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Once, back before I went freelance, I put my to-do list on a prominently
placed whiteboard in my cubicle. It was ranked by priority, and had a lot
of line items on it.
When people asked me to do something, I'd say, "Sure. I can do that. Where
do you think it ought to go on the list?" Often they would decide it didn't
really belong on the list at all, and would go away. Sometimes they'd look
at the whiteboard and go away without saying a word.
Since my time was occupied mostly by the same few people, the whiteboard was
useful for horse-trading. They could release their slot for one of their
other projects and give it to their new priority, and we wouldn't have to
confirm anything with higher management.
This doesn't cost anything if the project isn't underway, but it's really
inefficient to work on something, mothball it, and resurrect it just when
you've forgotten all the details.
Still, the whiteboard made the issue concrete.
I didn't particularly find myself in the templates business because the Tech
Pubs group was using Interleaf on SPARCstations and everyone else was using
Word on PCs. I just complained when they used the wrong logo artwork. The
topic of corporate stationery, letter formats, and FAX cover pages wasn't
inside my jurisdiction, which is just as well. It was less frustrating to
be responsible only for those things that passed through my own hands.
Now that I'm a freelancer, things are different -- much more free-form, and
the customer is king. It's fun, though.
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