A dead heat today, between this and the next post…
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John Fitzgerald
A tech, voluntary sector, cycling, sailing, Edinburgh-dwelling quaker shares thoughts and occasional photos.
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Category Archives: work
Clean desk = open mind?
Because of radical changes to our office layout in the past few weeks. all of our team have had to clear their desks and consider their filing habits much more than usual.
I’ve actually found the discipline of keeping a clear desk (by which I mean, empty in-tray, nothing else except phone and computer) has really helped my sense of organisation and productivity. I have the feeling that I can choose my own priorities- that I can choose what is important over what is urgent. I also appreciate having the space to spread out whatever it is I’m currently working on!
That said, I can see how keeping things filed and clearing one’s desk could easily become a substitute for ‘real’ work.
Posted in ideas, information, philosophy, work
Going for gold
Right now I’m working with a client to fine-tune their yellow/orange-coloured logo. We’ve got something we’re happy with on screen, but achieving it on print is quite a bit trickier.
Most of the usual tricks- matching to swatches, speccing a Pantone ink, etc work well for volume printing but are an unlikely prospect with a small local printer.
Also, the yellow/orange shade is a tough one to get right in print.We’ll see which of my range of options work out- we may have to be realistic and choose a shade which is more ‘flexible’.
Early starts and late finishes
I’m off to the FWCC World Triennial in Dublin later today. Even though I’m only away for just over ten days, I’ve had lots of things to tidy up at work. Add a few last-minute things to the list, a few nights out, and packing, and I find I’ve had a really busy week. Let’s hope my energy levels have a little fillip before I get to Dublin!
I’ll be running the official blog, which you can read at fwccworld.blogspot.com. The basic idea of the Triennial is to gather around three hundred Quakers from around the world, and explore a theme together and learn about each other’s different Quaker experience and practices. There are also business sessions where we decide policy, approve budgets and so on, also workshops on specific issues such as peacemaking or prison work.
Posted in work
Time
I’m not someone who feels that time slips away from them- generally speaking, I find I have enough time to get things done.
However, I’m very prone to getting sidetracked early in the morning (like now, when writing this post). It’s like all my creative energy bubbles up and tries to draw me away from cycling into the office…Hopefully one day I’ll be able to stay at home and make use of this creativity as it appears
Backing up…
I’m finally following my wise Dad’s advice and am making a backup. Off to Dublin in a day or two and taking the laptop, so I figured it would be good to back things up.Let’s hope I don’t need it…
Posted in ideas, information, work
Fail to plan, plan to fail
I’m a bit of a fan of the above maxim. I feel much better about getting on with things when I have a clear and reliable system for planning what I’ll be up to. However, this desire to plan, coupled with my general propensity for bits of stationery, has meant I’ve chopped and changed systems quite a few times.
For some time, I lugged around a fairly unwieldy A5 size filofax. I liked the way I could file papers of any size easily, but found to just too big! I also dabbled with electronic PDAs but never really got on with them.
Now working happily with a Personal size filofax- let’s hope it stays the course! Rachel is a bit sceptical and is convinced I might change again soon…
I’m hopeful that I can resist the urge to fiddle and just get on with it.
(For those of you who have been/are fettling with your planner, there’s a world of sites and blogs out there!)
Posted in information, work
To code or not to code…
In a while I’ll be setting up a site to showcase my graphic design work. I like the idea of coding the HTML myself (I’m no whizzkid but could manage it) but this might be a rather time – intensive way of doing it. In fact, hand – coding might be the ultimate in ‘avoiding the real work’, if you know what I mean…
things that might have been otherwise 