I usually go to work on a “muscular” bike after a stretch on the Cercanías. I love the feeling of arriving at the office at dawn having cycled for a long time, whether it’s hot or cold. As the Danes say “there is no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes”.
Over the years, our fellow cyclists at Distrito Telefónica have managed to get bike racks installed that allow us to enjoy our favourite means of transport. From here, I send my best wishes to all of them!
The start of my day
I usually start my day by opening the Edge browser and clicking on the Restore Window option. This way I get the five to ten tabs I use every day back in one go. The most important is the OWA Outlook Web Application, via portal.office.com. It is faster and more stable than the local Outlook client, especially if you work with mailboxes, and has features like tagging that I use a lot.
My tools
For Outlook mail I use the advice of the wonderful teacher Yéssica Mtnz. Cerqueira, whose courses I highly recommend. I start with the inbox and apply the two-minute technique: if I can answer the message in less than that time, I do it and if not, I tag it. My labels are: Short term, if I have to reply within a maximum of two days; Medium term, for the rest of the emails; or On hold, used mostly for sent messages I want to keep track of. Everything else I archive. In the middle of the morning I go back to check the new mail applying the same rule and for the rest of the day I only have the Short term folder in view so that I don’t get distracted by new mail.
I also use the Pomodoro technique with one of the many websites out there. Every so often (which is configurable) it helps you remember that you are more productive if you stand up for a moment, stretch your legs a bit and focus on the distance, blinking to rest your eyes.
Studies say that we tend to have more concentration and energy earlier in the day so it seems like a good idea to set aside that time for these tasks, meetings permitting. Speaking of meetings, I usually take notes on a OneNote Web page by opening it from the calendar. This way I automatically have the title, the attendees, the text of the invitation and attachments if there are any. I find it useful to search for meeting information later with the OneNote search engine.
When meetings and work permit, I try to read regular newsletters such as #SomosTelefónica or Fundación and check out the messages from the Workplace groups I follow to find out what’s new in the company. LinkedIn is also a good source of information.
Part of my job is to design technical courses, so the news I was talking about helps me to find out about experts, laboratories and topics of interest in order to prepare training courses that help to understand the technology. At Telefónica we show the advantages of technology so it is important to understand at least the main concepts.
Advantages of using technology
For example, knowing why we are interested in offering interfaces (APIs) to companies with information from our network (Open Gateway project) or how we are making money with the use cases of Generative Artificial Intelligence. As a telecoms professional, I find this dissemination work exciting!
Another of my functions, together with my colleague Esther Manjavacas, is to help employees who are internal teachers to be as well trained as possible. That’s why one of the most rewarding activities is to design and present train-the-trainer courses. Normally the courses are virtual via Teams, but in some cases where the aim is to create a community among a group of teachers from different parts of Spain, it is very important to share a face-to-face working day where they can “get to know each other” and even, if schedules allow it, have lunch together after the working day.
Finally, I also use Teams a lot in my projects. For example, all communication with internal teachers is done this way. Thanks to a Power Automate flow and the help of two great teachers, Javi Hurtado and David Querol, we managed to incorporate the collective of almost 4,000 teachers into a Teams team. It’s very convenient and productive to have all the information there: conversations, files, links, public and private channels, whiteboards, Loop elements, etc.
