I’m not used to these long days

I’ve been spending a lot of time with my boss today, just watching him is exhausting, but unusually I’ve been exhausting myself as well.  My day started early at 6:30 followed by 30 minutes meditation and chasing around sorting the house out, then it was into the car to drive the short hop to Preston.  Our Preston office is a bit short of parking currently, so that combined with my need to walk each day nudged me to park down by the river again, from there it’s a 3 mile walk to the office along the river bank and through a lovely park, so it makes for a great start and end to the day.

The extra bonus is that I walk past Caffe Nero on the way so I popped in for 90 minutes reading.  By the time I got to the office it was 11am and the roofers had blocked off the entrance temporarily due to dangerous building work overhead.  Not half as dangerous as last night in the gales though, apparently no one was allowed to leave the building until 8pm due to sheets of metal roofing material, that was in the skips, slicing through the air due to the very high winds!

Today proved to be very interesting, some of the highlights being:

• I approved the hardware and software that we are going to use to prototype the re-design the workstations that our agents use.  we’re hoping to increase productivity, reduce frustrations, stress and fatigue.  I’ve high hopes for this as there’s lots of creative opportunities and the benefits could be huge
• Then I worked through a couple of organisation redesign options that I’ve been trying to push through for the last year and got those approved.  This is very existing for me as once these changes are in place they will allow me to work on many other improvements
• Finally I worked on summarising hundreds of lessons learned on a major programme into 6 underlying root causes and got these approved ready for presenting up the chain of command

The day was not very structured, basically grabbing snippets of peoples time when I could, I think I met people in 6 different locations through the day.  By the end of it I was feeling pretty exhausted, had a bad headache, and was feeling the strain and pain in my hands, knees and wrists.  Unfortunately I also had to reschedule dinner out with the ever patient Debbie.

On the way back to the car I decided to pop back into Caffe Nero to clear my email, do a bit more reading, write this email and finish the game of Sudoku that I started this morning.  I felt much better after an hour relaxing, but pretty hungry.

I’m now leaving and looking forward to the 2 mile (podcast fuelled) walk back to the car and watching the last episode in the first series of the excellent Bletchley Circle when I get home.  Then tomorrow I need to focus on the storm damage to the house 🙁