What is making this semester challenging

My fall semesters have been quite challenging in the past years, due to a combination of circumstances:

• I teach for Ecuador mid August to mid December, my course for TU Delft runs from September through November (including lots of sessions to take oral exams), and I am also now teaching two lectures in a different course for TU Delft, and I have a fair number of students doing their bachelor thesis with me.
• EU proposal deadlines! The Cluster 3 proposals are all due in November, which means September and October are crunch time.
• We bill our projects by mid December, so there are the annual deliverables to take care of.
• I always happily jump in all abstracts for conferences, and then find myself committed to a fair amount of papers to write (which is usually fun and interesting, especially in collaboration with colleagues as it helps to get our ideas sorted out and on paper)
• We are organizing a national conference. I tried to stay out of the organization but got bullied in, I guess.

And of course, projects need to be moved forward, PhD candidates get their feedback and meetings, committees, journal papers, administrative work, editorial boards – but all in all, these are all good things.