Catching Up During Outage

In work terms, it is an unexpected break. In management terms, it would be called 'loss of productivity'. In technical terms, the email and chat servers are down. Whatever be the case, it is a welcome break. While others are taking their mandatory coffee break secretly thanking the culprit who could have caused this outage, I am sitting at my desk trying to make the most of it. And making the most of it means writing this blog whilst contributing my two cents worth to a Management Paper my friend (a Prof) is authoring. Since I ran out of ideas for the Paper a full 3.5 seconds after opening MS-Word (faster than Porsche which take 4.9s for reaching 0-60), I have switched full time to write this post. This way, I can keep those nervous fingers of mine busy by playing the devil’s trill on the keyboard while still managing to meet the deadlines of the projects I’ve got myself knowingly and unknowingly involved into.

Speaking of which, in the past few months, I've been trying to do several things (I’ll call them projects for the lack of a better term) at once but nothing in particular which makes me feel that I have a distinct lack of focus and that I am going nowhere in particular. However, if I take the sum of the parts, somewhere I see some takeaway from all of them. Big or small, I don’t know. Also, in the process, I have realized (or learnt the hard way) that working on different projects simultaneously requires a certain amount of discipline and time management and a lot of panache. Otherwise everything can be thrown off track. And due to this accidental discovery, I now understand and appreciate that people who wear multiple hats and maintain the discipline to finish them on time really deserve to be the winners they are. This is also one of the reasons why I have stopped criticizing people who do a zillion things (such as acting, promoting, regularly appearing on Page 3, turning up at charity events, working out to stay fit, making up and breaking up, etc.) in a day and still feel fresh to party by sundown.

But since I am not so disciplined and have overshot my deadlines, I am sitting here instead of joining the watercooler gossip. It is an unjustifiable compromise since there is no bigger fun than catching up on news about the office’s regular Page 3 people and learning juicy tidbits about them (which you can always use to your advantage later on). Well, I will have to wait for the next outage. Otherwise, there is no way that I can finish giving inputs to the Paper I talked about earlier, work on a key project that’s been collecting dust on my desk for a while, study for an exam, complete an assignment for my class within the next 24 hours and most importantly, also read a book on Investment Banking (just for the heck of it). And these projects are somehow teaching me to make sure that I make use of every minute (I haven’t managed to take control of the seconds yet) I have at my disposal so that at the end of the day, I don’t end up sitting at my desk while the hypothetical clock tower strikes seven. Or eight. Or nine. Or later. It’s going to be a tough one but I’m hoping I will finish within a reasonable time provided I skip these unforeseen breaks. Meanwhile, looks like the email’s coughing back to life. So, its time to get back to work now. The Paper will have to wait and so do the rest of the projects. Till that time, my congratulations to all you great people who have mastered the elegant art of time management.