My Current Obsessions

These are the things I am currently working on/worrying about/losing sleep over (in no particular order):

- finding time to do everything I want to do or (more importantly) that I said I would do. My constant battle!

- figuring out what type of intranet architecture and applications would best suit my organization. I am spending lots of time talking to people, creating consensus, reading, and viewing vendor demos. I am confident it will all come together with enough work;

- convincing my partner Marty that we really will need a vacation in the next four months and that it is a good thing to plan ahead for these sorts of things since the spontaneous last-minute thing never seems to work out for us;

- getting through the mound of invoices. The more behind I get, the faster the pile seems to grow. I have to get these cleared up pronto since I have a budget report pending, not to mention publishers calling;

- sorting out which loose leaf services to cancel. I hate to slag anyone, but generally the publishers really seem to have crossed a line with the number of loose leaf services and filing releases they are producing. Old, tried-and-true textbooks are now being produced in a loose leaf format. Formerly those titles updated once a year are now being updated twice or even three times a year, at twice or three times the cost since most are charged per release. Not only has this put a tremendous strain on our budgets, but also staff cannot keep up with the filings. And gee whiz, do you think this could be contributing to my growing backlog of unprocessed invoices? Hmmm.... The only solution I can come up with (aside from constant whining on my part which frankly doesn't seem to be helping) is to cancel those that aren't getting enough use all at once and explain why we are doing so. Just as soon as I find some time....

- getting rid of STUFF. At home and here in the office, I am really fed up with the clutter I seem to accumulate. My coworkers did a wonderful thing earlier this year and organized my office while I was away. I haven't done too bad at maintaining it, but I really need to clear out some of the things that I'm not using. One step I have taken is that, for any invoices I keep on file in the cabinet (but usually don't have time to file, so they sit in a pile), I have instead been scanning them into PDF and filing them away electronically on the network. Presto, changeo! No more paper piled up, no more paper to clear out of the cupboard when it gets too full. It's almost too simple....now I just need to find some other solutions to reduce my time spent on my routine tasks.

Well, thanks for listening. My time spent here hasn't helped clear up the backlog, but I sure feel a lot better after venting! Now, back to those invoices....