I'm getting better known here at the Argonut café. I'm not sure that's a good thing. I rather object to people interrupting my work day with requests to do time-wasting things like emailing someone 60 files because she's working at home and forgot to take a CD with her. Or getting IMs asking me to walk over and ask someone something, when the person could just as easily have IMd the person they wanted to talk to. Or getting more IMs asking if Gidget is in the office, from people too lazy to walk the 30 steps to her desk to see for themselves or, even simpler, pick up the phone and dial her extension.
On the good news (or at least "fun things") side of the equation, I've now been here for long enough that I'm moving past the daily tasks (i.e., "work") and onto more strategic (i.e., "dinking around") thinking.
This morning I wrote a 4 page document describing the three major online marketing programs we work with, identifying features unique to each of them and describing what we use them for. No one asked me for it and no one will ever care, but I always write documents because they organize my thoughts.
Mind you, I don't use all of those features. Some of them are new, some of them I haven't had time to experiment with yet, and some of them I didn’t know existed before I went poking around today. But I will be using them. One of the advantages of sitting down and writing up things you don't know about is that you're forced to learn about them. There are some fairly cool (if time-consuming) tools that I plan to play with work on over the next month. And there are other things, things I did because Gidget said to do them and to do them that way--now I'm thinking some of them might not be getting the results we want.
Certifications are available for some of the programs we use and I'm rapidly qualifying.
(Yes! I'm almost certifiable!)
Before I get sidetracked, I need to figure out how to document what I'm doing. I'm big on documentation, of course. I mean, first, sitting around and writing about stuff aimlessly, and, second, colored charts! (Also I gotta track what I do so if I break it I can fix it.)
I've been holding off on some tools previously available because I wanted to wait until the Next Level Plan was approved and we were getting things underway. Some of what I've found has the potential to significantly improve our marketing tracking and our traffic. I wanted implementation of those things to be something we could brag about in the NLP Results So Far reports.
That's not some kind of spitefulness. I've already made a lot of changes and improvements in the last four months and then, in the last month, I've had to carve out 25% of my time to do the ArgonutNews and all of the associated whatnot around it.
It's a mistake to be too productive, especially when you've been piled with extra work that's supposedly temporary. Do too good at coping and management will immediately decide to make the temporary assignment permanent.
Speaking of the 'NutNews, though, I've convinced Vela, my own personal ChaosManager, that paying a modest fee to use an email design-and-bulk-send service is a good idea. I did some research the other day (I love this job) and picked out the one I liked. They offer a free trial, so I'll have to spend some time messing around with it (so sad) over the next week.
Wow, that was boring and All About Me.
As a reward for reading through all of that (or at least skimming down the entire entry), I offer Google Trends. Who cares about what interests you today? What is everyone talking about? What's hot, what's spicy, and what's cold and empty? And when does "Whitewater Investigation" not come with the name "Clinton" attached? Check out what's trending.
If that's too complicated, take yourself over to Ask 500 People and respond to a few polls.
If you're just hard up for something to read, anything, well, I usually visit bharatbhasha when I feel that way.