Tag: productivity

Prioritization in Support: Tickets, Slack, issues, and more

I mentioned in my GitLab reflection that prioritization has been quite different working in Support compared to other previous work I’ve done. In most of my previous work, I’ve had to take “desk shifts” but those are discreet where you’re focused on providing customer service during that period of time and you can focus on other things the rest of the time.

In Support, we have to constantly balance all the different work that we have, especially in helping to ensure that tickets are responded to within the Service Level Agreement (SLA).

It doesn’t always happen, but I ultimately try to reach inbox 0 (with read-only items possibly left), and GitLab to-do 0 by the end of the every week. People often ask me how I manage to do that, so hopefully this provides a bit of insight. Continue reading “Prioritization in Support: Tickets, Slack, issues, and more”

Reviewing and Improving Workflow and Productivity: Methods and Tools

Most of our libraries and organizations have been around for numerous years, sometimes hundreds. Often that means many processes are created, changed as needed, and left in place long past their due date. Unfortunately, that means we are frequently working inefficiently, following old processes or cobbled together workflows.

The first part of the presentation will suggest methods for understanding and reviewing workflow. In the second half, we will take a look at various simple and lightweight tools and ways to use them to make work more efficient, especially in processing text, files, and data in batches.

Originally titled Tools, Tips, and Tricks to Making Work More Efficient. This webinar was presented for Florida Library Webinars on March 8, 2017. https://floridalibrarywebinars.org/events/16003/ Continue reading “Reviewing and Improving Workflow and Productivity: Methods and Tools”

Attempting to Prevent the Feeling of Unproductiveness Even When We Are Productive

This piece was originally published on February 15, 2017 as part of the The Human in the Machine publication project.

It seems it is not uncommon to finish a full day of work and feel completely unproductive. Sometimes I wonder if that’s simply a symptom of how we define what’s “productive”. Continue reading “Attempting to Prevent the Feeling of Unproductiveness Even When We Are Productive”