A year of work in progress – day 45

Day 45 – 10 March 2014

I’ve been off-net for two working days.  I haven’t looked at my email until this morning.  I even switched off the synchronisation on my phone just in case I got tempted.  And I did.  Thursday morning was difficult and I must confess to feeling withdrawal symptoms.  Two whole days and I came back to 422 emails. 

The problem with making yourself available I guess is that it encourages people to contact you.  Now I get a sweat on when my inbox is over fifty emails but I purposefully left it all until Monday to see how long it would take me to recover normality.  Today I only had an hour of time officially not in meetings to catch up.

By the time work officially started I had got it down to 178.

Over the weekend I finished the book Digital Government @ Work.  It was an interesting study in some of the difficulties of implementing change through technology in the government sector and reminded me of some of the strange times that I had put to the back of my mind.  I’d forgotten about my involvement in the now defunct National Programme for IT (NPfIT).  Perhaps it is best that I had.

Neil lent me one of his books ‘The Experience! How to wow your customers and create a passionate workplace’ by Lior Arussy and I’ve made a start on this.  As it happens I finished it as well.  It was a short and simple story from adversity to utopia yet there were some important lessons.  Just before Christmas the SMT spent some time flying relatively solo on the Service Desk.  The book reminded me that we need to do this again.  I got a few pithy tweets out of it too.

By lunchtime I had managed to get my emails down to 80.

The big event of today was a digital inclusion one, a follow up from a conference we held back in November.  The idea was to get as many organisations as possible that are involved together and set up new partnerships.  It was a sort of speed networking event bringing different ideas and opportunities to the table.  All of this was to build upon the infrastructure that the Digital Durham programme is bringing. 

Each person was given a different coloured lanyard.  Reds sat opposite greens and were given three minutes to get to know the person in front of them before the bell rang and the greens had to move one seat down.  There was loads of noise and it was a load of fun.  Twenty six delegates turned up and with the six on our team it made it a very good event.

By close of business I had managed to get my emails down to 47.

Stanley Area Action Partnership in the evening to present their part of the Digital Durham deployment plan.

Learning points for today:   You go away for two days and someone changes the kitchen; our down time to upgrade the revs and bens system this year was half that of last year; we should start promoting achievements more; all success is born of failure and; I should remember not to be so flippant (apologies to anyone I have offended today).

Today’s enjoyment rating 9/10 – only because it was a long one.