Resolve to Rock in 2015

Storytime Underground has encouraged everyone to share their professional goals for 2015 and resolve to rock the year! Here are my professional goals for 2015 and how I hope to rock this year:

1. Create monthly stats and stories reports for my manager, administration, my staff and myself. Stats are gold in the library world. And stats and stories are a powerful way to communicate what we see every day in the library. I know the impact youth services in the library has on our community. I hear the feedback from our patrons. But how often do I share that with staff, managers, and administration? My goal is to create short reports highlighting something the youth services department did each month to share.

2. Time management professionally and personally. I'm entering into a committee year, which means tons of reading in my personal time. I also blog and review for review journals in addition to my job and my family and social life. I want to really focus on making sure I have good time management skills to balance everything I do and work on finding a balance between what I do for work and what I do for me.

3. Keep up! I am notorious for having stacks of review journals on my desk and a backlog in my feedreader. This goes along with time management I guess, but I want to take time to read the review journals, keep up with the blogs I read, and keep up with the various organizations I'm involved in. This also ties into my fourth goal:

4. Being OK with taking off desk time. I've gotten better at this in the last few months, but as a manager it's hard to take off desk time. I have so many things I need to do, the desk needs to be covered, I have patrons to help, I have to set up or plan a program, make the schedule, schedule outreach and special events, attend meetings, talk to staff, and so much more! I have a hard time consistently taking time off desk to work on these things and it's something I need to get better at doing.

5. Cover the YA desk once a week. This has been my goal since I became youth services manager three years ago and I finally have staff in place where I can make this happen. We have a separate YA and Children's department location, even though we're all together in one service and department umbrella. I want to continue to make sure we blend together as youth services and part of that for me is making sure I stay in touch with the YA department and the teens and spend time there once a week covering the desk. It also means we have more YA desk coverage and the department staffed more often.

What are you goals for rocking 2015?