Work

Deadlines

We all have to live with deadlines, either they may be personal or business one’s.

The funny things with deadlines are that we all know we have them, we often set them up by ourselves and yet they have the force to really stress one up til madness. The most common deadline to be broken is the one you set for yourself. And the more shallow the reason the sooner and easier it is for us to break them, and no harm done, don’t get me wrong. But what this post is truly about are the deadlines that actually cause stress and problems for others that should be eliminated or at least minimized.

The thing with business deadlines are that they certainly affects others, either you want or not. So how could deadline respect be lifted from the gutter it has ended in lately?

deadline2The one to crack this will most probably be very successful and rich, and further more well liked in he’s/her’s work community. One of the problems these days are that the deadlines are strained to the limit and they push people to the edge. Time is money and therefore deadlines are set in my opinion too close for the end result to be satisfactory for everybody. When the project time is set to be too short it as good as always means that some corners are drawn straight which means the faults may be hidden as the end result is presented, but sooner or later they will be revealed.

The case the triggered this post for me today was a project i have been working on long days and even on weekends, just so that i would reach the customer set result by a deadline that was known to be idiotic. Well as a worker i have high expectations  on myself and the result i present. So this time i worked hard and including bending the rules to achieve the customer set goal. And so came the day today when the deadline was reached at 11:45am. I presented the result earlier during the morning and i transferred it to the production environment as agreed. 11:48am the customer sent me an email telling me not to move it to the production environment and that we would check the situation again next noonday. Meaning that they moved the deadline by them self, without a apology, or even a reason on why the wanted did this.

Cases like this really angers me and as soon as i heard the news my interest and urge to please the customer dropped like a stone. Why doesn’t the customer respect their own deadlines. I would like to know what kind of problems this resulted at their own end as the end-users should have had a seminar from 12am to 5pm where this was to be presented. Now as the order not to go live with was told to me there was nothing to present to the end users. deadline

Well, at the end the problem is not mine. When the command to go live reaches me i just have to do one simple thing and everything is set. As i did reach the goals for what the project was set for, there wont be any changes made anymore. So, when to go command comes i just launch the result and the customer will have to explain themselves to their bosses.

But it’s still very annoying and sad that these things happens over and over again all over the business world. 😦

 

New work week.

So it’s Monday again and a new business week has started. Nice!

This week is going to be a normal 5 day week. Because of Easter holidays and other reasons I’ve had shorter weeks for the past 3 weeks. That has resulted in more stress, longer days at the office and undone tasks. As the weeks are now normal i hope to get some undone things moved to the done pile and also get started on new. But the best part is that i’m on a good mood all thou it’s Monday. I wrote in Swedish a little while back about the issue of being tired at your work and just cursing about it instead of making a change, and as a shorter version of that blog post i just have to say here that i cant understand people who just won’t do anything to fix the problem.

If you ain’t happy about the situation you just shouldn’t complain and make everybody around you unhappy and irritated with your unsatisfied situation. You should try to remind yourself that negative thoughts affects others twice as fast as happy and has almost twice of the effect. And  a good thing to also remember is that happy people are always nicer to be around then grumpy and whining counterparts.

The weekend went fast, and not everything is going as smooth as we would have hoped with my better half, or should i say with our daughter. We suspect that the sweet potato she has been eating for little under a week has cause her stomach ache. She has been very at uneasy and also seems to have had pain. It escalated to the point yesterday that we had to give her a painkiller to calm her down. Surely, a moment after we gave it to her she calm down a lot and at the time of 9:15 pm she fell asleep.

We now agreed at home that we should change her diet to something else and decided on cauliflower. Hopefully that wont case her so much unease and she will return to the happy little girl she is. 🙂

Other things this week that’s pretty fun is the semifinals in the ladies league in handball here in Finland, and also the starting of men’s quarterfinals. On the ladies side there’s one semifinal left and thats played to day where Dicken from Helsinki meets GrIFK from Kauniainen. As the situation is 2-2 in matches the match today will decide who of the two goes to the finals against HIFK. The looser from this game will go to bronze match against BK-46 from Karjaa. On the men’s side the quarterfinals starts this week and that’s always fun to follow. Mostly because my old team has gone threw and will meet BK-46. The same club they have gone up against the last 4 years. Earlier years Atlas has won but this year i think the matches will be much more even. And i wouldn’t be surprised if all 5 matches are needed to decide who will go onward to the semifinals.

More on the issue of the men’s quarter and semi finals on Swedish later on.