Work – 23rd Feb

Todays work followed on from last weeks. I continued with the spreadsheet that I had planned and started the week before. I found my planningand notes were effective in reminding me of what I needed to do on this, and the task continued smoothly. Since I didn’t have anything to occupy me after I finished the sheet I emailed J asking if she had anything else for me. In the end G passed me a set of figures to do some data entry – somthing I’m not always keen on doing. Since I could combine this with revising the drafts I was sending to K it wasn’t too bad. My spreadsheet continued to be refined; K is very direct and consise in her instructions so it is usually a simple matter to change something. We also sped up the process by using the shared drive to access the same file and make notes on it. Editting a document – whether it is a spreadsheet, word document or something else – is always made up of lots of little tasks. There isn’t generally anything that takes a long time. In this case I did feel that I had to click on every macro-programmed button in the document to ensure that I had written the correct code. User testing is something that I have forgotten in the past and it can make things un-usable. It did concern me that I was going to release this project without having any ‘end-user testing’ (K doesn’t count as she was involved in planning the project). My comfort was that I had written a framework which was to be filled by other people. They will hopefully identify and bugs and report them back to K who can ask me to fix them. This does not represent best practise; in the circumstances and given that I hadn’t written particularly complex code it would be fine. The process of writing this sheet involved a lot of buttons used to hide and display portions of the sheet. This took a lot of time and systematic working to implement. I was somewhat intimidated by the scale of the work and the necessary attention to detail, but in the event I found it surprisingly easy. With the perpective of a little time it seems that I was more afraid than I needed to be and that my capacity to do detailed, painstaking work is in fact above average. This does contrast with my lack of attention to detail in my personal life; I can often seem slapdash, clumsy and forgetfull. It seems that I can pay attention to a specific task or item whilst forgetting the world around me, or remember the world and forget the detail. Balancing this tendency is something I am getting better at, but I can still improve. My in-between task was entering meter readings into a database. This is tedious work which nobody wants to do. G (who asked me to do it) is aware of this and asked me whether I minded, and it did give me something to do whilst K went through the spreadsheet so it wasn’t too bad. Since the other people in my office were leaving I put music on (via headphones) to keep me interested. I know that I can keep my interest in a boring task much better if I have some music playing in the background – its quite antisocial though and some people think its rude. I tend not to have any music if there are other people in the room – it doesn’t seem worth annoying people over. On balance this seems a sensible decision, but is it just making my work worse so that they don’t become offended? It all probably depends on circumstances; the temperaments of the people concerned and their strength of feeling. Being selfish occasionally is important – subsuming your desires to the wishes of the group can only be done for so long before it becomes constraining. ON the other hand managing to keep an active social life is about subsuming the things you want to do into activities that everyone will want to do. Just like everything else, its a delicate balancing act.