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I thought I was caught unawares about mentoring some high school students, when I found out two weeks ago I’d been signed up and they’d be coming mid-June. Well, surprise again! One of them is actually coming this Monday, and I just found out today.

Good thing I’ve already been thinking about what they’re going to be doing, so I’m not completely unprepared! One more good reason for planning things ahead.

I just found out a few days ago that I’ve been signed up to mentor 2 high school students this summer. Without being asked! I am kind of worried since I’m already spread pretty thin on the proposal I’m working. But, I am actually really psyched about it too. I think mentoring will be very rewarding, and not too scary considering I’m about 10 years older than these kids… I suddenly feel old :-)

I’ve been back at work for about 2.5 months now, and the last few weeks were super busy! I’ve only been working half time but I feel like I’ve been making major contributions to the proposal I’m working on. I’ve been named Deputy Proposal Manager, so at least I’m getting some recognition! My workplace is getting quite a deal since I’m much more efficient with my time now than when I was working full time, plus I end up putting in a few hours off the clock…

For a couple months, while I am on maternity leave and I have other things to focus on!

And understandably so – I’m having a baby! For now I’ll be content if I can meet all my current commitments and wrap things up before I go on maternity leave in two weeks.

I just hope that by the time I’m planning to come back from maternity leave, I’ll be ready to find work engaging again. I suspect that it will be hard at first…

I recently found out that Remember the Milk, an online to-do list tracker, has a Firefox plug-in to integrate it with Gmail. So, I switched to Remember the Milk for my personal to-do list and added due dates, which I didn’t use on my previous to-do tool. I found it made me somewhat more productive because I tend to leave Gmail open most of the day (and thus, RTM) and my most urgent to-do items stayed at the front of my mind.

But – it meant I started spending more time at work thinking about all of my personal to-do items, which didn’t especially help my work productivity. At least it didn’t significantly hurt it, either.

So, I just decided to put my work to-do list into RTM as well, and to sort my to-do items into lists (i.e. work and home). Now I can set RTM only to show “work” items when I’m at work and “home” items when I’m at home. It’s actually been fairly helpful so far in boosting my productivity over some of the other to-do methods I’ve used in the past.

I imagine I’d get the same effect if I had my to-do list alongside my work email, like in Outlook. But we use Eudora, so that doesn’t work. Besides, I like the interface and it’s nice to be able to access my to-do list from multiple computers. And I can add personal to-do items even when I’m looking at my work to-do items, which helps me get my mind off of personal matters and back to work!

Now that I’m ready to change jobs I need to reflect on things and figure out the best way to learn from my “struggles.”

TO DO:

1. Make a de-briefing list of challenges and proposed solutions from my current job so that when I meet with my boss I have concrete and constructive points to bring up so that we can all learn and move forward.

2. Email the manager some brief bullet points about concerns I want to bring up (mini agenda for the meeting) so that she has a heads up and facility photographs.

I think that now that the summer is coming to a close, I need to sit down and reflect on my strengths and weaknesses as a supervisor so that I can figure out how to learn from it. Or mostly my weaknesses and figure out how to work on them.

1. prioritizing? sometimes i get caught up in the details. i am a details person which is great in some tasks but a lot of days i need to be a big picture person and instead of focusing on little projects i need to figure out how they fit in and how much benefit they will actually provide. i need to ask myself whether or not the energy invested will really pay off and whether the little project is worth it in the first place.

2. this spills into time management. i am really good at making to do lists and choosing priorities, but you know those low priority tasks that get postponed day after day and never really seem to get done unless you deliberately move them to the top of the list? i need to ask myself this: should they really be on the list at all? do they really need to get done? sometimes i try and do too much and i need to make better decisions about what is actually worth my time and energy.

3. i am a pleaser. i try and make everyone happy, and i have learned this year that the more you say yes to and the more you deliver, the more people ask of you. i think learning when to say no or when to decide that something isn’t worth your time (yes, you will make someone happy but is the benefit going to be worth it?) is a skill that comes with experience.

4. sometimes i am reflective. i think this is a good thing in some scenarios, but i like to roll things around in my head and sometimes mull over decisions carefully before i make them. this is hard to do when you are in a dynamic working environment and things are going on around you all of the time. if you don’t have the privacy of your own office how can you take the time to make good decisions in front of others without looking lazy? this is a really hard thing that i have learned this year – making decisions takes time and energy but it appears to other people that you are not doing any work. you know the phrase “oh, managers don’t do anything?” well, now i empathize! just because they are not moving around doesn’t mean the gears are not turning! i ended up just bringing a lot of mental work home with me this year – it is hard to justify contemplating things when you are paid hourly.

5. i can be a real details person, which makes me slightly intolerent of non-details persons. okay, i’ll admit it, i’m anal. and when staff are in charge of numbers and getting reports and forms filled out properly and putting the right dates on things, i get frustrated. is it worth my time to call them out on it? should i be more tolerant? am i too uptight? should i let more things slide? i let a lot of things slide this year – i guess i am working on “choose my battles” – because if i picked on every little detail it would be a full time job. but again i need to learn when to let things bother me and when to just let them go. and i need to working on learning to trust people – sometimes i feel the need to double-check everything!!! but at the same time, when i do, i find tons of mistakes!!! i guess this goes back to needing to be more of a “big picture” person – i need to realize when the details are going to have a big impact and when they aren’t. as hard as it is to let the little things slide, sometimes being a perfectionist can be inefficient.

Since I’m cutting back to half time in a few weeks, I’ve been wrapping up a few things and getting ready to pass them on to other people. In a way it’s nice, but after putting lots of hard work into something, it can be hard to hand it off to someone else.

One thing in particular that has been hard for me: I’ve been leading a team of about 7 people in preparation for a proposal, but I’ve now given up that role.

I was originally the appropriate choice for team leader, but eventually the focus of the team changed. I was still expected to carry on despite my comparative lack of experience in the area, and I’d like to think I did a pretty good job (I put a lot of effort into it!) It was both stressful and rewarding.

However, certain other folks at my company felt my continued leadership of the team would be inappropriate. (I agree that the proposal will be better with more experienced leadership.) So, I’ve been replaced. At least it was a graceful transition – there’s no implication that I performed inadequately. Plus I have the outward excuse of my pregnancy & reduced time availability which helps me save face. But still, it hurts after all the effort I’ve put in.

The upside is, the new team leader has been impressed with my efforts so far, seems to respect my opinion greatly, and still wants me to be an integral part of the team. So, I still have some “authority” with the team, without the stress of as much responsibility.

Last week was super-busy preparing for an all-day review, and this week was super-busy dealing with the aftermath and another review of sorts.

I managed to get through the week by having a list of all my tasks on my cubicle’s whiteboard, listed by day (and in fact, the rough order I expected to work on them). I crossed off each thing as I did it. It was a good feeling, and I got a lot done.

I think part of my recent problem with motivation happens when I’m not sure exactly what I need to do next. My job can be nebulous like that sometimes. I didn’t have that particular problem this week, and I had plenty of motivation. But unfortunately the volume and urgency of the work made me a little depressed mid-week. It’s hard to find a good balance.