05.04.08
Overwhelmed!
If anyone was following this blog regularly, you’ve probably wondered what happened to me or maybe even given up reading it. If you were disappointed in my poor performance, you have my sincerest apologies. It’s just that I’ve been super-busy lately. I’ve started at least 5 different posts, but have been unable to perfect and publish any of them. So rather than finish writing even one of them, my solution is to write a new one! What else would a packrat do? If I can’t accumulate unwritten blog posts, then I’m not a true packrat.
One of the things that has overwhelmed me lately is my accumulation of new blog subscriptions. For the longest time, I had a manageable collection of blogs to read– somewhere around 65. But in the course of keeping up with my professional readings, I’ve discovered more blogs and subscribed to them. Being the packrat that I am, the number quickly jumped to 92 (I just added another today http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/). I don’t want the number to rise any higher, so I need to review the list and prune the deadwood. (I also need to learn how to speed read.)
Before I pruned any blogs from my reader, I decided to read through some of them. Of course, I didn’t get very far before finding this post from Steve Rubel about attention crash and managing email, blogs, and everything else our in digital world. He referred to Inbox Zero, which offers tips on keeping your email inbox empty. A colleague of mine already recommended this same link to me, but I’ve failed to spend enough time investigating or implementing it. Maybe it’s because my own inbox is so overwhelmingly stuffed that I feel there’s no hope for ever getting it to zero. Inbox Zero could more accurately refer to my attention span, which is hovering around zero these days.
Steve wrote about investing in search tools, although he didn’t mention a new tool called Twine, which I’ve signed up to beta test. Twine is a semantic web application that’s supposed to tie everything together, meaning you tell it what you’re interested in and it searches the Web for that information. It can make recommendations and even link you up with like-minded people who share the same interests.
Steve’s blog also mentioned the book The 4-hour workweek by Timothy Ferriss. I just got a copy from my library over the weekend, so I have yet to read it. Hopefully I can work it into my piles of nonfiction books awaiting me on my hope chest at home (how appropriate!– they’re hoping to be read). When I figure out Twine and read Tim’s book, I’ll let you know if either of them are useful, whether or not you’re a packrat.
03.31.08
An early April Fool’s Day?
If only this day were April Fool’s Day! Then we could wonder if all the bad things that happened today were just a cruel joke. But then we’d have to do it all over again tomorrow for the real April Fool’s Day (or would that make it Groundhog Day, like the movie?).
It definitely was a Monday, no doubt about it. We changed our external IP address over the weekend and spent most of the morning dealing with little surprises related to the cutover. Our OCLC FirstSearch connection was the first to go. Next came FTP capability to and from our vendors.
By the end of the day, the FirstSearch problem was resolved, but the vendor FTP was not. And so the work (and frustration) piles up. No new orders, no electronic invoices, no authority work. Sigh…
03.26.08
Chaos
I should never leave the office during the week. Chaos inevitably breaks out. Not that it doesn’t break out most days– it’s just that when I’m gone, I’m at a bit of a disadvantage of being in the loop of general information. Even checking email from home keeps me only partially in the loop, since face-to-face communication is impossible and I miss phone calls.
When I’ve been gone from my office, it seems like so many people come in with questions, problems, or just general chit-chat as soon as I return. The backlog of people running in and out of my office makes it near impossible to complete a simple task, like reply to an email of equal importance to the problems being brought to me in person. Some days I fantasize about assigning everyone a number– then they can’t come into my office until I call their number. It works for people returning stuff at Target. Closing the door doesn’t work– I’ve had people open it anyway and others stand outside, waiting to be noticed while I was participating in a teleconference or webinar.
It’s kind of nice when everyone goes home late in the afternoon; the phone stops ringing, the office visits stop and I can finally really concentrate. Unfortunately, it’s hard to dig into something that takes deep concentration when I have 30 minutes left and I’ve already worked almost an hour overtime. My brain is plumb worn out and my family is wondering if I’ll ever come home.
In a fit of desperation at the end of today, I threw a bunch of papers (all of them new problems) into my in-box. I knew it was probably a death-knell for them, since I didn’t file them and they represented a multitude of unresolved problems. But I wanted that clean desktop facing me tomorrow morning, so I’ll be prepared if (or when) more chaos breaks out. If I have a quiet moment during the day, I may pull out one of those papers and see if the problem has magically resolved itself.
