Check out the new video!

Updates on a sleepy afternoon

Yesterday Suj and I edited the training video footage with Sylvia, in her tall narrow house in Bernal Heights. It's the sort of house and the sort of neighborhood that seem to be unique to San Francisco: narrow houses crammed wall to wall and painted in the oddest mishmash of pastels; seamless concrete driveways substituting for lawns; a grassy park rising suddenly amidst it all. The quiet of Mission Street nearby unsettles me-- having grown up near Los Angeles, I'm used to main thoroughfares being noisy, crowded, and smoggy.

The training video is just a part of the training materials Suj and I are developing, as a (massive) sub-project of the (already massive) Replication Project. It ambushed me in the middle of the week, throwing off my plans for the rest of the week. I've had to push all my other deadlines back a week, and given that working on the training materials will likely consume any extra time I have over the next few days, it looks like those deadlines may have to be pushed back even farther. No wonder it takes so long to get things done... You begin a project excited and ambitious, but then you begin other projects just as excited and with just as much ambition, and suddenly they've all piled one on top of the other while time has grown both shorter (generally) and longer (after about 3pm or so most days).

But we've got some exciting stuff in the works, and it's fantastic that we're able to generate our own ideas, develop plans for them, and see them through to make them a reality. Yay startups!

Working 9-5...

I realize that I was the last person who posted on this blog, and it's kind of lame to do it again, but, at this point, I don't care.  It's 4:30 on a Friday afternoon and I'm not really sure why people work this hour, because no one else wants to pick up their phones or respond to their emails.  Everyone just wants to get it over with and go home, so they just sit at their desks and stare into oblivion.  Or go on Facebook.  Or do something less-than-productive.  I'm doing my best here, but I'm not going to lie--the weekend looks pretty good right now, and I'm sort of just waiting for it to hit me.  Thus the blog post.

It could also be that I'm in an office, which, I've discovered, does not work for me.  It simply doesn't.  I go a little crazy.  Thus, today was the best day ever--I spent practically no time by my desk.  Went to a great lunch with Perla and John, our contact at Volunteer Center, and then I met up with Caroline for a meeting with an interested organization.  Most hilarious experience of my life.  I'm on the phone with another organization and I get this frantic text from her telling me that she needs me...  Apparently she wasn't expecting the full on board meeting (6 people just staring at her) that they had ready for her.  It was intimidating, from what I gather, but the girl breezed through the conference and everyone loved her by the end. 

I'm seriously rambling now trying to eat up time while at the same time be the least bit productive.  The main thing that I took away from this week (and, I suppose, all the weeks previous--a cumulative learning process, if you will) is that I do not function well in an office environment.  I get a little sleepy, a little crazy, and it's all just bad news.  But the good news is that I've found a solution--get out of the office.  Site visits, meetings, the works.  I'm not sure that my real, grown-up job will allow me to be as flexible.  I have 3 years to either get over it or find a non-desk job.  Fun stuff.

Ok enough rambling.  Going to go do research on volunteer blogs or something.  22 minutes until the weekend!

P.S. Am insanely jealous of everyone going to see Batman this weekend.

The Menace of Spreadsheets!

I already knew that people hated spreadsheets--I mean, I've heard countless jokes poking fun at their boring facts and figures, their endless lines of cells, and their ability to reduce practically everything to boxes of meaningless numbers.  That and they're boring.  But, man oh man, I did not know how intense they were.  I always thought that people exaggerated how much time they consumed, how much organization and management they required, but I was oh so very wrong.

This week we've gotten into full swing for outreach and we've been emailing people nonstop, following up with organizations, setting up phone conferences and site visits and profiles... it's been organizational madness.  There are so many different organizations with so many different points of contact, so many different steps to getting them set up on the website and tracking their process, and so many different people that we get shuttled between, it's a wonder we can keep anything straight!  Our outreach tracker document is massive.  Really, really huge.  As in I have to open it up using a different internet client, in case its size causes the program to crash.  It's just a visual reminder of how much hard work we're putting into the site and getting the nonprofit community set up on it.  It can be overwhelming and daunting, but something tells me that once all of those silly little boxes say what they're supposed to say, we'll have a feeling of tremendous accomplishment.  Until then, I'll make sure my face isn't too close to the screen while I frantically scan the cells looking for the next thing that I have to do.  Hopefully I'll be better adjusted by the time I get my next post up next week :)