A relatively open, meetings-lite calendar is always a welcome sign for Monday mornings. But I’ve been doing this job long enough to not be too optimistic about open blocks of time to get to pending readings and writings. Today turned out no different. My calendar has only two meetings for the day, one of which was cancelled but quickly replaced by another. The other was scheduled for a half-hour (very limited times this actually works) and ended up being 1.5-hr long. The upside is both were productive and necessary.
Today, I found myself squarely in the managerial space as we’re wrapping up our Financial Year 2015 (FY15) planning. The deadline to submit our FY15 workplan to our organizational leadership was today, and we still had a few loose ends to tie: final review and edits to the proposed activities, meeting with our communications staff to finalize our plan on how we would engage our roughly half a million supporters on the projects we’d be working on throughout the year, speaking with our HR manager and Finance staff about budget appropriations and last-minute reallocations, and verifying time and project assignments for our 11-person team. It was all wrapped up and shipped out as the clock struck COB: “close of business.”
Other tasks today included approving timesheets for staff, brainstorming membership of a steering committee to guide an upcoming meeting I’m organizing on food equity in a few months’ time, and responding to general stream of emails on topics as wide-ranging as a new research tool we’re testing to build up our analytical capacity, to a letter on scientific integrity policies for the Secretary of the Department of Energy, to a climate rally I’m joining in New York City later this month.
Questions? Share your thoughts!