How do you feel at the end of the day?

I’ve been busy lately, here on the SRM team within Ionix.  My calendar fills up fast, and I’ve been logging in nights and weekends to sneak in work on my day job, never mind my blog (which explains the real gap in activity here!).

Why the sudden burst in activity?  Why am I letting my day job run away with my life?

I’m not, really.  The truth is my shift into a more technical role was just the first part of a two-part shift I didn’t see coming.  I also inherited a handful of work from another colleague who had recently changed jobs within EMC.  I did the best I could playing both roles for the month of January, but I basically spent the entire month stressed out and losing track of everything.

The answer, in true EMC style, was to invest more time into work — but in a smarter way.  I set aside chunks of “me” time at home (and at work, to be fair) to organize my tasks, organize my team’s tasks, organize my information.  Cleaned my inbox.  Set up a system for tracking open issues, for organizing my meeting minutes, all that.  I didn’t do a full GTD reset or anything (I keep thinking I should, but …), but I did invest heavily into my work infrastructure.

The end result is that at the end of the day I’m tired and spent, but I’m not lost and overwhelmed.  I know where I am, I know what I need to do tomorrow, and I know what my team is doing.

Mostly.

The truth is, how hard you work isn’t really the determining factor in how you feel at the end of the day.  It’s how you do that work.  For me, the weight of inheriting someone else’s “tracking system” was too much to carry, and I had to do extra work to create my own.  It made the past calendar week pretty much unbearable, but now that I’m coming out of the weeds I can see February shaping up to be a pretty good month.

Busy, but good.

That’s how I like it.