Be proud of yourself, for how far you’ve come and never stop pushing to be the best you can be.
Anon
Thanks to a Breast Cancer diagnosis, chemo in 2011 and subsequent treatments I have been left with ‘fuzzy logic’ and somewhat of a ‘Dory’ (think ‘Finding Nemo’) state of mind.
I know right! Everyone I meet and explain this to, says that, ‘they too are forgetful’. Cue, Eye Roll, it’s not the same. What I’m saying is, think ‘baby brain’ on steroids.
Not that it’s a competition and I wouldn’t wish any of it on anyone.
While I functioned ‘normally’ some of the time, being the mum of four rapidly growing kids and needing to go back to work fulltime, my state of mind was kind of a problem.
I have always been a problem solver and my strengths lie in being able to find solutions, I am driven to find the best & most efficient way to do things. I’m not sure if it’s due to the fact that I don’t ‘do stress’ well & prefer to be ‘chillaxed’, but, I resent wasting time doing ‘stuff’ that takes too long and eats into ‘my’ time.
Be it at home or work, my thought process is the same, “Is this the best, most efficient way, or can I improve it?”. I get really excited when the answer = “improvement needed”, that is my jam! The inner GEEK really comes out to play!
However, if I wanted to get a job, let alone to perform well in the workplace I needed to do something about my impeded brain power.
Enter crossword puzzles, ironically, though I work predominantly with numbers I can’t Sudoku for the life of me, word puzzles on the other hand are a completely different story. I’m not sure what got me through my self imposed ‘brain improvement regime’, except sheer frustration and the unwillingness to remain beaten. I (still) struggle with basic synonym type crosswords & ended up teaching myself cryptic puzzles. So much easier! It took a lot of energy, perseverance & a couple of years.
Even now I make sure that I do some kind of puzzle most days (Word Cookies is very addictive, just saying).
Being a full-time stay-at-home Mum, working part-time for my parent’s preschool and having a self-employed husband gave me lots of opportunities and scope to learn and broaden my skill set. I taught myself database design and developed a fully functional Student Management System for my parent’s business and for my husband’s tutoring business, a custom designed package for rostering, invoicing & debt management. In turn this honed other skills I hadn’t used pre-children like advanced query writing skills, SQL, some VBA, advanced Macros and the beginnings of advanced workflow concepts.
Now, by day, I work as the Business Manager for a small but very busy Primary School and, since I always need a project, by night, I have started writing posts for this website to share knowledge. I have discovered that because I work for an educational institute, that doesn’t mean everyone who works there is educated. Another one of life’s ironies.
When I started, I assumed that everyone knew what I did, or they at least knew what they were doing.
To my dismay, this is not so. It saddens me that so many diligent (mainly support) staff are left on their own without the support or the knowledge to empower themselves to wrangle order from digital chaos. They usually muddle their way through, and, because ‘that’ worked last time they keep repeating the process without giving regard to how long it actually takes. Often even when presented with a better option they are too time poor and stressed to take it on board. Working in a school isn’t like a normal job. On one side you have teachers, because they are salaried the overarching principle seems to be that it doesn’t matter how long a project takes, just as long as it gets done. There is no time/cost effective logic applied. Then there are the support staff, second rate citizens, who have to justify every minute and very rarely receive the training required for their role. This seems to hold true especially as new technology is rolled out.
The sink or swim mentality prevails. Most staff tread water and manage to keep their heads just above the water. Metaphorically speaking.
What leaves me speechless is that Principals and Boards of Trustees don’t seem to realise (or care?) that money well spent on simple PD (professional development) for admin and support staff will literally save hundreds of hours, which over the course of time, obviously equates to thousands of dollars! I was originally on the Board of my School, it was a complete revelation (not in the good sense of the word) once I started working in the office and got my head around the systems and how things were run.
What do you mean it’s faster to type a hundred names on certificates? Have you seriously not heard of mail merge …?! Yes, I know that was only five names this time, but each time you do this, it adds up, and over the course of time this inefficiency is costing way too much. Let alone the impact on productivity, or your mental wellbeing!
It is the small things that make the biggest difference, not the flash whizz bang PD that costs a lot of money.
To be honest most of the PD that I have paid for, has left me feeling more ripped off than anything else. With two exceptions. I have to shout out to Rob Clarke from Learning Architects and Ben Collins from Ben I Collins of Collins Analytics. I have learnt a lot from them – especially Ben, his Advanced and Extreme Formula courses were lots of fun. (I’m sure I’ve mentioned the geek word … )
The workshops I attended with Rob were game changing. I was a newbie at school and it was the first time I had encountered G Suite (I didn’t even know it existed). Sure I had a personal Gmail account – but that was for junk mail not ‘real’ emails. Rob supplied the basics in taming, mastering & extending the digital office, which set me on a journey of acquiring ‘different’ knowledge that continues daily.
I hated it.
I missed Microsoft.
Since G Suite was here to stay as long as I remained where I was. I had two choices, learn or resent it. I know which option is healthier for my mental well being. So I have learnt. A lot. Again it surprises me just how much. ‘Knowing what you don’t know is better than being brilliant’ isn’t just a cool tagline. It’s true.
“Just Google It” is the phrase I have used the most over the years since, when dealing with my colleagues regardless of their position, even though I’m the one that usually ends up hitting the keys and finding the answer. Did I also mention I suffer from FOMO, and can’t bear not knowing the answer?
These days I figure if I get one helpful hint from a workshop or a couple or three from an all day event I console myself that it was probably worth it. I hope you get something out of my site that helps. It is a collection of things that make my life that much more productive, forgive my fuzzy logic and let me know if it doesn’t make sense. I know what I know & with the devil being in the detail, sometimes translating it to the page in a coherent, decipherable, informative form can be, somewhat, challenging!!!!!!!
“You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it”
Charles Buxton