A new kind of job
This has been a weird week for me.
On the one hand, the number of mailings sent this week comes in at #7 for all time, which is not bad at all for a summer week (being closed last week certainly helped).
On the other hand, I was barely involved in any of them. I did proofreading on roughly two mailings (one of which was a postcard, so that barely counts), and I only read a few others because I happened to be walking by the staging area while they were there, and I was curious what their writers were up to. For the majority, my only involvement was putting together the invoices, and trying to suppress the “did you remember to…” urge.
This is going to take some getting used to. Over the past few years, I’ve read literally thousands of prayer letters (it’s a neat job), and my days have been more or less defined by what shows up on my work list. Monday’s the busy proofreading day, Tuesday’s the heavy output day, Wednesday-Friday show declining amounts of work and are therefore the best days for meetings, and so on.
Now, rather than doing all the work myself, my task is to make sure Kevin has everything he needs (training, supplies, background knowledge, environment, etc.) to do the work. Beyond that, which doesn’t take as long — particularly on Mondays — I need to figure out what to do with myself.
Not that there’s any shortage of other things to do, and not that I’m just twiddling my thumbs, by any means.
But my schedule is much less defined than it was even a month ago, when I was still involved in some sense with every letter, even if I wasn’t doing most of the work then, either. And I didn’t view it as being very defined even when I was doing all the work. So I need to be careful to enforce some level of discipline that isn’t being forced on me by the work itself. Otherwise, it’ll be too easy to fritter away time on things that I don’t really care about.
Loosely, I want to be dividing my available (work) time into the following main areas:
New product development. I have a ton of ideas of things to implement, and need to choose and create one that will help fund the creation of the others.
Existing product enhancement. There are areas of the mailing service that could be improved, and in some areas, there’s a lot of room for improvement. There are also a number of things that I need to change from the operator’s perspective so that Kevin doesn’t need access to some of the arcane and obscure knowledge in my head that I only know because I wrote the code that he’s using, particularly when it comes to importing mailing lists (very powerful code; not so user-friendly).
CCC involvement. Beyond being keeper of the checkbook, enforcer of the budget, and discoverer of really obscure financial policy oddities, I’d like to get a little more involved with people again. I miss that. Now that the class of ‘08 has graduated, I don’t really know any of the students. How time flies! I only tend to connect with a few students in a given class anyway, and it was a bit of a shock to be going to a thesis presentation for someone I clearly remember staying up all night with during C&R her freshman year, playing cards outside Mid Mass while making sure nobody ran off with the tent.
Infrastructure. The process of ensuring that nothing is going to break under load, that everything is reasonably secure, and that people who work for me can enjoy doing so. This is less of a pressing concern than it has been in the past, now that cash flow isn’t a nail-biting issue, but it still needs time and attention.
Other stuff. I want to work on some skills and areas that I haven’t given much attention in ages. More on that some other time, perhaps.
That’s what I want to be doing. Now I just need to figure out how to structure my time to be most effective in doing so. And get used to the idea of not being completely up on the missionary endeavors of several hundred people.
