Day 36 – 21 February 2014
Day three without paper and all is going well. I have resisted so far but I nearly fell into a trap yesterday when talking to Lee. I reached for my pen to make a note and fortunately didn’t have it on me. Lee offered me the use of his but I held firm. It’s like giving up an addiction. I managed to get rid of a few more old pieces as well.
On the back of this I have added a number of things to my list of weekly tasks. Every Friday I take some time out to prepare for the coming weeks. I used to print my calendar but that’s banned now. I set up a task for each day for the next four week period, add the things that I need to prepare for and chose a date by which I need to start that work. In this way I have all of the main issues planned out. Something’s only take a day or two while others may take a month to organise.
The next bit was new for today. I have set up folders for each day next week in explorer and I will transfer all of the relevant documents into them as I work through the individual day’s task. I then transferred the notes I made from each day into a monthly folder and deleted any documents and folders that I no longer need. Are you keeping up?
I then went through my calendar and coloured my appointments. Red is must go and can’t be moved, green is should go and would rather it wasn’t moved while blue is I will attend but can be moved if a better offer comes along. Yellow is a telephone conference and purple is travel time. I have others but they are not used a lot. I set this up to give Pam a chance to rearrange my diary as with more than twenty meetings a week there is constant movement.
I then entered my mileage onto the online claim form, checked out if I can get the train and whether a pool car is available to save using my own. Finally I wrote a blog piece for the ICT Services intranet.
Preparation is the key to success, half the battle, the mother of victory and so I spend a lot of time trying to improve my own processes to maximise the amount of time I can spend in front of customers, suppliers and my team. This week I had four meetings with my mangers, nine with customers, two with suppliers and another ten covering projects and general updates.
Today’s meetings were with Digital Durham, a mobile platform provider and Paul, the Head Of Finance – Financial Services. I had a nice lunch as well.
Learning points for today: You can get a sandbox on your mobile device (a security mechanism for separating running programs which didn’t sound so much fun once I knew what it was); Sometimes personal issues get in the way of work and; Sometimes work issues get in the way of work.
Today’s enjoyment rating 8/10 – only because I couldn’t go with another 9.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 