low_delta | Entries tagged with work

Monday evening was the whisky tasting. It went well, for the most part, so that's over. But of course I had an early meeting the next morning. Fortunately, I didn't drink all that much.

I was in a meeting on Monday, and they scheduled a 7:30 meeting to continue the discussion the next day. One of the guys acknowledged that was early for me (that's about the time I'm normally waking up). Fortunately, it wasn't anything where they'd be relying on my for a lot of input, because my brain just isn't working at that time of day. But before they even sent meeting invites for it, I got another invitation for a 7 am meeting. The good part was that both of these meetings were the same day, so I could get them both out of the way quickly.

So Tuesday I woke up early, but when I looked at my phone there was no 7:00 meeting. When I logged on to my computer to check my calendar, I realized it was next Tuesday. So that was a waste of getting up early, and I'll have to do it again next week. And I was barely functioning for that 7:30, and in fact felt out-of-it all morning.

I had no meetings today, but have three tomorrow morning, including one at 8:00. So I'm going to have to get up and moving quickly.

I've been feeling ADHD at work this week.

My prioritization system is based on the time it takes to complete a task. The quicker the task, the sooner I work on it. There are long-term tasks, projects with due dates at some specified or unspecified point in the future - days or weeks. There are short-term tasks which could take up to a day, usually one to four hours. And there are immediate tasks, that would take less than an hour to complete, though they're often only minutes.

This has always worked well for me. I always get my stuff done on time, and I can't figure out why other people can't. I reserve time in my week for the long-tern tasks, and reserve time in my day for the short-term work. Then I handle the immediate tasks as they come in. Mornings are typically devoted to the more immediate tasks as other people are gearing up for their days and sending out requests. I typically work on the longer-term tasks late in the day when other people are slowing down or checking out.

But this week, I don't know, there seemed to be an overabundance of immediate tasks. And I kept jumping from one to another as priorities shifted from moment to moment. One day, I had several things that needed to be done, and was working on one, and then I got pulled into a meeting, and after the meeting I decided to work on the thing that came out of the meeting because it would be very quick and it was still fresh in my mind.

One of the reasons I do the immediate things as immediately as possible, is to get them out of my inbox. I want to keep my to-do list as short as possible, and I don't to risk losing items (either forgetting to add them to my actual list, or losing them in my e-mail because the list is too long). But also, having so many things on my to-do list is a distraction. So there's the ADHD thing again.

I guess this came to a head this week because it was so busy. Not only with a lot of work, but with tight deadlines on it. And I may have misprioritized some short-term tasks as immediate. I actually worked overtime this week. I need to slow down, take a breath, and make sure my priorities are correct.

I said that I didn't understand why other people can't get their work done, but that's not a fair statement. Usually, those other people are managers. I get extremely frustrated when a manager (usually my own) can't respond to me or get me an answer, for days or never. But I think the root cause is not time management so much as it is financial priority. The boss is overwhelmed, but that's not a personal problem - we need more people on the team.

I went to the plant in Mexico last week. Flew down on Monday, and back home on Friday. I went with two coworkers. We hadn't been there in a year and a half, which was too long. The people at the plant were grateful that were were there - it's nice to feel appreciated for a change.

I ate too much. Dinners out are always more food than I can manage, these days. Afterward, I would spend 20 minutes on a treadmill in the hotel gym. And I wasn't hungry in the morning, so had only a minimal breakfast. There's a good restaurant next to the hotel, which we ate at twice. The people at the plant took us out to eat the other two nights. Somehow I always ended up at the end of the table, sitting next to my coworkers, so it was harder to talk with the Mexican coworkers. At Thursday's meal, after a short while, I just got up and went to the other end of the table and talked with the plant manager for a while. I hadn't intended on staying there, but I did anyway. A woman from Quality arrived and sat next to me, so I talked with her a bit. Those two were the only ones I talked with, since the rest of that end of the table spoke only Spanish. They all know English, to some degree, but it was a social situation, and I wasn't very near most of them, so I was left out quite a bit. But that was OK.

In meetings, sometimes they would talk at length in Spanish (one of my coworkers was the interpreter). That's OK to a point, because they don't always know English well enough to get their point across, or to understand the issues, but after a while it gets a little annoying. That's because I don't know when they're done with a subject, and can start talking myself. Or I don't know if what I want to talk about has already been covered.

It was very hot there. A weather station at the airport, which was near our plant, said it got to 105°F every day. It felt like a furnace when we walked outside in the afternoon, but we only went between the buildings and the car, so we were never out for very long.

