seattle

Journal – 090823

/ Sinclair / Leave a comment

I finished talking to the whole team individually today. I spent over two hours with one of the techs that is not performing. I told him to ignore what was told to him previously and to do three things every day and he will be an average performer with time to spare. I found another low performer that we inherited from another team. He is the replacement for my old position. I gave him the secret to high performance numbers and having two hours of spare time in the day. I want my team to perform above average and I will help them get there. Anxiety and lack of confidence is destroying them. I was in a similar place when I was in their position. I figured out what was needed for each position I was in and used other team members that were better than me as a gauge of my progress. At the end it went against everything the company didn’t want us to do. But it gave them the results they wanted. I made it public to the director and CEO what I was doing and the things they say to do doesn’t really work. I understand where they are coming from. But there are very few people that it works for. My system is simple, what it the number of tickets I needed to complete and pull each day. How many responses to each ticket for the lifetime of the ticket is needed. That’s it. Right now, I told all my low performers the exact number they need and do it every day. After a week you should get spare time. Use that to automate your work. I gave them the tools to use to respond to the ticket with little effort. Little typing, with a quality first response to the ticket. This sets them up to close the ticket quicker with less effort. At this point they will have more free time, less anxiety and time to sharpen your skills more to have more knowledge, which will start to help build your confidence in the subject. In 3 months, you should be the subject expert for that specific subject. The team has 36 specific subjects we are responsible to assist with.

 🌤️ 77°F – 53°F 🙂 | #Seattle 

Journal – 080823

/ Sinclair / Leave a comment

 Started the day and planned out what I need to do at work. Today I had to take disciplinary action on two employees and one more tomorrow.  I am taking one of the technicians under my wing. I can see him do well, just needs a little more training.

 🌤️ 83°F – 58°F 🥱 | Seattle 

Journal – 070823

/ Sinclair / Leave a comment

First day working in my new position at the company. There are a lot of little things I have to do. Trying to block time for every event on my daily, weekly, monthly tasks. The time went quickly. It felt like I worked for 3 hours. I learned a lot today.

 🌦️🌧️ 78°F – 59°F 🙂 | Seattle 

Journal – 060823

/ Sinclair / Leave a comment

I got up early with my son and went grocery shopping. It is a ritual we do. We have one on one time, and it gives us a chance to talk without interruptions.  Spent much of the day decluttering the house. I made steaks for dinner on the grill.

🌦️ 88°F – 62°F 🙂 | Seattle 

Journal – 050823

/ Sinclair / Leave a comment

I slept in to catch up on my sleep that I lost from the past two days. My mind wouldn’t stop thinking. I was constantly thinking of how to streamline and keeping everything organized on my new duties at work.  Drove to Federal Way to go shopping. We bought allot of junk food from Korea, Japan and Thailand. They are fun, but still junk food. Once we got back home, we continued to declutter the house.

I bought a few new items for my office so I can use my personal laptop at work. The desktop at work is too limiting. I either don’t have the tools I need or need to copy config files back and forth. My plan is to use Microsoft Products for everything. The tools I use are all integrated and will save me a lot of time. I will store the files on the company servers. I think I can get half my duties automated using Power Automate. Allot of the things I have to do is pull data and moving it over to a spreadsheet, then filtering them.

I am using OneNote to keep my stuff organized.

 🌦️ 78°F – 56°F 🙂 | Seattle

Journal – 040823

/ Sinclair / Leave a comment

I was incredibly busy at work today. Moved all my clients to other technicians so on Monday I can start my new manager position without distractions. I started talking to my team to gather their normal work hours and days in the office. Just getting everything organized. I have asked other team managers on their process of getting things done. It’s kind of unorganized and they take a bit of time to find things. My plan is to use OneNote to keep everything in one place or have links to active docs that are shared. After a month or two, I am going to streamline the process and to automate anything that I can. Half of my time will be looking at data or moving data into an excel spreadsheet and filter out unnecessary data. I will be automating that process using Power Automate. It should save me time so I can to do other things that matter. So far I am feeling pretty good. My mind has been very active thinking of how to organize all this information and to streamline the duties I know I need to do. It is keeping me from falling asleep. I have been sleeping for about 4 hours a night since my promotion. I don’t feel anxiety or fear. Just an active mind.

 ☀️ 80°F – 61°F 🙂 | Seattle 

Journal – 030823

/ Sinclair / Leave a comment

 I received a lot of congratulations at work today on my promotion. I had a meeting from a fellow team lead on my duties. There are quite a few little things I need to do. I’m going to calendar block my time for each task and streamline them. 

☀️ 83°F – 57°F 🙂 | Seattle 

Journal – 020823

/ Sinclair / Leave a comment

 I started to read books on team management. I have experience before but would like to improve. I’m not the team lead, we have been lacking for months now. Everyone on the team comes to me with questions and guidance throughout the day in the office. I help with customer feedback for the individual and see if there is any improvement or how we interact with customers. Most of the feedback we get is disgruntled clients that caused the issue themselves or the device is over a decade old, and we are unwilling to replace the item. But every once and awhile there are valid criticisms. I spend a bit of time analyzing them and see where our faults are and take corrective action.

I professionally have an issue with a new employee in the group. We started at the same time at the company and sat next to each other. He talked a lot. When I mean a lot, I mean he will add to your conversation on every word you say. He will not let you complete a sentence without talking over you while you are trying to convey something. So much that it is frustrating. To me it feels like talking to someone and you can hear an echo of yourself on the call and it is getting so bad you have to stop talking.

I have informed him to stop interrupting people in meetings. That lasted maybe 3 minutes tops. When someone has a question on a solution to a critical issue, I can see them get frustrated while he interrupts while they are trying to ask a question to add a joke that only he laughs at. He was on another team prior to ours. I feel that they saw an opportunity and dumped him into our team.

I also need to understand why I get upset around him. This isn’t the first time I worked with someone that annoyed me. Not sure why he gets under my skin.

*** UPDATE ***

Before I left work today I got pulled into the Director’s Office for a chat. I got promoted to lead 3 teams. Two in the Americas and one in India!

I will be busy for a bit to get all these little things in place.

 ☀️ 88°F – 57°F 🙂 | Seattle 

Journal – 310723

/ Sinclair / Leave a comment

Hectic day at work. A lot of issues that needed to be resolved. We should be fine by Wednesday. Helped my son fix his computer. He is a quick learner and has a better grasp on how a computer works and uses that knowledge to resolve the issue.

☀️ 80°F – 53°F 🙂 | Seattle