09.22.08
Where have I been?
Where have I been?, you might ask (or maybe not, if you’ve quit reading this blog for lack of any posts). I’ve been working, day and night it seems, for the last several months. My VPN software was both a blessing and a curse, allowing me to get a lot done in a day, yet work beyond my 40-hour week. It wasn’t just one week, but several weeks in a row, all connected to become a month (or more- I’ve lost count).
Why so much work? I don’t know. When it rains, it pours, right? Several projects converged at one time, like overflowing streams flowing into one river that overspread its banks. I was swept away in the ensuing flood, caught up in the powerful current and pulled downstream away from familiar landmarks. I was planning my nights and weekends around work, cramming it in when my family wasn’t around, finding myself disappointed when my evening plans prevented me from working additional hours.
Then the unexpected happened. No, I didn’t burnout in a ball of flames. My laptop died on me. My whole absurd work-from-home obsession came to a screeching halt in one failed boot of my laptop. I’ve never felt so lost. It wasn’t that I lost files or programs; those were backed up. It was that I lost control. I lost myself.
I’m happy to report that I have a new laptop and most of my files and programs have been restored. We’re learning about one another, sort of like a very long first date. I’m re-installing the VPN software, but will not be obsessed with using it every night and weekend. I can’t read, relax, write or spend time with my family if I can’t wait for them to get out of my way so I can just get some work done. The work will be there in the morning, waiting for me as it always has. If it doesn’t get done by 5pm, then too bad. I can’t lose control and lose myself again. If I do that, then who will be there to do the work– at any time of the day?
08.21.08
Frantic days, exhausted nights
My to-do list and projects lists are expanding at a mind-boggling rate these days. It seems as though I just get a few things done and checked off my lists, then five more tasks magically materialize to replace them. I’m juggling more balls than a circus clown on speed. I have tasks and reminders scribbled on scraps of paper, recorded in my Outlook tasks, and listed on my Excel spreadsheet. Some are overlapping while others are listed only once– and subject to being lost among the growing piles on my desk (again!). Will I ever return to the peaceful days when I sometimes grew bored with routine tasks and long gaps between special projects? Most days now there’s hardly time for me to catch my breath, much less daydream.
I haven’t written much in this blog lately because I’m finding it impossible to relax long enough so I can think, which enables me to write, which enables me to think some more. My brain needs periods of quiet and introspection in order to digest and absorb the dozens of random thoughts running wild through it. Writing helps me to lasso those thoughts into an orderly herd, so I can lead them to productive outcomes at work. Without introspection and writing, those thoughts get jumbled up and tumbled up, stepping all over each other in their frantic dance. If too many of them are dancing about in my brain, no to-do list or priority list can tame them. The end result– my brain freezes up and I accomplish nothing. I feel like a scratched track on a CD– skip, skip, skip– no forward movement through my day.
I collapse into bed every night, despite having so many thoughts buzzing through my head up until it hits the pillow. I find myself hungering for the weekends, hoping I can rest and renew my energy, both physical and mental, before I face yet another hectic week. I often wonder how long I will be able to keep up with this breakneck pace of managing so many new projects, most of them with no end in sight. I know I should be thankful for my job when so many people are losing theirs in this economy. It’s just that sometimes it’s hard to appreciate what you have when you’re so close to the beast that you can’t see the whites of its eyes.
05.18.08
Pollyanna
I took home a bunch of work this weekend, thinking I’d spend some time doing it so I could feel caught up come Monday morning. I should have known better. I already have too much work to do at home, so what was I thinking? I do the same thing every night– take home way too much to read, compile, summarize, or even absorb. Now I find myself doing the same most weekends. Sometimes I wish I could slip a professional journal under my pillow and through osmosis, absorb the latest library information contained within it.
I wish I could multi-task even more than I do. I want to do not three or four things at once, but ten. I want to compile statistics while browsing my email, file papers while scanning my blogs, and catalog problem books while checking staff work. And as each new day dawns, like a perennial dummy, I think “This is the day I will get it all done.” Pollyanna strikes again!
I wish I had the capability to have a really good idea of what I can realistically accomplish in an hour, or a day, or a week. I’m too optimistic for my own good. For example, this weekend I brought home a vendor profile to finish filling out, an employee performance appraisal to start working on, 2 professional magazines to read, several management binders to re-read (so I could get into the right frame of mind to tackle the appraisal), and 2 sets of conference notes to summarize. It was not fun toting home all that stuff and it’ll be less fun dragging it back Monday morning– especially knowing I didn’t touch any of it. What was I thinking? I should ask Pollyanna– I’m sure she knows the answer.
05.15.08
Miserable day
I struggled to wake up this morning and I felt like I was catching a cold. I’m feeling the effects of too many late nights and early mornings. They make for a horrible combination for staying focused and being on an even keel emotionally. The weather didn’t help either. It was cold, rainy, and oppressively gloomy all day. My head throbbed with a dull headache, my contacts felt dirty, and my neck and back ached. Two meetings kept me away from my desk and every minor frustration nearly drove me to tears. Some days I just want to throw up my hands and run out the door, never to return.
