From The Wordsmith’s Forge:

Describe a typical day at work, for you. Where do you go, whom do you meet, and what do you do?

Each day is different from the previous one, but there are some commonalities.

Right now, we are doing without a receptionist/basic admin person so I am taking care of those tasks. I arrive around 7:30am, start the first batch of coffee and unload the dishwasher from the day before. I make sure the lights are turned on and the phones are on ‘day’ mode and unlock the door.

Then it’s off to my office to check email, look for potential problems and plan my day (as much as I can).

Since it’s the end of the year, I am reviewing our Policy & Procedure handbook. I am making sure it’s up to date with any changes we implemented, marking out items that may need review and/or change to better fit the company culture. (That also means identifying the people best suited to work with me on reviewing and editing the specific items.) I’m the original author (4 years ago) so it’s more than a little boring, but it needs to be done.

I have a new toy to play with, a database I asked our IT person to create for me. It has all of the employees’ information in various combinations. I’ve been making do with Excel spreadsheets of data, but this is much more sophisticated, and it has everything in one place, not several. We’re ready to test it with various reports and then I’ll move it from its semi-public location on the server to my PC for better security.

My boss (the owner) just got his broker’s license, so I’m reviewing the state’s rules and regulations governing his new status. For someone not trained in the law, I read a lot of legalese.

I’m a little behind on keeping the Library organized, so I’m going to try and spend some time in there. We subscribe to more than 30 journals and have a collection of nearly 500 books that are often found on peoples’ desks rather than on the shelves. We’re looking at re-organizing our filing system, but I think what we really need are a couple of data-entry folks with music on earphones and a whole new database for them to fill with facts.

All this week I’ve been meaning to write a draft response to a survey the employees took a few weeks ago. It was a single question: “What do you need to be more productive?” and we got a pretty good response. So I’m going to get that done today (our staff meeting is in a few days and I want it finalized before then).

It’s not usual, but I just finished putting together the mailing list for our holiday cards. A last-minute glitch meant that I only ordered those cards three days ago, so we’ll be mailing them next week instead of this week.

Finally, I negotiated a deal with a vendor who provided extremely poor service to us and instead of paying $27k for three months work; we’re only paying $5k.