Mr. Tsuchiya, do you have anything to add?" Since I hadn't been listening, I had no idea what to add. I tried to cover it up by saying, "Um, I have a question about the campus map, if that's okay?"
This is my life every day.