The flights down were very warm. Milwaukee, to Houston to Monterrey, both the planes and the airports were warm, especially the second flight. I was sweating. I wore fewer layers on the way back, but everyplace was damn cold.
The trip went pretty well on the way down. The only snag was that I didn't have phone service. I didn't even realize it until my contact didn't answer me, when I told him we had arrived. I only had data when in wi-fi, which I didn't have at the airport. Cindy tried to fix that, and seemed to have chosen the right options with our provider, but I never did get data outside of wi-fi, like I had the last time I was there.

As part of some little joke I didn't quite follow, one of the engineers there gave me a shiny 20 peso coin. I told her it was my lucky coin. Everything went smoothly on the flight home, so when I got home I told her so, and that it was because of the lucky coin. We had two hours between flights in Chicago, which, I'm told, might not be enough time for an international arrival if the lines are really bad. But it was more than enough time, and we were able to have a sandwich at a restaurant before our flight.

My one coworker and I got the same flights, so that was nice. Neither of us fly often enough to feel like we always know the deal, especially international, so it was nice to have each other there to figure things out, or at least be more comfortable with what's going on.

We'll be back at work tomorrow, following up on what we learned at the plant.

This is not about my current stress load, so much as it is about the ways that certain factors can stress us.

I don't like the cold. I have difficulty with air blowing on me, and I especially dislike cold air blowing on me. My office, of course, is always cold. Recently it got really bad. I called Facilities to look into this. I was wondering if something was actually wrong. But I don't mean to complain about that, specifically. I want to say that this unpleasant environment is, itself a form of stress. I mean, I'm wearing layers, and my hands are cold, and I have this chilled air blowing on my head. It's uncomfortable, to say the least. I have to sit in an uncomfortable place for eight hours. That is an additional stress. It makes me not want to be there. It makes me want to leave. It makes me think angry thoughts about how our workplace are set up and biases that might occur. It's just one more item on the list of things I hate about my job. Oh, and then I think more unhappy thoughts about how other workplaces would be no different.

I use CAD programs at work - 3D modeling of industrial products. A little over a year ago, something happened with the network, where things became very slow. My CAD program became extremely slow. Apparently, many of its functions somehow access the network. This was very frustrating. Things that used to take ten seconds suddenly started taking several minutes. I had to start coming up with alternative ways to work. I'd plan other tasks while my computer was thinking about things. I'd make lists of the parts I'd need, and copy them into nearby folders for quicker recovery. I wanted to call our company's helpdesk about this problem, but I didn't think they'd find a problem with the general network slowness (why does it take five seconds to delete a 100 kb file?), so they'd assume the problem was with the CAD, which they can't help with. And we have no maintenance contract with the CAD provider, so I'd just be screwed.

Anyway, my point is that this slowness was stressful. It was like a weight on my chest. And again, it brought about thoughts of frustration and anger.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a big network outage in the building. IT scrambled to fix, and when they did, the network was back to its expected speed. It's so nice! I no longer have to use the workarounds. I like working in CAD again. I feel like I can breathe again, and I can work efficiently. Unfortunately, I don't think there is a solution for the cold air. They might be able to set the vent over my head to not open all the way. We'll see.

On a normal workday, my alarm goes off at 7:20, I get out of bed around 7:50. After showering and breakfasting, I jump in the car at 8:30, in hopes of getting to the office by 9:00. If I'm working from home, I might stay in be a few minutes longer, and/or start work a few minutes early, and still have some time to relax.

My normal start time is 9 am, but I make it known that if someone needs to schedule a meeting, I can start as early as 8:00. An 8:30 meeting is easy, because I just just start work instead of getting in the car. An 8:00 meeting means I have to make sure I get up a little earlier than usual. Often, I'll just grab a bowl of cereal and start my computer, showering later.

I occasionally have meetings with Europeans, which is the usual reason for an early meeting. My boss is one of them, and I have a one-on-one call with him every two or three weeks. Well, this time he scheduled a meeting for 7:30. It wasn't too bad - I just set the alarm for 20 minutes early and got out of bed fairly quickly, got breakfast and fired up the computer, only to find he had postponed the meeting. This time it was for 8:00. Again it was no trouble, except that he postponed it again. This time it was for 8:30. I thought this was much better, until my coworker pointed out that it would be in the office. My boss is in town for a few hours, and wants to meet in person. So that's a full hour earlier than usual, that I have to be up and out of the house. Not fun. At least I'm fairly certain he won't postpone this one.

My coworker says a friend of his works for Harley-Davidson, and they (salaried staff, not factory workers) have unlimited vacation. They're no longer required to work a certain number of hours, they're only required to get their work done.

This sounds like a way to accommodate the new workforce and their style of working. A way to deal with a staff that works from home anyway, where there's no good way to determine how much time they spend working (other than outright spying on them, which, even to management, doesn't feel good).

This sounds like it could easily go badly for the worker. Ideally, you and your manager work together to balance your workload. But this requires a talented manager and a worker who wants to do a good job. In reality a manager can easily be unaware of how unbalanced your workload is, in either direction. But even worse, if you have a boss that doesn't like you, they can just give you more work. Or if you don't understand your own workload, then you might not ever be able to take time off.