03.25.08
Working from home
I’ve been on vacation for the last two days, so it’s anybody’s guess how bad my desk looks. So much for cleaning it off before I left! Oh well, if I look at the bright side, at least it will be obvious what landed there while I was gone. I’m sure it will be mostly problems and reading material that gets routed to me. Hopefully I can deal with that stuff quickly when I go in Wednesday afternoon.
I’ve been keeping up with my email from home, checking it twice a day (and sometimes at night) to keep it under control. When I checked it on Sunday, before my vacation even started, I was already getting a warning email saying I was reaching the maximum allowable size for my in-box. Geez! How’s that for falling behind before I was even gone?
I used to give my brother a hard time for working all the time when he was out of the office. He has a laptop and a Blackberry and is always working, everywhere he goes. In my case, I think being a manager makes me feel like I have a certain level of responsibility for what’s going on in my office, even when I’m not there. Technological improvements have not only allowed me to read my email from outside my office; they have enabled me to dial in to my desktop computer. Now I have access to all of my software and files as though I were sitting at my desk. It’s pretty cool. Okay, so I’m tied to the office with a technological umbilical cord. That’s probably not so cool.
Too late now– I’m hooked and there’s no turning back. It’s a dual-edged sword; I work in more places and for more hours than I could spend in the office, although the payoff is that I’m not as far behind when I return from being out of the office. Technology is both a blessing and a curse.
03.23.08
Getting along at work
I recently read the book Stop Pissing Me Off!: What to Do When the People You Work with Drive You Crazyby Lynne Eisaguirre. I admit I was drawn to this book by the title, but it wasn’t a flippant treatment of how to get along with employees, co-workers, and bosses. Instead, it gave me valuable advice on how to handle many annoying personality types and stressful situations at work.
Lynne begins the book by pointing out that there are annoying people in every corporation, so simply switching jobs to get away from them isn’t the solution. You’ll likely run into their type again. Since most of us spend more time at work than we do with family, we need to find ways to get along with people at work.
She says one of the reasons people have difficulty getting along at work is that in today’s workplace, there are so many differences between people: age, gender, religion, race, ethnic background, and culture. Many people are dealing with emotional problems, medical problems, mental problems, or are taking medication that adversely affects their behavior. It’s up to us to try to understand what could be going on in their life outside of work that could influence their behavior at work. I think this is even more important if you manage people, like I do.
She describes her 1-2-3-Go! technique for dealing with an emotionally charged situation. Here’s how it works (from p. 88):
1. Say something to the person that implies understanding or appreciation.
2. Make a behaviorally specific (doable) request. (It has to be something the person can do or say, or it’s not behaviorally specific.)
3. Add more appreciation and understanding.
4. Go away; do not nag, hover, or whine.
At the end of each chapter, she provides a chart summarizing the relationship tactics explained in the chapter. It’s called Your Relationship Toolbox and it shows how to go from being pissed off to powerful. She shows you how to manage your time and anger, so you can love the job you have. The very last chapter covers what to do if you’ve done all you could, but feel you must move on to a new job. She shows you how to do this without burning bridges in the process.
I highly recommend this book for both managers and their employees. I’ll buy a copy for my personal collection, since it helped me to better understand people in my organization and improved my ability to get along with them. I think some of Lynne’s advice could apply in personal relationships, as well.
03.18.08
Collecting web sites
I recently decided to use delicious to organize my library and technology web sites, since I tend to collect them like I do papers and books. I set up the delicious buttons on my computer at work, so that when I read of or hear of a new website, I can find it and bookmark it right away– no delays, no excuses. This way I won’t be scribbling it on a piece of paper or photocopying an article I would get to ‘later’ when I had more time to read it (yeah, right- who am I kidding?). Maybe this will help me reduce (or at least manage) my paper piles.
My collection of links in delicious is pretty puny right now, but I plan to beef it up in the coming days. I have gobs of links on paper and in other places, so there’s a lot of work to do. When I get it more fleshed out, I’ll post the link to my delicious links (don’t you love how that sounds? delicious links) here on my blog, so I can share my collection of web treasures with my readers. Delicious appeals to my desire to organize everything, even the web (or at least the tiny part of it that interests me).
