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Saturday Musings - Working to the MAX!
Some of you may have noticed that I didn’t do any posts last week. Yes, I’m fine and nothing disastrous has happened in my personal life. I just reached a point of work saturation.
Have you ever been working so hard that no matter how fast and how diligent you are your in-tray just keeps on mounting up? Well, that was me last week. A number of nights I found myself working until 3:30am and up again at 7:30am because there was just so much going on.
So what’s been happening? Everything from reviewing legal agreements, managing partners, sorting through client issues, working with the ParkLogic team, designing graphics, cleaning up websites, debugging servers, launching new platforms, coding client requests into existing systems and working with spreadsheets that literally take 30 minutes to calculate. The last issue drove me crazy because if I touched my PC during a recalc Excel would just stop! Grrrrrrrrrrr!!!!
At one point during the week I put a team member on hold and let out a bit of a roar due to the weeks frustrations. As Shrek would say, “Better out than in.” I then took them off hold and calmly began working through the issues they raised.
So how do I handle all of the myriad of tasks that seem to be flung in my direction? I’m going to sound really boring but I create a list and ask a simple question, “Can someone else do this?” If the answer is yes then I handball it onwards otherwise add it to the priority list.
It just so happens that we are coming to the end of a 2-year development cycle (yep, way too long) as we’ve redeveloped the entire ParkLogic platform from the ground up. This means that the team is being stretched so I have to be very careful whom I handball anything onto.
Once I have my priority list I do something very important. I start and complete a task. This may seem obvious but many people get completely overwhelmed by their lists of tasks and thrash between many of them, never completing any and becoming everyone’s worst nightmare.
Once the first task is completed I work on the next one and so on and so on. I’m also aware that there are times to do some tasks that are better suited to them. For instance, I like programming late at night because I’m not interrupted. If I did this task in the day then I would write some pretty awful code.
Also, be aware that you can’t work at your peak level perpetually. You need some downtime to do some thinking, be creative and enjoy life. If you’re constantly working flat-out until the wee hours of the morning than there’s something wrong with your life. Eventually something is going to break and it’s likely going to be you.
Now that I’m at the end of my week the world is a better place and believe it or not the in-tray is looking a little healthier. I have next week largely planned and it’s looking to be a much better time……in fact, there’s a little bit of excitement in the air as lots of great plans are finally coming to fruition! I’ll also have some time for some good blogs I’ve been dying to write!
Have a great weekend!
Michael
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