...of Tracey

6:15 am Slowly wake up while enjoying one of the Beatles songs on my various alarm times. Mull of Kintyre is the 6:15 time slot so I listen all the way to the end. Same old routine, eat breakfast, read the newspaper, make a cuppa tea with my hubby who started work half an hour before me. His office is in the former formal dining room while mine is upstairs.  

7:00 am Up in my office, deciding whether to read Slacks or ignore Slacks. I choose “ignore!” I’d read the important ones over breakfast. Because many Slayers east of me are well into their day by the time I’m up, I want to make sure I reply to anything timely.

7:15 am Monday is Timesheet day: I review last week’s time entries from a high level because our Team Leads have already had their eyes on them. Hopefully nothing is missing and I can quickly export the data from Quickbooks Time and run a custom macro in Excel that produces a timesheet for each client. A brief review of the finished product and then I can email them out. With that task done, I add the weekly stats to an ongoing spreadsheet. Part of my role as “Chief Knowledge Officer” = data gatherer! 

8:00 am Time for something more interesting: a Google Survey. Last week we received over 200 resumes for a bookkeeping position we’d posted on Indeed. After an initial review, it turns out there were a lot of good ones! How to decide which ones to look at in more detail? While waking up to the Beatles, I was also designing a pre-interview screening survey that I would create in Google Forms. 

8:45 am  The Survey is complete! I’ve sent it to a couple of Slayers for feedback and testing and will spend the next while creating  instructions for my EA to send out the Survey to the candidates I reviewed in Indeed. Oh yes, and tea has arrived! I’m spoiled.

10:30 am Since I was in “recruiting mode”, I decided it was time to revamp the Google Sheet that we use to keep track of candidates: I consolidated some tabs, added data validation and conditional formatting. Ah, yes, that’s better!

11:30 am It’s a lovely warm day and hubby is making us a salad for lunch. We sit outside on the sunny side of the porch to eat and share stories of our mornings at work.

12:30 pm I have a quick five minute Zoom call booked with one of our Slayers to set up her LastPass account with 2 factor authentication. Passwords are such a key component to the security of our clients’ environment and securing sensitive accounts with that “2nd Factor” is the easiest thing you can do to protect them from being compromised.

12:45 pm Time to read today's internal slacks from three different “companies” and wade through the emails for anything important - not usually, fortunately - just a lot of “FYI’s” to file away. Wow! How did almost an hour go by reading Slacks? Sigh.

2:00 pm We have a new Slayer starting and today is her 1:1 orientation where I introduce her to our Google Workspace, tips and guidelines around our environment, introduction to our password manager, LastPass, our CRM Hubspot and answer any questions she had from her very thorough review of our Slayer Handbook (makes me sooo happy!)  

3:30 pm Check in with hubby to see when his day is ending - is it a nine-hour day again? Nope! Quitting time all around and it’s still sunny so we head outside to play. 

4:00 pm We walk up to the park with the soccer ball and the aerobie and I get some basic lessons on how to kick a ball which I don’t think I’ve done since elementary school. I found it more entertaining to kick the ball far past him and watch him chase it down - something he loves!

5:30 pm After the fresh air and exercise, it’s time for dinner. We’d chosen a “veggie only dinner”: pan roasted broccoli with an indian-spiced oil drizzle which hubby worked on while I pan roasted carrots and made a ginger orange sauce for it. They were both amazing and we wasted no time in adding them to our recipe database in OneNote.

7:30 pm Time to cozy up on the sofa and watch the last two episodes of Deutschland 83

10:00 pm Bedtime!