Coming Off a Week Well Wasted
Nov. 29th, 2020 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerI'm winding down a 9 day stretch away from work. Even though we canceled our plans to travel over Thanksgiving I chose to keep my time-off from work plans on the books. Or, as I wrote days ago, Thanksgiving's Canceled; Vacation is Not!
So, what have I done the past 9 days? ...Pretty much nothing.
I haven't traveled anywhere.
I haven't caught up on projects.
I've barely even done chores around the house.
And it has been awesome!
All good things come to an end, though. This actual, no-work, no-nothing that even looks like work, vacation is no exception.
In preparation for work tomorrow I read through my work email backlog this evening. I deleted all the obvious spam so there'll be less than one screenful of actual messages to deal with tomorrow morning, but mostly I wanted to get a handle on my meetings schedule.
On Monday and Tuesday this past week I glanced at my work email queue a few times. I saw a lot of meeting invites coming in. Most of my colleagues are good about not scheduling me for meetings when there's already a conflict on my calendar. A tougher challenge arises when a lot of invites come in before I have a chance to confirm attendance. Unconfirmed meeting times show on my calendar as open. Thus I may get invites for conflicting times because people don't know better. With the large volume of invites I saw flashing past I was worried that was happening, leaving me with a train wreck of a schedule for my first day back.
Thankfully, there's no train wreck. The huge number of invites were mostly from the same person, fumbling around rescheduling the same meeting numerous times. Yeah, it really makes me confident when someone's motto is apparently not so much "Third time's a charm!" as "I don't need more than ten tries, probably."
"No train wreck" is not the same as a light schedule, though. I have six hours of meetings tomorrow. That's sadly typical of my job right now.
So, what have I done the past 9 days? ...Pretty much nothing.
I haven't traveled anywhere.
I haven't caught up on projects.
I've barely even done chores around the house.
And it has been awesome!
All good things come to an end, though. This actual, no-work, no-nothing that even looks like work, vacation is no exception.
In preparation for work tomorrow I read through my work email backlog this evening. I deleted all the obvious spam so there'll be less than one screenful of actual messages to deal with tomorrow morning, but mostly I wanted to get a handle on my meetings schedule.
On Monday and Tuesday this past week I glanced at my work email queue a few times. I saw a lot of meeting invites coming in. Most of my colleagues are good about not scheduling me for meetings when there's already a conflict on my calendar. A tougher challenge arises when a lot of invites come in before I have a chance to confirm attendance. Unconfirmed meeting times show on my calendar as open. Thus I may get invites for conflicting times because people don't know better. With the large volume of invites I saw flashing past I was worried that was happening, leaving me with a train wreck of a schedule for my first day back.
Thankfully, there's no train wreck. The huge number of invites were mostly from the same person, fumbling around rescheduling the same meeting numerous times. Yeah, it really makes me confident when someone's motto is apparently not so much "Third time's a charm!" as "I don't need more than ten tries, probably."
"No train wreck" is not the same as a light schedule, though. I have six hours of meetings tomorrow. That's sadly typical of my job right now.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-30 04:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-30 02:52 pm (UTC)Fortunately, as we get the VA helpdesk situation wrestled into some semblance of sanity, I don't have quite as many meeting marathons, but still entirely too many for my liking.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-30 04:20 pm (UTC)As I look at my calendar I see that right now I only have ~4 hours of meetings each day Tue-Fri. It's still start-of-the-day Monday, though. I expect by lunchtime a lot of the gaps will be filled in.