A small fire broke out in the 7th floor of my 10 floor office building so everyone in the building was told to take the stairs to evacuate. The door at the bottom of the stairs was LOCKED, and everyone sat there like a bunch of assholes for 5 minutes until they found the security guy with the key who had already evacuated a different way!

My columns are set up as follows: 1. Project 2. Frequency performed (one off/daily/weekly, etc) 3. Details 4. Direct hyperlink to project

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[I'm an admin to a hospital vp and also support our patient care services dept, which includes all our nurse managers.

Basically, I'm all over the place: in meetings, planning events and travel, reconciling expenses, preparing reports and tracking (nagging) others for their action items' progress, correcting time cards, updating policies, etc etc.

I perform my job with very little supervision (just the way I like it) and must stay very organized. To be honest, I don't feel that I have a very good memory, so keeping a spreadsheet like this is a lifesaver.

It will impress the hell out of your supervisor when you are able to quickly find whatever they ask for, make yourself indispensable... "What would we ever do without you, insertusernamehere!?") and almost guarantees you excellent pay raises.]

BONUS LPT: Use Microsoft Outlook's many tools to color coordinate and automatically sort your emails so that you aren't "touching" your emails over and over.

When an email arrives, I click to sort it in my Inbox as one of the following (plus others directly related to ongoing projects). Note: when sorted alphabetically, the categories sit in your inbox in order of importance.

Attention (red) Delay-to do (yellow) Delay-waiting (orange) Yet to come (gray)

I also use color coded calendar categories so that my supervisor and I can see what we have going on at a glance:

Phone/conf calls (green) Birthdays/anniversaries (purple) PTO or outside meetings (black) Important reminders (red) Meetings (blue)

Hope this is helpful to someone. 🤓

People feel more valued or in control if they get to make choices about the task ahead. I learned from taking care of my nephew that if I ask him "What do you want for lunch?" It can turn into an endless thing about why I don't have his favourite food or why we can't go to McDonalds. Instead I say "Do you want pasta or toasted sandwiches for lunch?" He makes a choice and feels some measure of control even though I have maintained control over what I have to make.

This can be manipulative but if you're managing a team of people with a lot less experience than you it can be tempting to map out every aspect of how they do a job. Some jobs are highly complex and time-sensitive and have to be done a certain way. Wherever possible find areas where people working under you can make choices or use initiative safely. They are more likely to take pride in what they're doing and take ownership of the task if they have some measure of input.

EDIT: Some commenters seem to be missing the 'even if' in the title. I'm not saying manipulate people all the time. Where possible, give them genuine scope for initiative and genuine choices. If necessary, and without being too obvious about it, manufacture choices. People work well with structure. Too much and you're micro-managing. Too little and you're giving up control. Good managers should avoid these two extremes.