The Long Awaited Giveaway!

Forever ago, I mentioned that I was so inspired and motivated by the Blogalicious 2011 conference that I attended that i was going to hold my first giveaway at the end of November. Of course, I chose November because of all the online activities I was attempting to do, like Nanowrimo and Nablopomo. November came and went and although I managed to post every day during the month, I had absolutely NO follow through on my giveaway. And I have no excuses my friends. None whatsoever considering I did order the item and have had it on my bookshelf since it’s arrival.

So, to one of my very lucky readers will go a brand new Kindle Fire! <<insert applause here>>

To be eligible, you had to have been a follower of the site by the end of November or have commented on a post during the month of November. I put everyone’s name in a numbered list and used Random.org to pick a number and the winner is…

NIK

I’ve been following Nik’s blog for awhile now. She is a fellow knitter and a fellow STEM girl. Visit her on her site and consider joining to see her great projects.

I’m looking forward to the next Giveaway! Click that little follow button or comment often to be eligible. Thank you all for following along on this little journey known as my life.

Finishing?

The countdown is done. I am officially on holiday!!! I am officially done with my temporary 6 month assignment that turned into two years. And even though its not done, I am officially done with 2011. That may change tomorrow, but it’s how I feel today. 2011 was not a bad year by any means but it was a tough year, the worst of it being three trees hitting my house during spring storms. How I hate tornado season!

But 2012 will be here soon and although I expect it to be tough as well, I’m hoping for the kind of tough that strengthens me and not the kind that wipes me out. 2011 has wiped me out! So, what am I looking forward to in 2012???

• Making a family cookbook with my grandma
• Wedding planning with my mom
• Our wedding in September
• Becoming a wife, gaining a husband
• New job?
• Finishing a book
• Buying into a business
• Launching a new endeavor for engineers
• Becoming a MacArthur fellow or winning one of their grants or at least putting in a proposal for something
• Make the donation that will get me on the wall!!--more on this later.

There are so many other things on my list for the new year. Needless to say it will be a busy, busy, busy year and I’m praying for so many things for myself and for those around me. This is truly going to be a year of action. I can’t let 2012 see me as tired as 2011 saw me. I have to break through.

What’s on your Goal TO-DO list for 2012?

Kanban Followup

Since I’m stuck at work waiting for a meeting to start (I started this post on Monday night), I figured I would update you on how the Kanban productivity system was working out for me.

For tasks that are repetitive or have very distinctive sections or parts, this system is a great aid. In the middle of using this system to produce a report, I got sick and needed to be out of the office for a couple of days. Upon returning, my Kanban was on my desk giving me a visual clue of exactly where I left off. I was able to quickly get back to my report with little time lost in trying to figure out exactly where I was in the process. Adding the HOLD box allowed me to delay portions that were causing me problems. The extra box under the Done column was added to allow me to quickly answer questions from my manager on a subset of items that fit a specific criteria.

The green post-it tags are inputs to the report that I am writing. The blue tags are sections of the report itself that need to be completed. I put the Kanban in a plastic document sleeve to keep from loosing my tags. As I moved items into the DONE column, I started to tape them down as the tags at this point were starting to loose their stickiness.

For regular usage, I would…

• use the super sticky line of post-its so there is better hold
• always use a plastic document sleeve
• color code the task types to add to the visual value of the Kanban

And I do need to add that it is definitely a positive to have such a visual progress chart for coworkers and managers to fully understand your workload. I can verbally tell you that I am working on generating a report, but that doesn’t fully relay all the input documents that need to be produced and reviewed to generate the report as the Kanban above does.

All in all, the Kanban is an excellent tool for those job tasks with repetitive or distinctive sections. My next step is to evaluate using a Kanban for following a procedure flowchart.