The Career Trifecta

I've been thinking lately about the three things you want in a job. You want to have respect for the organisation you work for. You want to like the people you work with. And you want to have work to do that you enjoy.

I'm not sure I've ever had the whole package. I respect PRI and Climate Action 100+ (I'm employed by the former in a grant-funded position at the latter). I'm happy to be working for something I believe in. I love the people at PRI and most of my steering committee members. I work at home, so I don't get the benefit of working with these admirable, committed, lovely people face to face. No. 3 is where I've come up short. I'm a writer in a project manager's job. My skill set as a writer are of little use in this job. My lack of skills when dealing with technology is a real handicap.

This week I've had to figure out how to do a Doodle poll to set up a meeting in four time zones on one of five dates. I made an error when configuring the poll and had to resend it. I also had to fight my way through the many obstacles to progress put up by Marketing Cloud, the hateful content platform with its hateful templates and synchronised data extensions. I also needed to develop an agenda and update an Excel spreadsheet for a 12 December Steering Committee meeting. I spent an entire day in another Excel spreadsheet updating tabs for each of our working groups. Tomorrow I'll try to embed a drop down with four choices in the Status column. Wish me luck. Today I developed a review process for each (of many) decision points in the redesign of our website. Tomorrow, I'll create this process in TeamGantt.

In short, I spend a lot of time working with technologies I don't understand. So I make mistakes. Which makes me feel dumb. I know someone half my age wouldn't bat an eyelid with these various tools. But to me, it's like trying to run in quicksand.  

Dec. 4