Bored, bored, bored!

I am staggeringly bored.

I am working at home today and tomorrow, and I have a range of different things with me to do. I have made some progress this morning, but for the last two to three hours my brain has ground to a halt and I simply have got nothing done whatsoever.

The trouble is, what I have to do is mind numbingly dull and really doesn’t interest me at all. I am writing a Project Initiation Document for a project to refresh our web pages, rewriting a job description and pulling together a gannt chart for another project. I do quite like project management work, which appeals to my tidy ordered mind, but the subject matter bores me rigid.

I mean, IT, come on for goodness sake! I am a strategic, broad brush manager and I have staff to do things like that for me! The trouble is none of them could write a Project Brief or a PID if their lives depended on it and it would be twice the work and require numerous edits if I asked them to have a go. So it just seems simpler to do it myself.

It doesn’t help that the sun is shining today and it is pleasantly warm. The cats are basking on the lawn in a tight circle formation so that at least one of them can watch the puppy at all times, and she is running around them like a dervish with my old slippers and an old small squishy football, desperate for them to play with her. Very soon, one of them is going to reach out and lazily scratch her on the nose, I can see it coming.

There is a gentle buzzing of bees and garden strimmers (clearly not a lot of my neighbours are at work – I’ve never seen so much gardening activity in the middle of the day in the week) interspersed by the odd blaring car radio as one of the local Herberts drives up the road too fast, windows wide open and radio blasting out, in his customised Renault Clio that has speakers almost as large as the car itself. But apart from that, it’s a pretty peaceful summer’s day and a nice day to be sitting here looking up the garden.

This may come as no surprise to you, but I really don’t like my job. Oh, I can get on with it and when I’m in the office most of my colleagues are pleasant enough, but the work isn’t my cup of tea (I’ve sort of inherited quite a lot of it through various restructures etc and it was either that or be out of a job myself) and I’m really not sure what sort of difference it makes. Honestly, does it really matter that a load of super rich people in Kensington get their basement extension approved in eight weeks and a load of nimbys have access to a super duper web site so they can spy on and complain about their neighbours? I don’t think so!

I will have to get on in a minute, but I think after another half an hour or so I will pack it in for the day (I have been working since 8am, so that’s not too much of a skive) and come back to it hopefully refreshed and in a more IT type mood tomorrow.

But before I do, I’ll just see what Olympic sports are on the telly…..

Back to work today (briefly) before a few more days off. I'm really struggling to motivate myself, it all seems so DULL.

I'm sure the worthy residents of the wealthy central London borough where I work deserve to have their local authority open today, but actually it all does seem rather pointless. Most teams only have a skeleton staff available and things will just tick over. Nothing will actually get done.

I know lots of people feel really motivated and proud of their jobs, and indeed I used to feel like that. But more and more I can't really see the point of it all. After all, I'm not really making any difference to these people's lives and they are increasingly ungrateful and rude. It seems that the more we try to do for them, the more they expect and the less we get thanked. But perhaps I'm just feeling slightly jaundiced about the whole thing; I'm sure some of them think we are doing a good job and certainly if you work in the social services (for children, families, the elderly and the vulnerable) you really can improve and change people's situations. But planning, in Knightsbridge and Belgravia? Please! They're all filthy rich and most of them are foreign!

I've opened up my laptop today to 68 e-mails (not bad, but that's since 5pm last Friday), about half of which are rubbish, and half of the rest are whinges. I'm getting sick of it. Once, just once, it would be nice to open up an e-mail that says thank you.

I should be working now. Dealing with the problems and writing the reports no one wants too read. But I'm not, I'm writing this. The trouble is, jobwise I'm not sure what else I could do, and once you start to earn central London money, it's very difficult to move away from it because you take on commitments to match. I'll just have to make the best of it, won't I, and bide my time until I'm old enough to retire and do the things I really want to do. But by then I'll probably be too old and decrepit to do them!

So 2012 is a year of resolutions. I am shedding my commitments this year and focusing on ME! Weight, fitness and other general interests and leisure activities are coming first. That's my resolution! Let's see how long it lasts.