A desk of my own

Yay! I have a desk. It's made a bigger difference than I expected in my productivity and excitement about coming in to work some mornings. The feel of having even a little space that's more or less my own is great... maybe I'll even put a few things on the wall in the next few weeks! In the end, it just took me realizing that it would make a difference to me, and then deciding to establish myself at this unused desk. Good stuff.

In terms of work, the excitement(?) of this past month has been learning my way around the intricacies of Salesforce, the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform my organization uses to track everything and everyone they have contact with.

I'm working on a system using outside PHP code with Salesforce code and internal pages to sync with MySQL database tables. The goal is to manage the database that will display event calendars on our new website, and also let volunteers interact with that database from the backend to create radio versions of those calendars. Oh yeah, and match up the event venues with our records for those venues and their underwriting / sponsorship history. No problem.

We've also finished strategic planning here for the next year, including a detailed action plan for my project, rebuilding the website. That means that for the last few weeks we've had two separate timelines to try to follow -- this action plan and my VAD. I just spent this afternoon coordinating those, which happened more smoothly than I expected. So this month, and here on out, I'll have just one timeline to follow. That will be good, since trying to coordinate with both meant that I often wasn't totally satisfying either; the unexpected complications of some steps didn't help.

Our fall pledge drive starts in just a few days. Those next ten days will be something of a flashback to my first week here, which happened to also be the special one-week summer pledge drive that happened this year. It's nice to think that I'm so well settled in here now, know my coworkers and my way around, and just generally the way things work. (It's also exciting because there's tons of great food in the office to tempt the 'round the clock phone volunteers; I may not have to buy food for two weeks!)

That's it for now... happy to be transitioning into a more active phase of my year, actually starting to make decisions and build working systems instead of always being in research mode. And still thinking about next year... I know from experience that there will be plenty of questions about that when I visit family over the holidays!