I have developed my entire professional career in the financial area. Currently I am a consultant in the ORTI decision support department.
My start of the day
Regardless of whether I telework or go to the office, I always try to start the day in the same way. Greeting my colleagues. What I am about to say may sound like a joke, but it is strictly true. Throughout my career at Telefónica I have had many types of colleagues from whom I have learned a lot, those who have been good and those who have not been so good. At the moment I have the great fortune to be with a great team, not only professionally, but also on a personal level. So, the first thing I try to do every morning, either on Teams or in person, is to say hello to the people I am lucky enough to work with.
The next thing is to check that all the automations, robots and macros that I have programmed to give us the information we need first thing in the morning have worked correctly. If any of them have failed during the early hours of the morning, which is when we have programmed them to start up, I check them, fix the problem and launch them again.
With the others, I analyse the information to decide what I am going to start with in order of priority. My work has three types of tasks, the “routine” ones, which are needed to “keep the machine running”, the “creative” ones and the “good” ones. I always start with the routine ones, analyse the reports and dispatch them in order of urgency, then I move on to the creative ones, which I also dispatch in order of urgency, and finally I leave the good ones. These are the ones that make me grow and enjoy myself. And they are, basically, finding ways to improve the previous ones or make them easier, unfortunately, I don’t usually have much time for those.
Tools I use in my routine
For information gathering, my sources are basically Telesap, TRASO, IMIDES. Then I work a lot with SQL and Access for database processing and Excel for decision making and reporting. Lately I’m getting a lot into Power Query, I’m discovering it and I find it a very powerful tool, and I also use Power BI. Right now I’m in the transition phase from basically using Excel and Access to integrating everything into Power Query and Power BI. I also work a lot with “my own” robots made with Blue Prims.
My best time of the day
Coffee breaks and lunch time allow me to interact with my colleagues. Sometimes you take advantage of them and discuss some work in a more relaxed atmosphere, but usually you deal with interpersonal relationships. We are emotional beings and working on personal relationships with the people with whom you are going to spend a very important part of the day makes you more comfortable, more committed, more efficient and, in short, you work better. Of course, you can only enjoy this when you are in the office, teleworking has the advantage of allowing you to sleep a bit more, not to waste time in traffic jams and to make better use of the day, but it deprives you of that moment.
Another good and intimate moment is when I come back from lunch, in the early afternoon, I get a machine coffee or I prepare a delicious coffee in my coffee machine (depending on whether I am teleworking or not), I sit in front of the computer and I am going to face one of those “good” jobs I described before. It’s a delicious moment, I concentrate on how I’m going to get to grips with a task that motivates me while I smell the aroma of the coffee. It’s seconds, sometimes minutes, that I seem to have become engrossed… and I love it.
And one last moment that makes me very happy is when I have finally found the solution to one of those “good” jobs that will allow me to improve “routine” and “creative” jobs and that has had me in my head for a long time. That instant when you do the pilot tests and it works. It’s an adrenaline rush, a shot of happiness in the vein. It’s a pity that day-to-day emergencies don’t allow me much time to attend to that kind of work.
A few tricks to help me organise myself better
The first thing I have to say before getting into this field is that I have ADHD, so my brain has some peculiarities that, if you understand them, you can use them to your advantage, but if you fight against them, you will fail. If I’m not passionate about the task, it’s impossible for me to sustain my attention for a long time. It’s not that I get bored and decide not to pay attention, it’s that it’s simply impossible. It’s like trying to breathe underwater, no matter how much effort and attention I put in, my brain ends up switching off. And that’s why I work with three screens.
When I have to carry out unedifying work, I am much more efficient if I use short periods of time, then focus my attention on something else and return to the task after a short time. This way of working is very bad for a person without this peculiarity, but in my case, very high levels of productivity are achieved. That is why I usually have a task on each screen and my concentration jumps from one task to another in short work periods.
