Daily Life: Paperwork, Teleconferences and Gravity

I am feeling a little guilty that I didn't do anything over the weekend. I kept it a quiet weekend, stayed close to home, and other than some incidental errands the only thing I really did over the weekend was go out to the movie.

I knew it was the right choice this morning when I woke up. I was bright-eyed and bushy tailed and fairly leapt out of my bed. There was definitely a spring in my step as I started the day.

If I were to describe my mood today it would be "centered and slightly introspective". There is a sense of the deliberate in my mood today, as if I were walking on uneven ground and carefully placing one foot after the other. Not in the sense that my footing is uncertain, but in the sense that each step is very certain. I am not sure that analogy makes any sense, but I am sticking to it for now.

I was looking at my work calendar today and I noticed that I currently have 10 hours worth of meetings on the books this week. That is an extremely light meeting load, so I am taking that as a portent of good fortune.

A long time ago, when I was a child, my father was the foreman of a construction company in Rapid City, SD. I can remember going to pick him up from work and being fascinated by his office. He had an average sized office that had a round window. Inside the office was his desk (covered with paperwork), a big table (covered with blue prints) and assorted shelves and file cabinets.

In later years I learned that there is far more to being a construction foreman than paperwork, but at the time I was terribly impressed and I remember thinking "that is what I want to do when I grow up - sit in an office and do paperwork". I had other dreams and visions of what I wanted to do when I grew up as I grew up (most folks do I think), and I often refer to the last ten plus years of my life as my "accidental career".

The advent of the personal computer of course mostly transformed paperwork into the realm of electronic media, but paperwork is still paperwork, whether or not it involves paper. If you were to ask me what I do for a living - the functional aspects of it - I do two things - I go to meetings and I do paperwork.

It all centers back on the task of managing people and projects, but if you were to sit in my office with me you would notice two things that are prominent. I am almost always reading or writing something, and I am quite often on the telephone - either in an individual call or in a teleconference. My day consists almost entirely of two very basic things - writing and talking.

The biggest challenge in my day is dealing with the wide diversity of personalities that make a big corporation move. It is navigating my way through a hundred complex relationships, rich in history and detail, and finding two distinct points and connecting them. I think there is a secret that good managers know and bad managers never truly grasp. Success or failure in any organizational task relies on people, and a managers true job is managing people. All the rest of it is just paperwork, teleconferences and gravity.