I have gotten lazy…

I think, cross my fingers, that the second round of budgeting is over but I learned something: I think I may have gotten lazy over the years. My boss can work long hours for days on end, which is intimidating and a bit worrisome. Do people now expect you to pull multiple days of working until 2:30 am or later and working all weekend? I need sleep and I find I need to refresh by doing different things, so I’m a bit concerned.

Over the years I’ve used automation to help me get work done faster and more accurately. The ability to get more things done and sooner means I have time to try to create things that no one else is creating. In my last position, once I figured out how to automate the reporting process (essentially cutting down from 8+ hours to around 1 hour), I went on to create a Project Metric system that could show me at a glance all of the salient financial qualities about a project or a group of projects. It was the only “dashboard” of its kind in the company. A few years later, the company rolled out something similar. I couldn’t have done this if I hadn’t automated some aspects of my other duties to leave me time and energy to dream up this Project Metric.

But this latest project showed that I do not have the stamina for 14, 16 hour days. I tried to help out by developing tools to aid us in the analysis or in the collecting of actuals or in the consolidating budgets. But it still wasn’t enough.

I really need to work on doing macros on the fly.

[Off the cuff comments on picture: drawings, or intricate doodling in this case, cannot be automated! I would have posted sooner in the day but doing this “doodle” actually took me a couple of hours. I had to do various versions before I found one that I sort of / kind of liked.]