I had three straight hours of meetings today. That simply should not happen. I didn’t schedule any of them. Two hours of them were three standard meetings that happen on regular cadences. Thankfully, they don’t often fall on the same day. The third hour was a product webinar that occurs mostly monthly but moves around to accommodate other events. Today, it was from noon to one. I don’t believe in scheduling meetings during the lunch hour, or what is the lunch hour for most folks in the company. On days that have hours and hours of meetings, I end up exhausted but feeling that I’ve accomplished nothing.
One of the people who works with our media partners set up a task for me in Jira a few days ago. It was assigned to the wrong person, so it didn’t appear on my board. I had a vague memory of her saying she needed something done, so this morning I ran a search for issues she had created. There was the little bugger! And, of course, it needed to be done today.
The task was to style our polling widget to match a new publisher’s site. That should have been simple. Of course, something wasn’t working correctly. And our “widget guy” (he was much more than that!) was laid off back in October. I finally gave in and asked one of our developers for help. He compared what was happening on the site with the CSS I had entered and verified that styles were coming from somewhere else and overriding my work. Then, it was time for my biweekly one-on-one with my manager, so I left that developer to keep looking (he was as committed as I was by then). I mentioned the struggle to my manager, who dove in. He finally spotted the issue! I was able to style the widget with a workaround. The publisher is happy. Yay!
I did get other things done today, it just didn’t feel like there was enough of it. There are always more tasks than there are hours in which to accomplish them.
I finished some good books, but I haven’t been feeling like writing reviews. I need to get back to reading Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution for the book club at work. It’s a long one! I normally listen to non-fiction in the car, but I don’t drive very often since I work from home. Maybe I can get used to listening while I do needlework.
I’m still keeping up my French study via Duolingo and Babbel, but to really learn something new every day takes a decent chunk of time. Duo says I’m at the high B1 level of the CEFR, but I have my doubts. Duolingo sucks for grammar, but Babbel is strong in that. Part of the problem is that my auditory processing delay is much more noticeable when I’m listening to a French speaker than it is with an English speaker!
Oh, well. I’m just learning for fun.
Off to get ready for tomorrow!