butterfly

My boss - the one I have to say I'm still rather resentful of for not letting me go home early yesterday - described the cause of a lot of the last week's stress as a "butterfly".

What she meant by this was that whenever something new and shiny came along, he was off, following it, rather than focusing on the things that needed to be done. So basically, instead of finishing off a job he was doing, or setting a prioritised list and running down it methodically, he only focused on the things that interested him or that appeared in his inbox.

This was a real problem, because the job he'd been brought in to do was work on a big new framework that could potentially be worth a lot of money over the next few years. So in other words, we want to win it and to do that you need to answer all the questions well.

So last Monday we had this session where we went through and looked at what was left to do. And there was loads - any question he hadn't fancied the look of he'd left and so we ended up divvying the work up between us.

And so I ended up having to come in to do loads of stuff over the weekend.

The thing is though, he didn't actually seem all that bad with the technical stuff, it was more that he just wasn't up to the job of holding multiple streams of activity in his head at once. He wasn't a manager, in other words.

Which was a shame, but also horrible for me as I spent huge chunks of the weekend working where I could have been doing other stuff.

I also seriously "fell off the wagon" in terms of my diet, but I'll talk about that later in the week.