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.
As a lifelong office worker i'd say i dont change much. Multitasking is bullshit and just ends in lots of jobs done poorly. I find i'm better at doing serial focus work rather than trying to mix and match. If i have a couple of big jobs at once i do much better spending the whole day on one rather than switching half way through the day or even worse, from hour to hour. I got a standing desk a little while ago. I might use it when it enters my brain to stand up but i do a lot of walking - walk the dogs in the morning, walk to work, walk at lunch with a mate, walk home. Usual day is about 14,000-15,000 steps on those work in the office days (8-10k for the wfh days). So standing isnt much of a priority. If i am forced to focus on splitting my attention, the walk in the middle of the day is a good reset for the brain. Other than that my day is organised chaos - look at emails straight away and mentally file into needs a response now, can wait till later. Teams chat is a boon and a curse. Good for chatting with work mates across the state, bad for being tracked down "for a quick response" because my light is green. But i'm fortunate in the sense that queries coming my way are specialised info answers that can be answered in 5min or big project type stuff that takes days.