(In)Flexible Scheduling
This past week, I’ve been having to work a very odd schedule because my babysitter took a week of vacation. I’m very fortunate that my supervisor and co-workers have all been very accommodating. I’ve been able to put in most of my time this week before everyone else gets into work, and the time I did have a meeting, my coworkers were able to tolerate the presence of my seven-year-old while we discussed some of that ‘boring engineering stuff’. This flexibility also extends to my coworkers. One recently went through the illness and death of a parent. He had to take time off on a regular basis to bring his mother to various doctor visits and then more extended leave when she passed away. Another coworker lives on a farm and regularly comes in and leaves early to take care of work at home. Over the years, I’ve known quite a…
Keeping Track of Work – Gantt Charts
Last week I talked about keeping track of your work in lab notebooks. There were some great comments on alternative systems, such as PowerPoint slide decks, simple memory, README files or digital scripts, or cataloged data in folders on the laptop. So that’s all well and good for writing down what you do – but how about keeping track of WHEN you need to do things, as well as what you’ve done? For scheduling meetings and events, I still like using a paper calendar. But I think I’m in the minority in that regard – most of my colleagues use Outlook, or Google Calendar, or some other online system. I’ve tried to go online (as with so many things these days, to the cloud!), but it’s just not my preference. I’ve used Tungle with classmates before, which is a group calendar that can coordinate between lots of different online calendaring…
Engineering SOs
I’m quickly learning the merits of downtime. Like many engineers out there, I’m always active. I feel lazy if I don’t get something done in a day, no matter how trivial. I am driven by progress and affecting my external environment. I like that I can make stuff, break stuff, create stuff and destroy stuff. However, significant others (SOs) often disagree that this should consume the majority of an engineer’s time. I’ve been encountering this recently and couldn’t agree more. While my work schedule has exceedingly regular hours (and light by some standards of engineering positions), my extracurriculars such as this website, a radio show, a design contest, a consulting business and a couple other things sprinkled in there seem to take up the majority of my remaining time. So I put myself in the same bin as people that are overworked, with long hours and stressful workdays (I had…