It's Friday Already

Yes, really, today is Friday. This is one of those weeks when I realize it is Friday, and yet it still feels like yesterday was Monday and I have not been able to do any of the things I had planned for this week. 

Yesterday (Thursday, not Monday) evening around 5pm I was finishing my last task for the day and ended up writing in my email to the customer that I had intended to send the email, and the report that the email was about, on Monday this week because I had read the previous email already a week ago and decided that first thing Monday morning I will get this thing done. I even put the task on my to-do list and blocked focus time in my calendar.

This wasn’t the only thing that was late this week or has not been done by today. There was another email that I had sat on for a few days because I did not think it was that important. After a few days I decided that I would spend a maximum of 15 minutes to reply to it and when I finally wrote my response, it took me 90 minutes. There was a “quick and dirty” LinkedIn post on a minor piece of news related to XEVMPD that I had planned to write on Monday that had expanded day-by-day into a several page long article looking back to some of my previous blog posts about XEVMPD and IDMP and the latest updates on product information management in the EU. The post is still unfinished and unpublished. There’s a bunch of courses in our learning management system that I was supposed to complete already last week, comments required on several documents, administrative tasks and the list goes on and on.

To rewind back a bit, or actually a bit more than “a bit”, five weeks to be exact, I had a three-week vacation. Yes, I had a three-week holiday in October. No, I am not completely nuts (just a little bit). In Finland, three or four weeks of consecutive vacation is not unheard of, it is actually the standard for anyone working in a “normal job”. Usually the vacation period happens during the summer months, June and July, to accommodate the vacation periods of everyone else and quite often the two month summer vacation that the children have from school and kindergarten.

Personally I haven’t had a “normal job” in Finland for the most of my career. I started out after university at a large pharmaceutical company, and when the first vacation days rolled around, I took a 4-week vacation in India during May, also an unusual month to take a summer vacation, but not quite as unusual as October. After that first post-graduation year of my working career, I have been working abroad, been a freelancer and for the past four years I have been running my own company. Three or four week vacations are a luxury that I have not been able to afford every year, but thanks to the great colleagues I have, this was actually the second 3-week vacation in October that I had while being the COO of Tepsivo.

Three weeks of vacation is great. First week you think about work a bit but have fun not doing it. Second week you don’t think about work and really relax. Third week you start thinking about the end of the vacation and going back to work, but you somehow manage to enjoy the vacation even more because you know it is coming to an end. 

I missed three weeks of work, but not the whole month. I could still remember most of my passwords. I imagined I might be able to catch up with some monthly tasks. My colleagues were quite destroyed by the extra work but not completely exhausted. I was sure I could still catch up. And that’s what I have been doing for the past two weeks. Catching up with everything and trying to continue the work just as before.But this post is definitely not about the possible downsides of having a long vacation. Quite the opposite. 

Going back to the email and report that I was sending on Thursday instead of Monday and all the other things that were done late, not completed or even started. I mentioned that I had written the task on my to-do list and in my calendar to get it done first thing in the morning of Monday. This is not how I usually work. I don’t do personal to-do lists and I do not block time in my calendar to get things done. I add tasks to our Jira boards that are based on the different teams that we have in Tepsivo because most, if not all, of my work is related to some team or “department” and their processes. Jira tasks assigned to me form a to-do list that I can follow and at the same time other people can add things to that list and can see what is on my plate. 

Another way of going through the tasks or receiving new tasks is emails. I go through my emails once a day (yes, once) and respond to them or mark them as a task and respond to them later. Here I know that I fail sometimes. Those emails that I know will take a longer time to respond, I might leave unopened and respond to them later without creating a task in Jira for me or someone else.

Then there are of course the meetings. I have some every day. And when you have a useful meeting, it quite often leads to tasks that need to be done after the meeting. It is possible that some of my tasks get done, and some of them get reassigned to someone else. 

This is how I usually work: emails, meetings and Jira tasks. 

So why did I now have a personal to-do list and focus time blocked in my calendar? I guess it was a combination of having some tasks piled up during the last days of my vacation when my colleagues knew that I would be soon back and could handle them, my reaction to some of the things that had happened while I was on vacation and wanted to have my say in them, having had some time to think during my vacation and getting some “good ideas” and in general being energized. I was determined to get things done, a lot of things done.

And I imagined that writing up additional lists would help me. I was wrong. What it helped me was to see clearer all the things that I wanted to do, but did not have the time to do. I would have had those things in my mind in any case, and I would not have had the time to get all of them done, but using my normal way of working, I would have not noticed that I am piling up a huge amount of tasks quickly and just simply do not have the time to get them done.

So have I learned something? This is a LinkedIn post, so there must be something that I have learned, right? Well, maybe. I did not really start writing this post because I wanted to share something that I had learned about my ways of working. I started to write this partially because I thought it was funny that I wrote in an email that “I was supposed to send this on Monday.”, and partially because I am still continuing to write the Tolstoy-length XEVMPD post that was supposed to be my weekly LinkedIn post that would help me to maintain my status as a highly influential thought leader. 

I had thought that the thing I wanted to talk about was scheduling, planning and getting things done. 

Scheduling in the sense that it is easy to keep your schedule if it’s about a meeting with one or more colleagues, but if you add to your schedule 30 minutes to finalize a report and send it back to the customer, somehow it is very easy to push it back every day just because it is fully up to me to do it and there’s no external pressure, except of course the customer waiting for the finalized report. 

With planning I should be able to estimate how much time a task will take me and what can I get done during the week. I am definitely a glass half full kind of person when estimating. Answering an email takes 15 minutes instead of 90 minutes. For me something is 500 meters away when Google Maps says 1.3 km. This gives me the courage to start tasks that someone more cautious would not even consider doing, but on the other hand also contributes to the never-ending to-do list that I have with all the late and pending tasks.

For me getting things done means that instead of saying and thinking about doing something, I want to and thrive to start doing things and I really believe in the incremental way of working, starting with the most embarrassing MVP I can think of and running with it. 

But I think that while writing this I also learned that I should start working in a better way with Jira. Adding even more tasks there to my “public” to-do list, estimate them properly and expect that I probably will not get as much done as I think. I have already started doubling all my distance estimations so probably I will try the same with work task duration.