tabs and tasks

The number of open tabs in my 3 browser windows (Safari, Chrome and another Chrome ) is just growing every day. Every open tab in an open task.

The first tab in one of the Chrome's window is a half-written Email (some emails requires a lot of thoughts and I have to edit them too to make sure my English matches my title in the signature!). Another one is an open email that I have read and still undecided what I want to do with it. It is from Alex, the video contractor who has disappointed me with his email. He is just not the type of person I would like to work with. Anyways, this tab also contains a few chat windows, one contains some important tasks that I have to do, to some links I have to open = news tabs to be opened. One tab is a PayPal page, which reminds me of the 4 freelancers whose payment is overdue 4 days now. The last tab in this Chrome window is a news page which contains a few names of new Education startup and I can't convince myself closing it before I have checked out all the names in the article. There ate a couple of other news pages. Some of these are google alerts that I received over the past two days for the pages that contain some keywords I have defined in Google Alert. There are mainly our competitors that i would like to be updated about.

Next Chrome starts with my Calendar tab. It is open always so I won't forget the meetings which are not too many these days btw. But i also leave it open to check other people's calendar when I see them offline so I am aware whose is where. The next tab is a spreadsheet called "potential conferences". This is one of the most urgent things I have to do: Check out the website of contact the conferences, gather some info and decide if it is worth spending a few grants attending the conference or not. The next tab is a "support" ticket. A prof has complained that one of the interactive demos we made has a "serious" mistake: The Demo is called Titration and one of the labels is reading "base" instead of "acid". I have to respond and send that to Jordan to fix. Very easy one. Will definitely do after I finished this post right away. Next to it is our company blog. Shaya, our marketing manager has written a new post today. I read most of it, but there is one last paragraph which I don't remember why I did not finish reading. Most probably someone just called me during reading and when I came back, I found it lost among the open tabs. The tab next to it is again a google spreadsheet. this one has details of the freelancers work and I have to just check the cells randomly to make sure they are not reporting wrong data. They have more or less gained my trust by now, so, I don't really check the details of each list they have done. But still, I do random check every time so, i won't regret for trusting someone who has lots of opportunities to put in a few wrong numbers and get more payments. Next tab, is the homepage of a prof who is really involved in active learning and teaching, I have to call her or email her and ask if she would be interested to collaborate with us. I gave this task to our content developer up to yesterday but he was really not able to handle the responses that prof give and I found myself spending longer times explaining to him how to do this than if I were to do myself. So, that is the reason this tab is now added here. Next tab is our server console. It contains a quick report how our servers are doing and how many students are online in which courses etc. This one is really just for information and there is no task associated with it. I normally don't have this page open, except today when one of our Canadian server went down today for 10 min! It could be very disastrous as you can imagine! Anyways, I kept it open for the rest of today and was checking it from time to time so nothing crazy is happening. I actually just closed it now.

The third browser is Safari. There are two reasons I use two separate browsers: One, I open my work gmail in one, and open the personal gmail in the other. Second, when I want to test something in our technology, I log in to student account in one and prof account in the other. So, I have a student account open in one tab in Safari as well as my personal gmail. The next tab is a music steaming website that I listen from time to time during working when I have not forgotten to bring my headphones. In general Safari is not my favourite browser and the tabs here are fairly unimportant tabs that I won't check as often.

I was talking to Ken today about the organization. He asked me: Mohsen, your role is not clear to me exactly: What are you doing most of your days? " For a moment, I found myself having a hard time to explain what I am really doing in a day-to-day basis. Now that i have read this, I know better. The question is: Is this really what I want to do?