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Week 64 at work

This week I managed to:

  • Agreed our marketing strategy for the remainder of 2014-15
  • Conducted a walk around of Bristol Museum & Art Gallery with Kerrie from Marketing to see what needs improving
  • Reviewed our 2015-2016 public programme which included a looong gantt chart!
  • Interviewed a number of people for our Marketing and Comms Officer maternity cover and made an offer
  • Developed our audience development plan ahead of our 10th October deadline
  • Talking with Suzanna from Westonbirt Arboretum to give advice on an upcoming app project
  • Worked on sprint 2 for our still unannounced project
  • Setup a new email rule to reduce my email distractions
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Bye bye cc email

When I made the leap to my current role I decided to also try and improve my own organisational skills. I was in denial that my inbox isn’t my to-do list and sucks lots of my time. One measure was that I moved to using trello to show my to-do items and help enable collaboration through shared work boards. I also needed to massively improve how I handled email, rather than email slapping me about. I have made small steps on this front but it hasn’t been enough.

Last week I decided that I receive too many messages which I was merely copied in on. So I have just setup a rule in my email client to move all incoming email with me cc’ed straight to a folder I can review at my leisure. The hope is that almost all of that email is for review rather than for me personally (heavy the inbox of a manager in a culture of just in case emails) to action as per David Allen’s getting things done definition of an actionable task.

Lets hope so anyway.

 

 

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Week 63 at work

With everybody back from holiday it was a tough week to just focus on a few important strands of work:

  • Most of the team and I spent a quality Tuesday at the National Museum Wales. We were hosted by John Williams and Co to see how they run their IT, Digital and social media. We left feeling very inspired.
  • Planning hat was donned for our 2015-2018 activity
  • Ran our second secret project meeting which was cool to see how others run projects in an agile manner
  • sat with Isla from Natural Sciences to talk about future projects, social media, 3D scanning and printing, open data and all things positive
  • Had a productive management meeting..
  • Attended a local ‘arts’ audience group meeting to see how we can best work together and show our value
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Week 62 at work

My first full week back since paternity leave and I managed to:

  • Took stock of products for our online shop… two steps forward and one backwards
  • Got invited to speak in November at Going Digital by The Collections Trust
  • Spent time just wandering the galleries to see how people move around our spaces
  • Hit Inbox zero after two weeks off
  • Reviewed applications for a maternity post to fill our Marketing Officer role – writing an application really is a skill many lack
  • Finally got a lesson from Mark about how to use our collection tool called emu which powers all of our records management and includes a front-end to search the online collection
  • Sadly waved goodbye to our Marketing Office Claire Royall who gave nine years to the service
  • held our kick-off for a 12 month project which we’ll be announcing very soon
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Staying in the loop

Our staff and my team are distributed across 7 sites so I think of us as being remote workers rather than co-located. Yet our tools are very much configured for co-location. As with most of the world, email is our primary tool yet it’s very poor for communication on projects, or working with multiple people as unless you CC everyone it’s impossible to stay in the loop.

In order to address the shortcomings of email there are hundreds of tools, often badged as “productivity” tools to carry on where email stops being helpful. At our service i’ve been introducing several tools that allow for groups to post messages, review other messages and make informed decisions by being in the loop with ALL key people.  I have been receiving less out of context email, picked up mistakes or potential issues much earlier and after holiday and paternity leave I’m able to jump straight back in to the mix.

I got started by reading the excellent guides on 43 Folders and Getting Things Done by David Allen

We all know email is only one tool in our toolkit, is it time you explored additional ways and means for yourself and longer term to foster a better working culture?

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Week 61 at work

Due to paternity leave I was only in Friday. I caught up with some of team, email and reviewed all our Basecamp projects – the progress feature makes this super easy.

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Week 58 at work

A significant reduction in emails and meetings means it truly is summer holiday time. Allowing me to:

  • Put out a call for a Marketing and Communication Officer maternity cover post [I’d call it part Content strategist]
  • Finally went on our staff induction tour which was fantastic and led by Ray Barnett.
  • Agreed on our White City exhibition which will run at Bristol Record Office from 7th October
  • Got very close to completing a secret project [better to ask for forgiveness right!]
  • Spent a lot of my work planning activities for the rest of the year. We have finally moved to some better project planning processes and this took up a bunch of the week
  • Agreed our next batch of digitisation work
  • Remembered we’re playing chess not checkers