Reminds me of something someone said to me once:
“It’s nice being an entrepreneur; you only have to work half days. Just pick which 12 hours you want to work!”
LOL. There’s more than a little truth in that joke.
Being away and on a job that requires us to work such long days really kills our ability to get anything more than some very basic office work done.
For me, my office work nemesis is estimates.
For whatever reason, all the jobs we quote are always unique, and each one has very specific challenges and different parts requirements. Meaning every estimate is an almost from scratch one-off, and as such requires a lot of time.
I’ve been trying for years to streamline or speed up this process, but I haven’t found any short cuts that work yet. 🙄
And if there is any part of dealing with us that isn’t great, I’d have to say it’s the quote process and how long it can take us to give someone a solid number, especially if we are on a job, there just isn’t the time or space for me to really do that kind of work in the job trailer. I know we disappoint people sometimes at this critical stage, and it kills me to let people down and also miss opportunities, but there’s only two of us to make all this work. It’s one of the down sides to being such a small company.
So with that being said, here’s what my office looks like when I walked into it today to try and catch up on at least some office work instead of have a day off.
Yeah, it’s a mess. Two desks, two computers, three monitors, a work table set up just to deal with the excessive amount of paperwork one particular job has created… Welcome to my little slice of hell.
At any given time I’ll have a dozen internet tabs open, collecting the specs on components or looking at remote projects for layouts, a bunch of PDF files open for prints or other specs, my note pad getting lots of, um, Chicken scratch😄, and a calculator that seems to mock me at every turn.
As I’m sure a lot of you here know, none of the work or fun stuff happens unless this monster has been slain first.
Anyway, enough complaining from me today-I’d better get back to work before Denise finds out I’m on RDP again!😄😄😬