By the Seat of My Slacks
I feel like I am speaking especially conceptually right now, so I would say my current mental state is kind of windy. Not stormy, but lots of little vectors pointing all different ways.
Every now and then I kind of go off the reservation on my organizational systems, letting the inbox build to half-screen or so, task list doesn’t get opened until the end of the day, and achievable tasks sometimes get delayed.
After waving a dead chicken above my perpetually corrupted roaming user profile in Vista, I started up this morning and felt solid again. Task list is trimming up, and work is running up to a day ahead of schedule.
As is our donor, by the way. We scheduled a little Groupon-fueled junket to San Antonio on top of the very important Scheduled Harvest Day for reasons probably related to me looking at the wrong month’s calendar and determining the week day from that. Luckily, our donor has tentatively soared ahead of her schedule (which we kind of expected).
The tentative revised schedule potentially sets me up for a six-day Labor Day weekend, but we’ll see. The Company has this great tradition of collecting the third quarter estimate at the same time as the Plan, so we end up working double-time around this period of the year (a swim up the stream did not solve this issue, as I had hoped it would).
I tried to automate something so fiendishly complicated it would appear to be a form of witchcraft if it actually worked. I wouldn’t say it doesn’t work, but I would say it would be really difficult to achieve full functionality without consuming a lot of time. This specific activity looks to be taking a permanent vacation to the Exotic Orient by year-end, so unfortunately that normally implies automation is a lost and wasteful cause. It’s better to export inefficiency than to innovate locally in these situations. When step five of the process is “Think,” the activity normally doesn’t offshore.
A lot of my automation is to work around poor design upstream of me, so I am meeting with one of the people presiding over a template far too old to be his fault, the improvement of which could be a boon to much of the organization.