Tag Archives: productivity

Calendar…

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When Pope Gregory “invented” the calendar, he was working under the belief that having a single universal standard that today was really “today” and not some time in the middle of February would be a good idea for the Christian kingdom’s of Europe. At the very least, it would allow everyone to hold their major celebrations and feast days at the same time. Good stuff if you were a Pope in the 16th century. Most people today keep a calendar for the same basic reason. It’s a hellofa good way to keep major events organized and make sure everyone shows up to them at the same time.

The rub comes, of course, when no one can agree what is supposed to be on a “major event” calendar. Senior staff meetings make the cut, but not inter-staff meetings. The Uberboss’ days off are on there, but not the senior staff. Multi-jurisdictional exercises show up, but sometimes not local exercises impacting people in the building. Some events are listed three times because whoever put them on there can’t figure out how to change the date and/or time of the original reservation. And keeping track of the hot mess that is our calendar falls to junior staff who a) Don’t know what the schedule is supposed to look like; b) Aren’t told when things change; c) Have never been given clear direction about what events “make the cut”; and d) Have no authority to demand information from other senior staff offices. Sure, that’s a guarantee of getting a good product.

The way I learned it back in the days when dinosaurs ruled the earth was that if you are given responsibility to do a thing, you should also be given the corresponding authority to make that thing happen. Having one without the other, well, is about as productive as trying to put a high gloss of a pile of feces. This little endeavor isn’t something that should be hard to do… but the players involved almost guarantee that it will be an exercise in futility… But the again, that’s never stopped us from wasting inordinate amounts of time before.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of previously de-published blogs appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Who’s down with OCD?

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Yeah, you know me. One of the perks of having mild OCD and a pervacive impatience streak is that when the issue is pressed, I will find something for myself to do to stay occupied. Things not going great at home? Launch myself into a new project at the office. Things not going well at the office, lay down stone edging around every flower bed in the yard. You get the idea. Tonight’s overpowering need to do something in the face of not yet being able to do what I really want to do has conveniently led to mowing the grass, starting the laundry, pondering what to blog about while I washed dishes, spot cleaning the kitchen, and a brief game of fetch. Not necessarily in that order. Now, of course, I’m doing the actual blogging. So if nothing else, at least more waiting has led to increased productivity. Still, I’d be happier with less productivity and more packing.  That’s not to be this weekend… which is probably just as well since half of everything in the house is pretty much still sitting in boxes from my false alarm back in January. I haven’t had the heart to unpack it just to turn around and pack it back again. This hasn’t been the way I planned to spend my Friday night, but I’m thankful for any distraction my slightly addled mind can come up with at the moment.

Four…

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Apparently, in the absence of having planned anything constructive, four days off is too much for me to handle all at one time. Admittedly, the first two were enforced by an uncooperative stomach, so there wasn’t much chance of getting anything accomplished there other than the occasional load of laundry and some poking around on the interwebs. Yesterday got the week’s “running” accomplished – groceries, random crap from Lowe’s, ridiculous organic dog food, and the like. The only thing that really hasn’t gotten done is bathroom cleaning… and I don’t think even my OCD-addled mind is pressed enough to take that on to just have something to do. If there’s one household task I simply detest, that would be the one. Sitting here grousing about it is obviously more productive.

My point though, in this somewhat rambling post, is that I really have nothing to do today (other than the whole cleaning bit that’s not going to happen). This means that I’m basically going to end up knocking around the house trying to come up with something that needs done… and then talking myself out of it because it’s Sunday and no one in their right mind starts a project on Sunday. I’m not quite saying that I’m ready to get back to work, but one thing I can always count on there, is that it’s rarely going to be boring… ridiculous, frustrating, and myopic, sure – but rarely boring.

All news, all the time…

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So I’ll ask you a question. If a newsletter is published and only the Uberboss reads it, is it actually a publication? That question is, sadly, not rhetorical. Every quarter, our staff spends somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 man-hours planning, organizing, editing, and publishing the “official” organizational newsletter. Actually, we spend more time than that because we usually end up writing most of the articles ourselves because our “call for contributions” generally goes unanswered… and when someone does answer the call, we generally spend even more time rewriting their bit because it seems possible that English is their third language. Or possibly their fourth. That, however, is a separate rant.

Our usual circulation is about 20 print copies plus an electronic version posted on the organization’s intranet site. Last quarter, the electronic copy was accessed something like 37 times. We have several hundred employees. You can do the math on how well this product is being received. Since the majority of our employees work away from the home office, it doesn’t even have the virtue of being used as birdcage liner for most of them.

The workflow for this product is something like this:

• Complete final draft
• Perform editorial review
• Submit to Uberboss for approval
• Rewrite or change layout at request of Uberboss
• Submit to Uberboss for approval
• Have “editorial board” meeting with Uberboss
• Rewrite or change layout
• Submit to Uberboss for approval
• Wait until Uberboss is out of office
• Publish
• Ignore for 2 months
• Repeat

Given the hours required and the pay rate of those involved, the cost to publish breaks down to something like $12,000 per quarter… or $210.52 per view.
Putting up numbers like that, it’s hard to believe that Uncle Sam is ever short on funds.

Editorial Note: This is part of a continuing series of previously unattributed posts appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Well trained…

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As a matter of policy, we want a well trained and highly educated workforce to carry out the agency’s business. One of the great military-as-management-philosophy aphorisms is that an organization should “train as it fights.” That is to say, it should build its training program based on situations and circumstances it will encounter in the real world. Of course that’s not the standard we train against.

