How did I get here? Am I right, or am I wrong?

[peterbirks]

I'm not sure when it was that I became part-administrator. I'm reminded of when Steve Bennett and I saw a poster for the Prince tribute band playing then (in 2000), and playing now, at the Boardwalk, Las Vegas, and Steve said, "the guys in that band must have woken up one morning and said to themselves, 'where did it all go wrong'?"

So, here I am at the end of the month, looking at 12, yes, 12, administrative tasks, stapled, like accusatory filings, to the board behind my desk. Of these tasks, six have to be performed daily and another six have to be performed at the end of each month. And, all credit to me today, I've managed five of them. But, well, hell, I'm a WRITER. It's well known that writers don't "do" admin. They leave things to the last minute, they screw it up, they forget.

I guess that my mistake was that I showed some signs of efficiency. This is such a rare thing in writers, that admin tasks that other people would have rescued from the average Sammy Scribe on the grounds that if they didn't do it, then Sammy Scribe would just shovel them into the metaphorical bin.

So it goes.

Comments

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

If you don't do them, will just the tasks be taken away from you? Or your job? (In which case bleah). Is it worth taking a task at a time and seeing if anything bad happens if it's not done? Back before I "retired" from management, I used to spend a lot of time agonising over which of the excessive demands made on me actually needed to be done, in order to reclaim some small part of each day for something less mind-numbingly tedious. It was surprising how many "I/We need..." tasks turned out to disappear without trace if lobbed on the "pending" pile...

If I don't do them

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Well, I have to admit that part of this is my own fault, because I know that if I don't perform these tasks, someone else will screw them up. But if they didn't get done,the following would happen:

a) The freelancers wouldn't get paid.
b) The archive of what I, and a couple of other editors, write, would not get updated. I need this archive, so it's a matter of self-interest for me to update it.
c) Lots of files would end up in the wrong place (because we have a "today" folder, a "tomorrow" folder and a "who cares what happened yesterday" folder)
d) The recipients of my newsletter would get so far out of sync with what SAP thinks is the reality of the matter (I don't really want to go here, but if you are ever thinking of using SAP as a distribution system, don't do it. I use Outlook and Distribution Lists. They aren't perfect, but at least the right people get the newsletter. Unfortunately I have to tell SAP every month where it is fucking up THIS month...

There are a couple of the tasks I could probably stop doing and the world would not come to an end. These are "back-up in case the world comes to an end" tasks. And, I haven't included here all the housekeeping tasks on my computer which I would call admin but some people would look forward to joyfully, like filing all my e-mails in the right folders so that I can find them in future. Most people just leave their mail in the inbox, let the Exchange Server delete them automatically after a couple of weeks, and then ask me if I remember such-and-such press release....