In the before-times, we earned paid time off by working for a company for a long time. From here out, we learn over time how to be able to budget the time off? Different method, similar results? Or maybe the younger professionals will get more time off than they would have in previous times? I'm good with that.

On March 1, I got an e-mail acknowledging my 30th anniversary with the company. I was hired on Feb 28, 1990. Since Feb 28 was a Sunday, it made sense I got the (likely automated) message about my anniversary. [Edit: a few days later I remembered it was Feb 26.]

Today, I got three e-mails, a phone call and an in-person congratulations for my service. These were all from management-type people whom I hardly know. The phone call came when I had stepped away from my desk for a minute, and it was from the VP of HR. He's so high up I've never even seen him. And I had a short video call with my boss.

Since My hire date was Feb 28, I was surprised to hear today was the day. I thought they were off by 17 days. Later, I realized that it was actually 31 years since I was hired.

As it stands, I was gone from the company for about a year, back in 1999. I was downsized. I got a new job, but after a year I was looking for work, and my old boss was hiring, so I went back. So when they calculated my thirty years, did they remove that year?

Strange.

"As discussed, we will engage and partner with [person] and [other person] as we evaluate engineering toolset as well as prioritization of delivery. Our goal is to complete the foundational activities including the organization alignment during this calendar year."

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Crossposts: https://low-delta.livejournal.com/1765361.html

For Thanksgiving we did the usual dinner with my mom and my sister's family, but we took Richie along (the guy who was staying with us a couple of months ago). He doesn't have any family in town. I ate too much, of course. It's tough. Every time I take smaller ans smaller portions, but there are so many dishes. They're all good, too. I skipped lunch, though, so I should be OK, having eaten twice as much as I should have. After dinner we played Pounce. That's a card game of speed, that we used to play a lot when I was younger. My sister, of course, won the most.

Today I was going to go into work for a couple of hours, then Cindy and I would go for a walk. The couple of hours turned into 3-1/2, so we did a less ambitious walk, ending as it was starting to get dark. Then supper.

Tomorrow we might try another walk, but Cyn's knee started bothering her on tonight's walk. And I need to go back in to work.

We have a huge project that needs to get done by the end of next week, and I'm worried it won't. It's basically my project, so I'm the one who needs to put in all the extra time to make sure it gets done right. We're getting a new system, and migrating our data from the old system. We have something like 60,000 lines in Excel that need updating. The project is for the department, but I'm in charge and I want it to end up as close to perfect as possible. Right now I'm trying to figure out what corners we can cut if we don't get it all done. I'd rather do the overtime than cut corners. Not only that, I'm twice as fast as anyone else. Anyway, I had originally planned to do an hour or so today, and five or six tomorrow. But after today's 3.5, I think I'll try to keep it to four.

Crossposts: https://low-delta.livejournal.com/1698302.html

My big project at work is... time consuming. I'm putting in a lot of overtime. A lot for me, anyway. I think I got over 45 hours last week.

Today I got scheduled for a 7am meeting. Who does that? Not one person at this meeting is normally at work by that time (except the person who called it). I asked him to reschedule for 8:00, but he basically said that he wanted to do it at 7:00. So I had to get up two hours early. I think I got nearly six hours of sleep last night, but I didn't feel like it. I had an 8am meeting yesterday, and the time changed last weekend, so I got up early every day, hoping it wouldn't be as much of a shock to my system. Unfortunately, I didn't get to bed very early, so I'm just short sleep.

So tonight I'm dead tired. I hope I don't get sick. I have too much going on this coming week.

Crossposts: https://low-delta.livejournal.com/1696274.html

I had four hours of overtime by Tuesday. That probably doesn't sound like much, but I never work overtime. Work is crazy busy. My head was spinning on wednesday. I was trying to work on an important project, but I kept getting interrupted. I was supposed to visit Doug that evening, so I only worked an extra half hour. I was pretty beat in the afternoon, so I told him I wouldn't stay late. He asked if I wanted to cancel, but I didn't. If I stayed home, I would want to go back to work, and would generally be too exhausted to get anything done anyway.

So I went down about 7:00. The temp was near 80(!), so we sat in the back yard for a bit, talked and sipped some Scotch. Then we went in and played a board game he made. It wasn't going very well, and I originally wanted to leave by 10:00, but he wanted to keep playing so I did. I didn't leave until 11:00, and I was crashing, by that point. I got home at 11:00, read a magazine for a little while, then went to bed.

I never turned the computer on. LJ is pretty dead, these days, so I was able to catch up today at lunch time. I felt much better today. Almost back up to full strength, and work was more "relaxed" today.