carte grise

There's an incredibly restful feel to work this week. From the amount of stuff I've managed to do (especially things which had been almost written off) it feels like it ought to be Thursday. It would be tempting to ascribe this to the absence this week of boss¹ but to jump to such a conclusion would be hasty; repeated sampling must be performed at subsequent periods of supervisor-holiday as well as supervisor-presence to ascertain if the effect seems unlikely to be the result of chance alone. One thing his absence is more certain to cause is the absence of completion of the tedious new time-logging system, brought in on Thursday after a lovely couple of years of not having to attempt to work out how much time each day was spent doing which particular task, something our previous boss¹ made us do each Monday morning, breaking down task-type-time by day and ensuring it balanced with the time accrued for the week on the time & attendance system. It would often be necessary to have a quick poke through the previous week's sent and received emails to get a better idea of how much time might have been taken up by the odd wee things which can be done so quickly that they don't stick in the mind. Fortunately the first few days of the month are reasonably easy to attribute to a single set of reasonably regular tasks but I'll have to attempt to remember to watch how much time I'm spending on what I'm doing for the rest of the week, especially if it turns out to be something different to what appeared on the vague list-of-things-people-were-supposed-to-be-doing with which the appointed deputy boss¹ was supplied.