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Do I have five things? Let's see.
I finished Fugitive Telemetry, the new Murderbot novella, and immediately felt the need to read Network Effect again. Not that I didn't enjoy the new one -- I definitely did -- but it felt more like backstory than a prequel, and it made me want to revisit all that tasty, tasty character development.
I've been in 2.5 hour meetings every morning for a project management training at work. It's a year-long program that traditionally kicks off with an in-person event at our main office in DC; I was originally nominated for it last year, but it took them until now to figure out how to transition it to a virtual event. It's working pretty well, although it's a long time to be on Zoom, especially multiple days in a row. It's been interesting, and I can see how it will be applicable not just to my dayjob work but to some of my fandom projects as well. But today was the first of two days on finance and budgeting and I can already feel myself start to glaze over. After this week, I'll be assigned a mentor and there will be various follow-up sessions throughout the year. I do hope we're able to do an in-person event at some point -- it's always nice to meet my distant co-workers face to face.
Speaking of distant co-workers, it's now been over a month that I'm not assigned to an office and am officially "remote". It's weird. I don't like it. I hope we find out who gets to be assigned to the Oakland office soon.
In other media news, we finally started The Mandalorian. We're enjoying it, but T is unmoved by The Child and its cuteness. I am flabbergasted by this.
One week and two days to Palm Springs! I can't wait.
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It's an in-house training created by and for my employer, but it's based in PMI principles because they encourage PMP certification. (All of our instructors and facilitators were PMPs, and the company offers a more intensive training for people who want to go that route.) This week was the kickoff, which I'd describe as an interactive lecture -- mostly it was people going through prepared slides, but we had regular breaks for written activities and breakout sessions, and we were encouraged to ask questions and interact via the chat at any time. I was wrong about the duration -- it's six months, not a year. Starting next month, we'll have five monthly meetings on a specific topic, preceded and followed by homework and threaded text chat (on MS Teams). We've also been assigned a mentor who we're supposed to meet with for at least half an hour a month. We're allotted 30 hours total PD time for the whole thing, including the synchronous meetings and the asynchronous activities. The kickoff was a lot of information, but I learned useful things about both PM in general and about how projects are managed at my company. If you want more details, let me know!
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I'm working on my MBA in project management right now. I started it for the same reason - it's useful in almost every single aspect of regular life, not to mention most professional work environments.
Good luck!
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I really truly do not. Having my work space and creative space at the same desk using mostly the same equipment is messing with my head in so many ways, and it's much harder to preserve a work-life separation, which is very important to me. I also prefer being able to connect with at least some of my colleagues in person, rather than everything being via videoconference (which raises the work-life separation problem, too, since so much of my socializing has also been via videoconference). Not having a commute is nice, but the tradeoff is worth it to me. I am fortunate, though, because assuming I get a space in the Oakland office, I'll have a pretty easy all-BART commute, no Bay Bridge required.
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The tradeoff of the commute is absolutely not worth it to me. I am light sensitive and BART gives me headaches. I was commuting via carpool and AC Transit and spending 2:15 every weekday. I was miserable. I live every day in tremendous fear of having to return to that. Also, at our beautiful former office, I had lots of natural light at my desk, and I hardly have any in the new office. Sunlight is very important to me emotionally, and the new office was a horrible struggle. I had file an ADA claim and make them change all of the lighting on one side of the office. Another move may be in the picture, soon, too, and who knows what I'll end up with then. I just want to work here and avoid all of those problems.
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The training was genuinely engaging for me most of the time. I think it helped that it was all live presentation (not a video in site) and that it was developed and given completely in-house, so everything could be made directly relevant to my employer (if not equally relevant to everyone's work -- they make the cohort intentionally cross-functional, so we come from across the organization).
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