I’ve been struggling to find time to read the May issue of Wired Magazine. It’s one of the many new journals that have been mysteriously appearing on my desk with my name on a routing label. Somehow I’m collecting routed journals and I didn’t even try. (Maybe there’s a sign on my back…)
The cover article discussing how to Get Smarter contains lots of fascinating long and short articles, so I hate to pass along this issue without reading it. Some points of interest: I can relate to how panicking makes you stupid. I was surprised to learn that reading too fast (i.e. speed reading) affects your comprehension level. But the most interesting article of all is the one on remembering everything you’ll ever learn. It says the best time to commit new information to your memory is right before you forget it– which is nearly impossible to do in everyday life. Now I won’t feel too bad when I forget something. I can just say I forgot to remember it at the right time.
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.
02.18.08
Almost got caught up
I was going to take my 4-Runner to get the oil changed and tires rotated this morning, but I decided I’d rather go into work early– I had so much catching up to do. I clocked in at 7:30 am and before I knew it, it was 5:30 pm. Another hour and I might have finished checking that last truck of vendor cataloging. But I figured I’d better head home, before my family wondered what happened to me.
It’s so nice to be in the office in the early morning, when most everyone else hasn’t arrived and in the evening, after they’ve left for the day. I can focus better when the phone isn’t ringing, people aren’t walking into my office, and emails aren’t popping into my inbox every few seconds. It’s kind of like I have the whole office to myself.
I almost got caught up today–well, sort of. I thought I was going to load files of vendor records and get them all taken care of, since they always arrive in my inbox at inopportune times, like when I’m in the middle of a project or away from my desk.
I work with files from at least 4-5 vendors. Each file from each vendor requires different access methods (even if they are all FTP), different authorizations and passwords, and different processes that must be done to the records after they’re loaded. Trusting all of this to my memory only causes me to balk at loading them, since it’s all too easy to forget the details associated with each one. So I’ve created record retrieval and loading instructions for each one and a corresponding folder for instructions and the printouts that result from the record loads. But no matter how well I plan my time to load them, there’s always something that doesn’t work out.
Today, for example, I got caught up on loading my daily files of corrected bibliographic records from Marcive. Feeling good about clearing up that mini-backlog, I thought I’d load the files from EBSCO, since that email notification had been hanging around the longest. But when I preprocessed the file before loading it, I saw there were way too many records in it for a monthly update. Upon closer inspection, I discovered the file contained a mix of added, changed, and deleted MARC records. In the past, each of these types of records were sent to me as separate files. I was unable to load the file and had to send EBSCO an email to try to resolve it. By then, it was nearly 10 am and I still had 6 trucks of vendor and staff cataloging to review. So much for getting ahead. Loading additional vendor files would have to wait until the next day.
Another area I almost got caught up was my vendor feedback. I let this pile up too, because sometimes I feel it’s easier to quickly check as many books as possible (especially when they have holds) and move them on to messenger service. I make notes on problems, then come back to my notes later and email the vendors. But there’s always a reason I don’t have time to compile the feedback and the pile of printouts grows and grows. The bigger it gets, the more time I know it will take to write up all that feedback. I realize I should write up the feedback as I find problems, but sometimes that takes so long it delays getting the truck across the room. No right way to do it, I suppose….
02.14.08
I need a clone
I need a clone. I think that for each day I’m out of the office, my workload doubles. I have so many trucks of vendor cataloging to review that I’m going to have to pass much of it through without looking at it. I know I’m supposed to be evaluating the quality of their cataloging and processing, but when I have 9 trucks of stuff to check, somethin’s gotta give. It’s either my sanity or those books– and I’m planning on keeping my sanity. If I had a clone, she’d split the checking with me, or even take it over entirely, handling problems when she finds them.
Email isn’t any better– it floods my inbox to the point that I lose emails, something I thought happened only to disorganized people– (Oops! that might be me!). I’m trying to do things like color-code email from certain people, like my boss. Email from him is in red text– talk about getting my attention– that does it! I also use colored flags in Outlook to quickly mark and find special emails that I need to act on, regardless of who sent them. If I had a clone, she would be assigned the job of reading all my emails and giving me a summary of what’s really important.
The piles of problems still sit on my desk and some days, they just have to sit there and grow bigger. I have to get tired of looking at them to really act on them. I know that’s not the best way to deal with problems, but some days, it’s the best I can do. There’s always something more urgent that comes up and isn’t on the to-do list. That’s when I decide whether or not I should delegate it, back-burner it, or do it myself. Kind of like plunging into cold water and getting it over with all at once, rather than getting wet one inch of skin at a time and slowly freezing to the bone. If I had a clone, she would handle all the problems, deciding when to delegate them or do them herself.
If I had a clone…we could accomplish so much together…