03.15.08
Unplanned events
If you’re wondering what happened to me this week, I’m okay. One of my employees had a medical emergency on Tuesday and had to leave work. She hasn’t been able to return to work yet and I’ve spent the rest of the week helping her and her family deal with the situation. I also went to an out-of-town workshop on Friday to hear about digitization projects in Indiana. The combination of events, both planned and unplanned, left me exhausted. If it hadn’t been for the Adderall XR, I don’t know that I could have focused on what was important during such a stressful week. I managed to keep materials moving through the department, have staff fill in for the missing employee, and pay attention during an all-day workshop at the end of the week.
My original plans for the week were to write up my employee’s performance appraisals now that I had organized their folders. I usually hate doing performance appraisals but I was actually looking forward to doing them now that I had a place to put them. My other plan for the week was to compile last month’s statistics, before bibliographic and item records were withdrawn from the system. Yes, it’s a sad fact that in a public library, much of our new stuff is stolen before it ever gets to circulate. It’s amazing how things like cookbooks just walk out the door the same month they arrived in the system, never to be seen again. The week was proof that no matter how much I plan my week, no plan is foolproof or guaranteed.
Clean desktop
Ever since I purged my desktop and files of several pounds of paper two weeks ago, I’ve become accustomed to seeing lots of white space on my desktop. I can honestly say I’m hooked on it. I can see the smooth, flat, light gray Formica for the first time in years. It brings a feeling of peacefulness to the whole room.
Anything that lands on the desk doesn’t stay there long now– that’s my new goal. I can say it’s almost becoming an obsession to keep paper off my desktop. I want it clean when I leave at the end of the day, which is what most normal people do. But I’m not normal and many times in the past, I’d leave stuff out when I left, because I knew I’d be working on it the next day. As long as it wasn’t confidential paperwork, why bother to put it away? I’d just have to get it out again. I was partly afraid if I put it away, I’d forget the next day I was working on it. You know– out of sight, out of mind.
The best incentive of all is the reduction in my stress levels. Seeing a clean desktop at the end of one workday and at the beginning of the next tells me everything is going to be all right and that I can handle all of my projects, employees, and responsibilities. That’s probably the best reason of all to keep it clean.
03.10.08
File management
One day last week, I tried to file my annual performance appraisal (which was very good, by the way) and couldn’t figure out where to put it. Where would I have filed last year’s appraisal? I asked myself. I looked in a hanging file folder labeled PROFESSIONAL, where there were several fat manila files, but it wasn’t in any of them. Hmmm… could it be in the big, black, unmarked binder in my overhead bin? Nope, it wasn’t there either. Where could it be? I know I had one from last year. Surely I filed it somewhere (was it in the to-file pile?). I went back to the lateral file and looked in a hanging file folder labeled PERSONNEL, but it wasn’t there either. Okay, now I’m frustrated! How can I lose a performance appraisal? That’s not something you just leave lying around when you have locking cabinets (unless you’re me).
While looking through my PERSONNEL hanging file (which was overstuffed, by the way), it hit me– I’ve been supervising employees for fifteen years and I’ve never created a decent file system for them. If I had to place my hands on their performance appraisals from last year (which I’m gonna have to do this week), I bet I couldn’t find them. What kind of a manager am I?
I began to panic. A quick search of the bottom of my lateral file drawer turned up theirs– and mine! all lying flat and hidden under a blank mileage reimbursement form. Hmmm….how did those get down there? I don’t remember putting them there (but I know I did). I probably put them there because the PERSONNEL hanging file was overstuffed with folders from long-gone staff who will never darken our doors again.
When I was going through folders looking for last year’s appraisals, I found a photocopied page from an unnamed organizing book. It was stuffed in a folder with job analysis questionnaires and had nothing to do with the questionnaires. How appropriate it was misfiled! I think I found it for a reason… as I believe everything happens for a reason. Two of the main points it mentioned were: 1.) 80% of what gets filed never gets used again ; and, 2.) Only touch paper once (gaaaahhh! I hate that one!). I now believe in #1 and am struggling to believe in #2.
Today, I was waiting on my computer to synchronize files when I realized this was the perfect time to clean out and organize my employee files. Why not? I couldn’t do anything on the computer for a short chunk of time. So I whipped through the folders, creating new ones, moving former employees to the back of the hanging file and even putting their performance appraisals from last year in each of their (new) folders. Wow! Now I feel motivated to begin working on their current appraisals, since those are a little overdue…
