Drink coffee, read email, find a reason to chat with my office crush, wait for my hair to dry, and maybe join a pickup meeting in the hallway.
In other words I’m not very productive until I’ve been here for a while.
How about you?
Oh no, I don’t want to chat with anyone when I first get here. My first hour of work is usually incredibly productive. I get my coffee and sit down and do whatever pressing task is there. I usually don’t even want to talk to anyone until at least an hour.
Today I spilled coffee on my new white shirt, but luckily not on my new blue sweater, so I went to the ladies to rinse out my shirt & use a Tide To Go stick. I decided to leave the sweater off so my shirt could dry faster. Tossed my sweater on my desk and my coffee cup tipped over and spilled on my new blue sweater (only on the sleeve, luckily). Off to the ladies again to rinse out my sweater.
First hour today - seemed like nothing but dealing with coffee problems.
Last 20 mins of each day I spend planning the next day. The first hour of each day I usually manage to remain on track and and on time, it’s the rest of the day that goes to hell in a handbasket.
This, especially when I’m busy. My productive time is the morning hours, though I can’t say on slow days that I don’t spend time reading emails/checking Facebook/etc.
If I’m in a crunch or even moderately busy? 8-noon is my most productive time. I just about turn brain dead between the hours of 3 and 5, so I gotta do work in the AM.
Mr. Athena is the exact opposite, which makes scheduling productive meetings (we sometimes work together) tricky.
During my first hour at work, I print about three dozen e-mails plus all their attachments in Word or Adobe. My five attorneys work late hours and forward to me any communications they want printed out for the file. In between sending to the printer, I’m checking their out boxes, ensuring I have fresh reams of paper on hand, and peeking at the Dope to see what the latest dust-up is.
I am incredibly productive in my first half hour. I have the pattern down so that nearly every second is productive. I usually have all overnight e-mails that came in since the previous day answered within the first twenty minutes, know my full schedule for the day, run checks on every production system in the building, and maybe finished a certification test or two if I have them due. I race through that so that I can work at my own pace the rest of the day without owing anyone anything.
It depends on the day. On Tuesdays and Fridays I dig right in and do important work before slacking off. On Wednesdays and Thursdays I can get right to the slacking. Mondays are, well, Mondays.
I get to the office around 9:30. Fill my coffee mug. Read e-mail to see if there are any emergencies. Go on my coffee break from 10:00 - 10:30.
We sometimes talk work during the coffee break…so…that could be considered productivity.
[Sometimes, I actually have to work. Most of the time it’ll wait, and I just stay later if I need to.]
-D/a
I check the futures and then catch up on the financial news. It is usually very slow and my favorite hour of the day.
Me, too. I start an hour earlier than the rest of my co-workers, except for the two in accounting. With just us three–and no phones on!–until 8:30 a.m., I can get a lot done. That first hour is generally my most productive. It’s not until everyone else troops in that the chit-chat, jokes, extra trips to the coffee pot, and such, start.
I sometimes come in and start working twenty or so minutes early, as well, maximising that head-start. Then I don’t feel bad about lingering around the coffee maker later in the day.
I also get to leave an hour earlier than anyone else, so I really don’t mind the early start, especially in the summer.
If I came in with the crowd, I’d probably still be productive the first hour, as I start the day with more enthusiasm than when I end it. Just not as much, due to the presence of others, and the phones being “on” and incoming calls to my desk.
I start at 7 AM by reviewing the patient histories and medications of all those who came into prison the day before; average of 33 new ones each working day.
Grab some coffee, boot up the computer, plow through the email from the previous 16 hours, review the charts designated as needing ‘urgent review’ (5-50 any given AM) and by 7:40 I’m ready to see the first patient of the day.
My mornings are so embarrassingly unproductive that I don’t even want to admit it. I try to set myself a task that doesn’t require much thought before I head home the previous evening, but if I don’t do that, I might spend a LOT of time surfing the dope before the neurons start firing on all cylinders.
Mornings are generally not my most productive time, so I usually spend the first hour on getting routine junk out of the way–reading and responding to emails, reading documentation, that sort of thing. That leaves me clear to spend the parts of the day when I’m really alert solving problems. That’s not to say I can’t do the heavy mental lifting in the early morning, just that I prefer not to. Honestly, if I know in advance that someone is going to need a miracle before 10:00 AM, I may well pull an all-nighter instead of trying to handle it before I manage to spin up for the day.
I’ve been retired for six years, but in my career as a mailman my first hour went like this: Get to the office about 15 minutes before starting time, get my coffee and a snack. Punch the time clock, go to the parking lot for a five-minute safety check on my delivery vehicle. Back inside and put up mail. No leaving my work area, allowed to talk to the other carriers, but not face to face, we’re in little cubicles surrounded by the mail we put up. Supervisor at a desk behind up making sure we work steadily. We had to ‘make standard’…that is we had to put up at least eighteen letters or eight ‘flats’ (magazines and such) per minute. Not quite as easy as it sounds when you have over 500 slots to choose from.
It took at least an hour and a half to get the mail up, so the first hour was just the beginning.
I longed for a job where I could ease into the day.
Curse the existence of e-mail.
Great googly moogly, you’re fast.