Assistant Persona

Nannerl is Wolfgang's assistant. She is Wolfgang's primary conduit and manager of logistical information. Through Nannerl, Wolfgang deals with a wide range of people and organizations from scheduling meetings with people inside the organization to dealing with Wolfgang's personal office logistics, travel plans, speaking engagements and board meetings.

Wolfgang is where Nannerl gets most of her requests for tasks, feedback for the work she's currently working and initiative and direction for future projects. Nannerl also receives requests from other people, usually to set up meeting times with Wolfgang.

Unlike Katie and Wolfgang, Nannerl does not coordinate the many people she interacts with. She is not responsible for their productivity and success. Rather she is tasked with completing discrete projects with clearly defined end-goals and needs to interact with many different people, oftentimes from many different organizations in order to complete her tasks.

The majority of Nannerl's tasks are actually for Wolfgang where Nannerl is acting as a proxy for Wolfgang. As a result, Nannerl needs to stay in constant communication with Wolfgang to make sure she is representing his interests accurately.

For example, Nannerl describes how sometimes "only Wolfgang" will know of dependencies between and the relative priorities of different tasks. Therefore he will request that she address her tasks or schedules meetings in a particular order. Over time however, Nannerl has learned to anticipate some of Wolfgang's ordering and prioritization patterns and has set up her own system for how she goes about coordinating travel plans or setting up meetings.

Nannerl approximates the meetings she pulls together for Wolfgang are 60/40 internal/external. And that her personal daily interactions are 50/50 internal/external.

One of the people she works most closely with in-office, outside of Wolfgang is Leopold, who is Nannerl's counterpart to Constanza, Wolfgang's wife and director of ABCD.

Nannerl says she often plays tag team with Leopold, working on projects together, handing tasks off to each other back and forth. This applies most to projects that require both Wolfgang and Constanza's participation (ie. IDEAL scholars) or if they are literally trying to coordinate an event or trip specifically for Wolfgang and Constanza (ie. vacation).

Nannerl's System

Nannerl currently has 47 open issue items in her Inbox, which is only 1 of 4 ways she keeps track of her tasks. (Paper notebook and digital and paper calendar are the other three.) Although she admits that some of her items are duplicated across her various task and life tracking systems.

Nannerl likes to keep the entire thread surrounding an open issue in the Inbox, so that she always has easy access to the context of the issue. As a result, often times, a single open issue will be represented by several emails in her Inbox.

Nannerl files all closed issues out of her Inbox into an Archive folder or a few other topic-specific folders she keeps, such as... (ask Nannerl again).

Nannerl's Calendar system

Nannerl uses iCal to manage her own calendar, her dog Arlo's calendar, her partner Carl's calendar, Wolfgang's calendar and the Mozartiana Office calendar. She also duplicates Wolfgang's calendar into Outlook (with Exchange) so that Constanza and Leopold can have access to it.

Nannerl maintains a personal calendar, which she often keeps permanently turned on under Wolfgang's calendar. She also has a separate calendar for her partner Karl and one for her dog as well.

Nannerl also enters "stuff she has do later in a specific timeframe" on her calendar.

Nannerl also uses a lot of paper to keep organized. She feels that sometimes jotting things down is just easier to do than entering things into a computer.

• She maintains a notebook where she maintains paper todo lists. She writes in a different color every day so she can figure out when she received a task. She will flip back to find todos and cross them out when she's done.
• She prints out a blank calendar so she can jot down time-sensitive tasks/appts as she gets them by phone or in face-to-face meetings
• She keeps track of when she has to do certain tasks by attaching stickies to her paper calendar and moves the stickies along, week to week, as the project progresses.
• Sometimes Nannerl will print out a few days of her calendar at a time when there is an ongoing event: e.g. Godzilla board meeting schedule.
• The rest of her to-do list is in her Inbox

Nannerl's Folder system

• Nannerl also maintains a manila folder for each of her projects where she stores all related paper materials such as invoices, receipts, contracts, itineraries, brochures and other documents.
• Nannerl also archives all of her old todo lists and project folders.

Projects

Nannerl usually has between 7-10 open projects of varying sizes at any given time. Some are one-time projects, others ongoing and still others recur at regular intervals.

They include coordinating a large residential moving effort which requires collaborating with both people in-office and external vendors such as moving companies, insurance companies, etc.

Personal logistical issues for Wolfgang include dealing with the House manager, medical insurance evaluation, etc.

She is also managing and planning a large-scale archiving project.

Wolfgang is a frequent, but not constant traveler. Nannerl usually has between 5 and 7 active trip folders open at any given time. She coordinates approximately 1-2 trips a month for Wolfgang. Some of the trips are personal in nature, but the majority of trips are for speaking engagements and conferences which involve heavy logistical coordination with event organizers and other related activities.

Nannerl is always preparing for or wrapping up some event for one of the entities in the Mozart Enterprises Inter-Entities group. This year, there will be 4 Mozart foundation board meetings, 3 Mozartiana board meetings, 3+ Godzilla board meetings, several XYZ gatherings and a Connect4 event. Nannerl estimates that there are about 12-15 major events of this kind to manage every year.

-- MimiYin - 20 Apr 2006