Time Keeps on Slippin' (Slippin', Slippin')

Happy Saturday, y'all! Welcome to the weekend! 🎉🥳

By the way, there's no TL;DR. I suffer from diarrhea of the keyboard. ⌨ Even my text messages are novellas. 📚 The beauty of reading the written word, however, is that you can take a break and go do something else, 🚚 then come back and pick up where you left off (And I won't know, because I can't see you... or can I? 😉) 

Here we are at the end of the last week of 2023. In just 2 days it'll be 2024. It seems like only a few weeks ago we were at the beginning of 2023! 

I've had some time to think about time over the past few days. Mostly, I've thought about how it flies by, and how it seems like there's never enough of it to get everything done that I need to do. I've also been frustrated when something I feel shouldn't take long at all ends up sucking up much more time than I anticipated. 

I've been blessed for the past 4 years to have a remote job that allows me to work from home. It's nothing glamorous or prestigious (or illegal), and the pay could be a lot better, but it's the type of work that's perfect for my introverted self. 😄 That being said, it's not all sunshine and roses and lazy days on the couch. It's work, and sometimes it gets to be a drag. 

Over the past 2 weeks, our processes and procedures got a major overhaul, and it's been... "interesting", to put it mildly. 😄 Along with those changes, I was promoted to a "senior" position which came with a 7% pay raise (80 cents an hour more, but putting it as a percentage makes it look like a lot 😉), a shiny new title (Senior Quality Auditor 📛), and a truckload of new responsibilities (no comment 😶). I'm very happy that my hard work has been recognized. I earned the promotion, the pay raise, and yes, even the truckload of responsibilities. 

The adjustment to all these changes has been more difficult than I expected, and I admit, I stumbled hard out of the gate. Time management has always been a struggle for me, which I've discovered is fairly common in people with ADHD. The biggest contributor to my poor time management is ✨The Side Quest✨ (which almost caught me just now), which I will get to in another post. 

Anyway, where was I? 🤔 Oh, yeah! Tripping over my expectations and falling on my face. Right. So yeah, these new processes and procedures have necessarily led to reassigning tasks and reorganizing timelines and deadlines. Before my promotion, when I was just a regular Quality Auditor, one of my responsibilities was to write a weekly document that went out to my assigned market's people (who are in India and speak and read Hindi. I'm in Louisiana and speak English-ish). The document isn't overly long, but it's more complex to put together than it looks. With the reorganization and promotion, I'm now responsible for writing a weekly document for each of 15 markets (with 10 different languages among them). 💀 A quick note about languages - The documents I write are in English for all the markets, but there are items from each of those 10 foreign (to me) language markets that I have to translate for my understanding. Google Translate and I are like this 🤞.

Now that I've given the super-summarized (no, really) background info, here's where things went sideways: when I was assigned to write all the documents, I thought, "Ehh. Yeah, it's more work, but I won't have to do this other thing that took up a lot of my time, so it should be super easy; barely an inconvenience!" Oh, ho, ho, was I mistaken about that! 😬  

I failed to do the math and extrapolate the results, so I was not prepared (so not prepared) when it came time to do the work and have it ready by the deadline. You see, I knew it took me an average of 1.5 hours to write my one document. What I didn't take into account was that it would most likely take at least that amount of time to write each of 15 documents (which calculates to 22.5 hours), and I have other responsibilities besides that (which I also failed to take into account). 

I did not meet the deadline that first week. I didn't even get all the documents written, in addition to other tasks that didn't get done. I faceplanted into a pile of unmet expectations. 😑  Thankfully, our management is very understanding, and knew that things wouldn't go very smoothly at first. 

This week, the second week, I thought I had it all figured out, but I found myself scrambling to finish my tasks again. At least this week I got all my documents written. They were late (again), but I covered all the markets this time (and management was still very understanding). It wasn't until I clocked out and looked at my time sheet that it occurred to me to "do the math". It was certainly an eye-opener! 

Now that I have a baseline number to work with, I need to make a real plan. I'll be spending time over the weekend working on that so I can start the new year with realistic expectations (New year, new me!). 🙏

Be blessed, and be a blessing! 😊

Megan

Coming Soon: "How'd I end up here, and how do I get back? (✨The Side Quest✨)"