No Sideshows

Boy am I beat.

Ever seen a lizard that got it’s tail chopped off and still continued to twitch. I’m that tail right now. My foot is twitching and I’m blogging but aside from my ability to breathe and move my fingers I don’t think I have anything left in me.

And I have to tell you, the one thing I really look forward to is going back to work on Sunday to tighten up the ship, scrub the floor and reply to 5 billion email messages.

This week, for the first time ever, I didn’t let other people’s agenda interfere with mine.

In the last Vladcast I spoke about schedule partitioning and prioritizing tasks. I only have a set number of hours to do support activities. I don’t have a secretary (I know I need one, I just can’t help but feel like I’m interviewing a babysitter for a grown man) and I have a huge company to run and manage and sometimes that means my day gets swallowed up by stupid tasks.

For example, last Tuesday I got to pay for 3 parking tickets. Today I sent a check for an event sponsorship / booth and added our conference room to the IVR. These are what I like to call “other peoples jobs” but for one reason or another shit had to get done and I either delegated and waited or got it done and moved on.

This week….

I was motivated to stay on point and stick to the schedule and check off every task that has been meticulously planned and allocated so that the high end big picture things got done.

Here is the only thing I’ve learned in my entire business and technical life:

Shit happens every day. Generally, not something you can control.

Your job as the leader is to enable those around you to do their job.

This year my focus is to make sure I am not falling behind in my overall obligations to the company and to our customers. If there ever was a fault in our execution method, that was it – we’d stop the train, jump off, fix the little stuff and then try to restart the train by pushing it along the rail.

Not anymore. We have big plans in 2009. Little things will go wrong. Little things went wrong when I sat on top of everything and everyone 24/7. Hoping this new stuff brings forward some change.

Feeling Good

If you hate your job, you can’t wait for the weekend so you can do what you love.

If you love your job, you can’t wait for the weekend so you can get better at it.

This week, for the first time ever, I got every checkbox on the wall checked and I made sure that we delivered the stuff that 99.999% of our partners and clients will be better off with. While this comes at a cost of Vlad ™ Realtime Response System, I believe it will make everyone a lot better off.

Most of all, I loved every minute of it!