Monday, 8 September 2008

This was my first day back at the office after a week’s leave and I returned to a very quiet office as so many staff are unwell, on leave or at external meetings. Apart from myself there were only three other members of staff in. One of these was Syed Ahmed, our Community Accountant, arriving for his first day at work and he seems very intelligent and personable.

Inevitably I spent most of the day reading through e-mails and achieving little more than sorting out the wheat from the chaff. I dread to think how many of my e-mails now carry little red flags to tell me they need answers, responses or consideration. I just checked and it's 179. Time management manuals say “only open an e-mail once” (like they used to say “only touch a piece of paper once”). But on returning from a week’s absence I first need to skim read every e-mail to see whether any great crisis has arisen and to halve the size of the problem by deleting the 200-odd spam mails that my filters failed to detect. This approach also serves the useful purpose of providing an almost sub-conscious overview or summary of some of the week’s developments. It is also the case that few e-mails stand alone (requests are withdrawn, meeting dates changed, and priorities transformed) so reading one e-mail in isolation rarely makes sense.

By late afternoon I was sufficiently up to speed to concentrate on my next priority: preparing for Wednesday’s trustees meeting and AGM. For the AGM we have received seven nominations for five vacant positions and Maria Waszkis organised a ballot paper for the necessary vote. Everything else seems well in hand for the AGM.

For our trustees meeting, however, I need to prepare an agenda and write a couple of short papers and prepare the financial report. These tasks all took far longer than I expected - particularly the finance report as I first needed to process the final audit journals. I finally left the office about 11:00 pm.

It’s nice to be back.