Work
Probably my most honest tweet of the year to date
343444480)@bjacksonuk @interhacktives Nah. I troll students from my own account.
— Adam Tinworth (@adders) January 22, 2015
Resolved: time to move my blog
For the third time this year, I’m unable to access my blog because of a problem with my web host.
Time’s up. I’ve blocked out a section on time in my diary for next week to finally move One Man & His Blog to a different web host. After that, I’ll look at the WordPress migration.
And I’m publishing this here, because I can’t get to OM&HB to publish it there…
When I'm stressed…
Whenever I get stressed about finding work, about the fact that I’m going to be a father soon, about the huge changes that are sweeping over my life, I remember that I live here, that I’ve been married to a woman that I love for 9 years and that I have some fantastic, helpful and talented friends.
And suddenly I can’t find much to be stressed about…
Red Eyed and Removed
Today is proving to be a struggle.
It's now about 25 hours since I had any significant amount of sleep. I took the red-eye back from Florida last night, and I'm aiming for at least another 9 hours awake before I finally keel over. Oh, yes, and I'm in the office - estatesgazette.com's office in Procter Street, to be exact. I'm testing my wife's anti-jet lag theory, that see you doing as much of a working day as you can before retiring to bed.
It was all neatly planned, you see. My desk in one of RBI's London offices was prepared, with my laptop left, pre-Christmas, securely locked in my under-desk pedestal. The journey from Heathrow to Holborn was smmooth and easy, and I walked into Procter Street before 9am.
And then I was stopped on my way to my desk by someone aking me if he could help me. "Just going to my desk," he said, gesturing in the direction of my long established desk at EG. "That's not your desk," he replied, a puzzled expression on his face. And, to my horror, I saw that my desk and those around it were now set up for developers. My desk was, indeed, gone. And with it, my laptop.
20 minutes of frantic hunting and pestering allowed my to find most of the stuff that was lost. I found my books on and in one guy's desk. The docking station and power cable for laptop turned up with the IS team. And, finally, the pedestal was found under a random other desk - the laptop safe within.
The monitor and monitor stand are still AWOL, but I'm not going to stress about those too much. The nature of my work at EG is shifting, and I think that truly hotdesking - just grabbing a free desk when I can - should make that both easier and more productive.
I've just spent a useful half hour clearing our the junk I'd accumulated up here over the last coupld of years, sending some of it down to my "main" office in Sutton, and the rest to recycling.
And I'm just hoping that I don't regret the decisions I've made when I'm no longer sleep-deprived….
Work from home? The office? The coffee shop?
Although working from home is convenient, sometimes it pays to go to the office.
That's what Sheryl Crow discovered when she jettisoned her Nashville home studio for a Los Angeles one to record her latest album, "100 Miles From Memphis." The L.A. location led a few famous friends to stop by, including Justin Timberlake.
"I dragged him into the studio and said, 'I want you to hear something,'" she recalled. She played him her cover of Terence Trent D'Arby's "Sign Your Name," redone with a Memphis sound.
"He looked at me and said, 'You know I'm from Memphis ... I've got the backgrounds on this.' And he came in and he sang on this," she said. "That sort of thing doesn't happen when you're working from home."
I'm a huge fan of working from home, but only as part of a mix of locations. And the quote above illustrates exactly why an "office" in the widest sense can be hugely useful. I work from two different offices, home and coffee shops. Each give me a different working experience, and each are suited to different tasks.
In Which I Venture to East Grinstead
The life of an Estates Gazette journalist is an isolated one. You sit in splendid, uhh, isolation in Procter Street, and only ever venture to QH for induction and training.
But since I leaped into a Sutton role, my Reed horizons have expanded immeasurably! New York! Dublin! The Strand! Rugby! and now… East Grinstead!
Yes, last Friday I ventured to one of the most remote outposts of the RBI empire, East Grinstead, for meetings with Bankers Almanac and Kellysearch.
Starting Again
New challenges, a new location and at least six months to make something of blogging within this publisher.
Woohoo!
Winding Down at EG
It's been something of a strange day here at EG towers. The business of the magazine is going on all around me, but I'm seperate from it. I'm busy clearing my desk of tasks for the next six months and before heading down to Sutton full-time.
Still, came up with a neat idea - there's no need for me to carry things home and then to Sutton. I can just use the internal mail, and let the company take the strain.