Our training is driven by a “points” system. Each of several hundred real world and online courses are valued as a specific number of training points. Once you reach the prescribed number of points for the year, you are, by definition, “well trained.” This is great if your objective is to be well trained in as short a time as possible; not so much if you actually want to learn something. Then again, learning something isn’t actually part of the training requirement so if it happens, that’s mostly just a bonus.

On a recent morning I had a few hours of unplanned free time, I racked up more than half of my required yearly points after about three hours of clicking through various PowerPoint slides and Flash presentations… while also having discussions with other staffers, answering the phone, sending email, and monitoring breaking news on Charlie Sheen. I don’t think that was necessarily the kind of quality learning the training office hoped to achieve, but that’s what happens when you base the requirement on earning a fixed number of points rather than on actual knowledge gained or skills needed to stay current in your career field. This is doubly true when you write off professional pride as a motivating factor.

Fortunately, I’m now officially “well trained” for 2011… so I can put this sad, sad experience out of my mind for another 11 months.

Editorial Note: This is part of a continuing series of previously unattributed posts appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Outlook…

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I’ve been operating on the apparently misguided assumption that Microsoft Outlook was the standard issue email client for federal offices everywhere since the dawn of time… or at least the last 15 years, whichever came first. At least that was my assumption until I overheard this conversation this morning…

Supervisor: Your inbox filled up over the weekend. Make sure you clean it out and move large files to your archive folders so they’re not taking up space on the email server.

Employee: It’s not my fault my inbox fills up. If people didn’t wait till the last minute to send stuff in, there wouldn’t be a problem.

Supervisor: But if you move those big files out of your inbox *pointing at the screen* we can solve the problem.

Employee: But I need those files.

Supervisor: I know, but they’ll be saved in your personal files so you can still get to them.

Employee: Well, I asked to go to that Outlook class but didn’t get in. This isn’t like the old Outlook so I need training and it’s hard to get into those classes. They’re always full. I don’t know why people can’t just spread out when they send stuff in…

Sigh.

Is Outlook really so hard to use that 60 people a month are signed up for training on how to schedule meetings and set up personal folders? I’ve been using Outlook since I got my first “real” job in the summer of 2000… Not like this is exactly a new piece of software we’re dealing with here. Sure, it’s been updated a touch now and then, but it’s still the same old Outlook that it has always been.

I guess the real question in my mind isn’t so much why that many people are signed up for training as it is how someone gets to be a 40-something year old career bureaucrat without knowing how to use email?

 

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of previously de-published blogs appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

My generation…

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One of the most shocking moments of my early career was realizing the level of discomfort most of my fellow employees felt when dealing with issues of technology. On the outside, I made the (unfortunate) assumption that government was full of code breakers, supercomputers sending men to the moon, and software that could track anyone, anywhere. I suppose those tasty bits of tech may exist somewhere, but the most advanced piece of hardware that anyone in my agency has is their Blackberry (already two or three generations out of date). It’s fair to say I was shocked and appalled at the number of people in government who just don’t get the role technology is going to play over the coming decades.

We’re in the leading edge of that future now. Utilities like Facebook and Twitter may have a toy-like simplicity – I’ve heard my own leaders dismiss them as “for the kids” and nothing more than a drain on productivity – but as more traffic is driven to the web, as electronic communication in its many forms continues its rise, the fact is that this is going to largely be the way people communicate in the future. Don’t believe me? When was the last time you received an actual letter from someone under 40?

The age of instant communication and access to the sum total of all human knowledge is going to level the bureaucracy, whether the bureaucracy accepts it or not. It’s happening already – those with a little bit of savvy are using basic tools like Dropbox, Google Chat, or SharePoint to circumvent the cumbersome “authorized” communications channels that stovepipe information to “collaborate in a matrixed environment.” Instead of sending a request for information up the chain-of-command and waiting for the answer to come back down from on high, we’re reaching out directly to the person with the information we need. That person may sit a few desks away or not even be on the same continent. The beauty of the age is that location doesn’t matter. The future is going to look like the cloud, not like a hierarchical org chart.

There’s more information stored electronically than we could ever hope to archive in the biggest file room. Electrons and knowing how to use them are what’s going to be left when we as an organization realize that the old forms are no longer viable. Information has always been power. Managing and controlling the flow of electronic information is going to be the “institutional knowledge” of our time. I don’t think command-and-control model of management will ever go away, this is government after all, but we few, we happy few who know how to make the electrons hum are going to be the voices of power behind that throne… if only because the king doesn’t know how to turn on his computer.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

An educated man…

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A dear friend recently gave me a book, The Marks of an Educated Man. The somewhat weighty text, penned by Albert Wiggam, and originally published in 1925 is a remarkable lesson in the fine art of being a man’s man in 1920s style. And lets be honest, when it’s written by a man named Wiggam, it has to be good.

Select chapter titles are:
• You Can’t Sell Him Magic (Jeff’s translation: Nothing good is easy)
• He Links Himself with a Great Cause (Jeff’s translation: To the greater glory of the German people)
• He Builds an Ambition Picture to Fit His Abilities (Jeff’s translation: Accept that some people are just stupid – but even they can dig ditches)
• He Always Tries to Feel the Emotions He Ought to Feel (Jeff’s translation: He’ll only show approved emotions like anger, lust, etc.)
• He Keeps Busy at His Highest Natural Level in Order to be Happy, Useful and Good (Jeff’s translation: Lack of productivity is un-American, so get a real job you useless hippy dipshit)
• He Cultivates the Love of the Beautiful (Jeff’s translation: Hurray boobies!!!)

And my personal favorite: He Knows that Popular Notions are Always Wrong.

It just doesn’t get any better than that, folks. I think I would have liked the 20s.