Biting off too much?

Dude.

I'm no HR guy and here I am planning to lead the team into an organizational planning meeting. Two days. Sure, I've done it as a member of a team, but I don't have the formal training and I don't have any experience leading the process.

Will I be able to pull it off with theory from all the books I've ever read, and those two times I participated in the process?

I'd better or there's gonna be a whole lot of egg on my face.

The good thing is that there's over two weeks to prepare. Of course one of those weeks is gonna be in Jersey where I'm likely to freeze to death. But that's still preparation time. God knows what I'm gonna do while I'm stuck on a plane for 20+ hours anyway. Thank goodness for business class.

When it Rains it Pours - And I've Got the Umbrella

Just went thorough one of my most hectic work weeks in recent memory. Three different guests from overseas, one BPO implementation series of meetings, strategic planning proformas up to 2013, leading the first mangement team meeting in almost a year, sales cutoff week for February, scads of financial templates, foreign travel arrangements to be made for two trips out in March, two months of expense reports, 12 backlogged training modules, three cross-sector coordination meetings (1 HR, 1 Finance and 1 Non-Stock) and five performance reviews.

Add in the political stupidity in Thursday and Friday and it was one hell of a last five days.

But you know what? For someone who's just survived an 80-hour workweek, I feel great. I didn't have as much trouble as I thought I'd have getting up in the mornings during the week. I was actually looking forward to getting in and polishing off work.

I love the feeling of knowing that most other people would get killed with that kind of workweek. And not only did I survive it, I got everything done. It wasn't all pretty and perfect, but everything was done effectively and on time.

Add in the great performance review from The Boss, and it was pretty damned fine for 80 hours of work.

I think I'm starting to get the hang of this job, and am starting to enjoy it.

Seasons Change

We just took the Christmas tree down. I think this is the latest that the tree has stayed up, just because everyone here at home's been too busy to just do it. Took under an hour to take it down and put it away. See ya next year, tree.

A Crush of Media and Interests

It's been over a month since my last post (on this increasingly-misnamed weblog anyway) and I'm still struggling to absorb all the information from available media sources, plus maintain two interests (film+a bit of small screen series, and boardgaming). It doesn't help that not only has work been going through one of those stretches where everything needs to be done in the same timeframe, plus the three trips abroad which only serves to short circuit any attempt I make to establish a rhythm to deal with the work. Sigh.

Books are dead. I haven't read a single page since polishing off the disappointing A Feast for Crows. I'm still stuck halfway through Guns, Germs and Steel, and have built up a reading stack that's going to take me until 2008 to get through at this rate.

I'm currently tearing through film in an attempt to catch up with all the major Academy Award-nominated films. It's a decent crop this year, and I've seen all five of the Best Picture nominees and written up four as of this writing. On the downside, I've accumulated even more DVDs that I am simply not going to get to finish off anytime soon, plus the first 1.5 seasons of Battlestar Galactica (criminal, I know), the only season of Firefly, and I've-lost-count-of-how-many seasons of C.S.I. and 24.

Forget about working on my novel AND my screenplays.

Here's hoping that work slows down as I expect it to in April, so I can take some time off, take a trip with Chris and maybe catch up on some media.

Man, I'm glad I've completely given up on videogaming. I don't think a stack of unplayed or unfinished games similar to what I built up for the PS1 and PS2 would be a good use of cash.