I have two New years Resolutions this year.  I thought I would put them down here so as to better hold myself to them.

1)  Stop being late for things.

To date I have found that I am often running late for things or else forget about things entirely, whether that be staff meetings at work or singing lessons for some reason I am always slightly behind in time from where I need to be.  One, but by no means the only reason, is that I often don’t leave travel time for things.  When I finish one thing, if I could instantly be at my destination then I would not be late, however since I can’t, I then have to spend 15-30min getting to where I am going and so of course I am late once I get there.  To get around this I will try to be more organised, and actually plan travel time, and wrap up time.  I was on time for my first singing lesson of the year yesterday so it is all running to plan so far!!

I guess an added bonus with this plan is that I aim to make more blog entries this year.  I notice last year that I only made 14 entries all together.  As I say I need to be more organised, but more of my on-line plans for 2010 later.

2)  Try to be less snappy at people at work.

I find that I am often impatient with incompetent or demanding people at work.  I would rather that I was calm, efficient, and professional at all times regardless of the person or group I am dealing with.  Anyone who has had to work in large organisations themselves will know the environment that I am talking about.  You can’t just ask the appropriate person to do something and it gets done.  In most cases instead even finding who the appropriate person might be is a chore with about a two week lead time.  As an example, if a rather extreme one, all the service spaces here at the University of Sydney were recently re-keyed for OHS reasons to try to control access to these potentially dangerous spaces.  Rather than providing those that need access with the new keys prior to changing the locks, the locks were all simply changed without warning.  This was in October 2008.  There was no plan in place as to how to get keys to the appropriate people, and even some argument as to who the appropriate people might be.  We are still trying to get these keys more than a year later.  So yes in large organisations one often comes across trying circumstances and even more trying people, but I think the most important thing is to avoid at all costs becoming the beast that you hate.  ie I do not want to become petty, obstructionistic, unhelpful and narrow minded.  Instead I aim to be as efficient, fast, thorough and professional as possible.  Like when you are flying Virgin Blue, their service is great.  If only other airlines, or indeed other businesses in general, put as much effort into customer service.