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Thursday, July 29, 2010

Day in the Life - July 29, 2010

Normal start for a Thursday; drive 30 minutes from my house to the Skytrain, ride the Skytrain for 30 minutes to Science World station, and then walk along the False Creek seawall (behind the Athlete's Village, under the Cambie St bridge, to Leg-in-Boot & the marina) and up the hill to my office at VGH to start the day.

During my walk I check my Blackberry for any urgent e-mails and notice I've continued to get messages once an hour from our pilot remote temperature sensor project indicating that a data closet has been at 34-35 C all night. Certainly not ideal, but shows that the pilot project is working excellently and that we have the objective information we need to bring to the facilities team to find a solution.

On the plus side, that's really the only email of significance so far today; that'll change but at least there's no emergencies this morning.

A review of my calendar and to-do list has me getting focused for the day ahead, and it's only just after 07:30.

Next thing to be working on is the Incident Management Working Group documentation; I need to review this in advance of the meeting I'll be attending with that working group on UBC campus later this morning. That also means I'll need to plan my time so I have the 30 minutes in advance to catch the shuttle from VGH to UBC. But for now, heads-down in to the documentation to make sure I'm ready. Although undoubtedly there'll be some other distractions before I walk to the shuttle...

Got to campus, attending the meeting, came out with progress and results; feeling good about that one. Shuttled back to my office and got heads-down into some paper-work that needed my attention. Got through that, and moved on to catching up with some of my team working nearby to find out what they are up-to today.

Back to the office, fielded some vendor phone calls, and got back to work reviewing documentation prepared by the team, provided feedback to senior management on other initiatives, and getting my team's incident & project management stats up-to-date.

Wrapped the day with a meeting with the Health Authorities to discuss some network gear status and developed a short action plan to deal with that, and then headed back to the skytrain for the trek home. Along the way home picked up more email on the blackberry and reviewed more network & process documentation.

And that's an average day - well, a little lighter on meetings than a truly average day, but pretty close!

In retrospect on the day, it's good to look at how I used my time, and determine how/where I can use it more wisely moving forward. I also have been reviewing my communications and trying to see where I can improve those. Always room for improvement, always lots to learn.