Office work question.
I’m wondering, when you work in an office, do you ever (or do you frequently) change the way you work? Because I’ve spent pretty much every day of the last thirty years wondering what I could do differently and even, occasionally, acting on that.
I thought everyone did… until I actually thought about it. And when I did think about it, I suddenly realised, no, you fucking idiot, almost nobody but you would do this. I’d guess most of you with normal jobs just roll in and do them as you’ve always done them. Is that right? Am I missing something?
Because on the other hand, if it's just me, who are these ‘hack your workflow’ ‘productivity tricks’ aimed at?
I got to thinking on it because I recently rejigged my daily writing schedule (again) to make regular time for a couple of smaller projects that I just wasn’t getting to. And then I rejigged it (again) when that started to take time away from my main projects. (It’s almost as though there are only so many deckchairs on the Titanic hours in the day.) But I know that when my son goes off to work in a commercial kitchen, there’s no room for fucking around with the process. You just do it.
Anyway these are the things I wonder about.
I have worked in offices for a while. You get into a nice groove where everything is working well and then some numpty reads a stupid productivity book by someone who once ran a factory in uzbekhistan and everything gets turned on its head, for a few weeks and then it goes back to normal.
Come into work, either in office or home office. Continue to work until superior now informs me this is top priority. Work on that until I either finish that, another superior or the same one tells me this is the important task to work on. During this attend the schedule training required to be completed by this time complete. return to previous to priority task, drop that to attend the mandatory in person meeting for new directors to tell me how we are going to be doing these things now, (same as how we did it 2 directors ago), go back to work on what I have been working on most recently. Finish that work, take next piece of work of the pile, repeat.