planning

I've been in planning mode today. For the last couple of weeks I've been burning out at work participating in this corporate project. We're in product design mode right now so it's weeks of 8-10 hour days sitting in a meeting room and hashing out interfaces and definitions. I'm literally wiped by the end of week and feel like I can't bear anymore hours with the programmers. Being on the core project team has given me some good experiences in the world of project management but as of the end of last week I spoke to a couple of my managers and requested to be taken out of the design sessions. I feel that my time there is wasted as I'm not an SME and can't actively contribute. It's getting to the point where I feel like it's endless hours of sitting in a dark room watching the vendor go over fields on a screen and listening to people debate. Sometimes the debates are ridiculous as people get trapped with tunnel vision and circular thinking. This equates to multiple instances where I've fallen asleep or have to duck out for bio-breaks just so that I can splash some water on my face to wakeup. Programming is a VERY dry topic. Deeming this as not very good use of my time, the project manager agreed to relieve me of the next series of sessions. Getting out of the sessions, I was given the opportunity to do some mini-projects. Happily I accepted a BCIT Computing Career Fair event from the Education Department. :-) Finally...Social Club type of work in my "real" day-to-day job. :-) Excited to be doing something that I truly enjoy, I happily met with 4 managers on Friday and was given some information on what they wanted out of this event. The good thing is that I got to build my own "team" (with some guidelines) and can control content, presentation, etc. The team is now complete (thinking of people to be on the team was fun as I wanted to represent all "looks" of IT). I'm excited about getting to hang out at the BCIT to promote our company and work with an outgoing and diverse team.

Feeling like it was going to be a productive morning. I took a break from the BCIT stuff and did some Social Club stuff. I finished confirming with the Burnaby School Board for booking the dodgeball tournament for April 6th. I find the process for booking gyms at an elementary school or highschool to be cumbersome. The system is inefficient. The next couple of months will be busy as I'll be hosting a couple of events for the Social Club. :-) Lol - I've always wanted to be a bunny...now my mascot dreams will be realized! Hahaa...just kidding...it's my turn put on a hot/furry animal outfit for the Children's Easter Egg Hunt in March. In the midst of setting up these events and talking to vendors, I'm also focused on rebranding the Club so that it aligns to the new corporate marketing strategy. Lol - I've got ideas but not enough hours in the day to look into them, so some of the Social Club board of executives have a been delegated tasks. I think I'm just going to run for the President position in the Club this year as I already manage 80% of operations/events.

As the most visible Director for the Club, I'm sent/forwarded A LOT of vendor pamphlets/packages...aka junk. Most of the time I look at the stuff once and hand it over to Karen who is good with keeping track of our vendor information. I was staring at the stack of lower mainland golf course packages I got this month when I thought about my own wedding planning. I picked up one of the folders (for Redwoods Golf Course in Langley) because it had a bride on the cover so it sparked my interest. I looked at the maps, menus, pricing, etc and pondered about where I'd want to have my wedding. Getting distracted from "real" work, I went to my MS Outlook program and exported my contact list to an Excel format so that I can later on import it into Excel to populate the guest list. As you can see I'm easily distracted if I don't focus myself. After that it was back to doing "real" work and not playing around with planning.

Tonight I started my first "planning" type activity for the wedding. I went downstairs and dragged up a box of wedding magazines from the basement (my house had become a reservoir for wedding magazines, etc from all the weddings Kim Anh and I have been a part of over the years). I flipped through a couple of magazines, surfed on the web to see when the next wedding show would be, pondered about booking tickets but couldn't make the commitment so set the information in my daily planner for later. I also created my budget spreadsheet. I think I got more enjoyment from creating the pivot tables and formulas then thinking about what the spreadsheet will be used for. Lol - I'm such a geek! There are a couple of planners in the box but I prefer electronic versions of things (much easier to transport the info on my USB stick). I'm debating if I want to go to a wedding exhibit as they're all the same and we haven't really decided if we're getting married in 2008 or 2009. Oh well - doesn't hurt to have things planned/prepared early.