Workflow is a time sensitive thing. We have delivery dates for the work we do and part of our job is to anticipate potential time-sucking issues that may impact a timely delivery.

I am getting pretty good at balancing my daily forays into Social Media, but we all have other areas that need attention.

  • Family (my increased time with my mom needs to be figured into the equation)
  • Exercise (oh, brother, this is high on my list of things I don’t get around to – do my weekly tap classes count?)
  • Home and Garden (my yard is a MESS – my counters are getting mightly cluttered – and there is a leak in the big bathroom that needs to be attended to – not to mention I am stripping an old door for a remodel project)
  • Volunteering (my work with MCA-I has increased recently due to some major changes in the association requiring more time as webmaster, singing in the church choir is fun and challenging – and there is a play I’d like to audition for next month)
  • Personal Business (refinancing too a huge toll on my time this fall)
  • Marketing (just started up my quarterly enewsletter again after more than a year in hiatus)
  • Bookkeeping
  • General attention to email (how is it possible that there are still 200 emails in my In Box with all the sorting and filing I did this morning?)
  • Actual Work

These are all things that we can generally anticipate. The things we can’t plan for are the little burps when your software (and/or hardware) doesn’t work the way it should.

Suddenly your delivery schedule looms when you can’t get your software to do what it is supposed to do. Is it the software? Is it your computer? Is it a networking thing? With each question comes more questions – more time spent – more time passing as the deadlines grow closer.

Somehow it manages to work itself out in most cases – especially if you have a backup plan – which is something that probably  needs to be on that first list of things to do!

I have multiple recording options if one fails, and have rarely, if ever actually missed a deadline, but it sure does put a kink in the workflow when something isn’t working the way you expected it to work.