Entries Tagged 'Work' ↓

Got summoned with a week’s notice to head up to Rod’s place in Hawke’s Bay with a couple of the guys from our marketing team to meet with Andy, our Advisor to the Board who was visiting from the States. We met him a couple of times while in New York, and being the ex CEO of dell.com he’s rather famous in tech circles and when put together with our CEO and marketing guys, they spoke a whole other language of marketing jargon that I struggled to keep up with at times.

However, I was chuffed to be invited and really enjoyed the experience of a business retreat to the boss’s beach house. Had to drive a giant Ford Falcon, automatic, to get up and back, rather a monster to drive for my first time out behind the wheel in 5 months!

Rod & Andy served up a great meal of beef, roast vegetables & salad.

Andy & I rode on the back of Rod’s quad bike to the shop – via the beach!

We spent the morning drinking coffee (from a machine like ours), eating Rod’s banana choc chip muffins and talking strategy.

Have been back in the Wellington office a couple of weeks now and I think I’m suffering from motivation sickness. I know your office space can impact on how you feel at work but I’m believing that there can be a physical impact itself, beyond sitting at a badly arranged chair and desk. That part of my set up is good.

I just don’t recall when working in New York that I ever had such stinging dry eyes and dog tiredness and often times feeling totally deflated. We’re getting way more sleep here than we did in New York and we’re not working stupid long hours, probably the same length days as New York. Perhaps it’s a winter thing, that our bodies and minds are in hibernation mode. Or perhaps it’s the fluorescent lights and too warm dry air from the air-conditioning. Perhaps it’s being in the office again getting interrupted and dragged into meetings and conversations, which sometimes I missed while being away, but most of the time just enjoyed doing my own stuff in my own time at least being able to recognise something achieved at the end of the day.

Hmmm, have to figure it out before my productivity slips.

Have really enjoyed getting to know another Community Manager over here – Karen’s from Harvest, a company that Xero knows about as many of each others customers want us to integrate. It turned out that the Harvest office is just around the corner from the office we were in so we’ve had a couple of lady lunches and other meetings. Nice to chat about common quirks of our jobs, things we do the same and things we do differently. I’m not sure that I have an easier job; other Community Managers I’ve met here seem to be the conduit for all customer queries where as I’m really just at our social media doorway. However, have picked up a few good tips and will miss having Karen so close by.

This week, our international product team launched Xero Answers – a site for questions & answers for our new product Xero Personal. Rather than have a massive customer base flood our email support queue, we’re going to try this largely user-based approach to helping our customers, the aim being that people can see questions previously asked & answered, saving them having to do it, & also to give an opportunity for people to help each other out as they build up their own product knowledge & learn their own ways of using the product that they want to share.

It’s still orange & it’s had a few questions posted to it already; I’m nervously keeping watch over it trying to answer the questions as best I can but I am further removed from this product than Xero Business that I wrote most of the Help Centre for. I really hope it grows into a big community site like some others I’ve seen where eventually we can hook up a blog, the @XeroPersonal Twitter feed & stuff like that. And maybe even extend it to our business product. Early days!

Planes make me think. I guess you’re always going some place new or some place old that can make you look forward to new things or think about old things you want to leave behind, in either case, you’re going somewhere.

I’ve been thinking a lot about working remotely, in a different geographical location and timezone from the main office, and after weeks of this filling space in my head I’m going to attempt to get some of it out – after all that’s what I started my blog for even though since we’ve been away it’s become a glorified travel diary. Time for it to return to its routes as an outlet and store of my random thoughts! However I have to be careful this doesn’t cross a line – in this age of social media and people being fired for airing their grievances online and acting in a way out of line in the eyes of the company I will likely have to watch what I say, which kind of defeats the point of a personal blog! I don’t hate my job and this isn’t a precursor to any major decisions, just supposed to be random stuff about working remotely!

So why is this topic filling my head? I don’t think it’s one thing, I think it’s a collection of little things. I think if I was to pick one thing, or have one thing to sum it all up, it’s that change thing. I thought that being out of the office would open up a new way of working for me, give me some new and different things to do, stimulate new thoughts or ideas and above all, give me some freedom to change bad work habits for ones I actually want. However, due to my own need for routine, the office not really being set up for remote workers and the new way of communication that’s required for remote working, I’ve been unable to bring about new work habits.

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Laughed and laughed and laughed like no Twilight groupie should at a screening of New Moon at The Knitting Factory in Brooklyn on Sunday night. It was shown on a screen out the back of the club, attended by a mix of people wanting to see a comedy show and some true die-hard Twilight fans in their Twilight t-shirts – the difference being the alternate script via voice-over from comedians The Raspberry Brothers.

I wrote a bit about it on the Xero blog so please read that to save me re-typing everything here!

Letter from New York – records & film night

Living here means I get to attend at the last minute amazing conferences that just wouldn’t be run or have the attendance in New Zealand, although this conference was very like one of a series of Ignite conferences we went to at the Paramount the night before we left Wellington to come here.

So for 2 days in late April I attended the NYC 140Conf - a conference about social media – aptly named 140 Characters (that’s how many characters are available to you in a tweet) where 140 people spoke for 10 minutes only, or took part in a 15 minute panel, over 2 days. A very engaging format – sure some people were a bit boring and by the end of it we were starting to hear the same things again and again – but still a very cool way of presenting a conference.

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Getting used to the commute now. No wi-fi or reception in the subway but can tap out an email response or 2 and send them from the surface. Train is not usually this empty – must’ve been coming home after 7.30 this night.

Realised today that The Mister’s desk in New York is beginning to resemble the command centre he had back in Wellington … when he had a desk there …

In case you missed it I posted my 2nd letter to everyone back at work in New Zealand on the Xero blog this week, I’m trying to do one every couple of weeks although now that we’re pretty much set up (which is what the first couple were about) I’m not sure what I’ll be writing for the next few. We’ve had a couple of work meetings so I guess I could summarise those.

Anyway, here are the links:

1 April 2010: Letter from New York – settling in

18 March 2010: Letter from New York