My blog titles are always bimodal, it seems. First nursing, then geekery. I had adventures in professional communication during my shift on Sunday. I was paired with The RN No One Wants to Work With (for good reason). I don’t know if this will work even half the time, but I gathered my ‘nads and approached her directly, asking her to cease to yell at me in front of patients because it made us both look bad. This worked. She apologized and we worked really well together for the rest of the day. It amazed me completely. I’m getting a lot better at appropriate communication. I used to shake and feel vomitose about it, but I’ve gotten up to a point of feeling only mild queasiness when I have to do it.
Also, I found that coming on to a 12-hour shift when you’ve had a day off beforehand is a far different matter from hitting it when you’ve already had two clinical days in the hospital. Shocker there! My day was wicked busy and I ran my ass off, but it didn’t seem nearly as bad since I wasn’t exhausted to begin with. Major difference. I’m not burned out; I’m just tired. Good to know.
Readers know that I’m a productivity junkie…so much so that I waste a lot of time tinkering with technological ways to allow me to save time. We all have our peccadilloes. For the last few weeks I have gone back to plain old Mac-included software and one downloaded dashboard widget (DoBeDo). I really like Remember the Milk (but gave it up because it won’t sync with my Centro without lots of hoop-jumping) and still use Sandy for occasional reminders, but for the day-to-day stuff I have fired Gcal on grounds of attendance problems and insubordination and have started using plain old iCal and Apple Mail. My events and to-do’s sync perfectly with my Centro this way. Mail is actually pretty handy. I turned my nose up at it previously, but I am making good use of the notes and the incorporation of to-do’s and files.
For example, I keep a folder called “Project notes” and keep one note per project in there. Each note has to-do items for that project and other notes I have made about it. Very handy. I use smart folders for my to-do’s and also use DoBeDo in dashboard for a quick glance.
Apple has a few numskulled problems to fix with Mail…for example, in what universe does it make sense to not be able to logically create “New To Do” from an IMAP e-mail message? It adds them all to the calendar “calendar” and doesn’t give any other options. With POP accounts it works the way it intuitively should. This is a bug, because if one checks the box next to “create new to-do’s on my Mac,” it should freaking DO that. This is a major annoyance. Nevertheless, this system has been working really well for me, except that it leaves me nothing to tinker with and I’m forced to actually be productive. 
0 Responses to “Professional communication/Mac productivity”