Lori is Director of Human Resources for KEI, which serves OSAF and LPFI. She is responsible for:

• Salaries and payroll
• Employee benefits
• Expense reports
• Annual reviews
• Employee feedback
• Hiring and Internships
• Personnel issues

Lori's data

Ad-hoc requests for Lori's time

Always has 15-30 things going on at any given time

• Somebody needs to have their payroll changed - which is something that needs to happen by a certain date e.g. 28th of the month

• Requests to posted intern positions @ different schools. Need to keep track of:
  • Contact at the school
  • Password for job board
  • Gather a list by talking to people around here
• Job descriptions for the interns via email from whoever did the last rev of interns

• Request to post jobs for an H1 application. Need to keep track of:
  • Application deadlines
  • How long up for
  • When they go up
  • When they come down
  • Maintain a standard list of places to post
  • Get information from attorneys
  • Follow-up on responses to the job posting

Recurring tasks

• Weekly status report on hiring and new hires
• ???

Amorphous tasks

• Fire code issues: Jared asks Lori to research a few things on the firecode for the office
• Figure out a better process for managing office keys: who has keys

Recurring captial-P Projects

• Finding the right health plan for KKIE
  • Send off demographic information about KKIE employees to insurance broker
  • Broker comes back with 5-10 plans to choose from
  • Goes through a process with Mitch and Freada to figure out which ones is right for KKIE

• Signing employees up for Flex-plan benefits: Happens every year.
  • Medical applications
  • Dental applications
  • Non-qual benefit allotments
  • Waiver of coverage forms
  • Processing Reimbursement forms
• Sends out info about plan options to employees:
  • Excel spreadsheet of choices: plans/benefits/rates. Lori uses last year's spreadsheet as a template.
  • Different forms every year
  • All of this has to be uploaded to the internal wiki as well
• Runs sessions to answer questions about benefits
  • Set up fixed times
  • Prepared materials
• Needs to keep track of applications, which ones went out already, which ones she's still waiting for
• Follow-up: When the first bill comes in, check to make sure it's correct

• Setting up New Hires
  • Setting up Payroll
  • Signing them up for Benefits

Stuff for the Archives

• Fax number for different health carriers
• Group plan numbers
• Forms for different health carriers
• Personal info about employees birthdays, # of dependents, zip codes
  • Doesn't want to keep a centralized repository of this information
  • Cobbles it together every year from a bunch of different sources, paper forms, email, etc.

Personal task management techniques

• Maintains a Notes document. Types in all outstanding tasks for Today
• Jots notes down onto a pad of paper. Uses 2-3 writing pads
• Sometimes she transfers email requests to her task list on her note pad

• Stars important tasks
• Crosses off items as they get done
• Moves items to the next day's list if they aren't done

• Maintains a running list of things that she's waiting on other people for
• Creates a lot of temporary lists that die
  • Project-centric: Things she has to do for a particular project (ie. Research fire code)
  • Timeframe-centric: Things she has to do Today, Things in the next month

• Maintains Project files: Blue sheild Health Insurance, Guardian Dental Insurance, etc
• On the folder, she maintains a list of employees that owe her application forms and tracks who hasn't turned in forms yet

• Creates drafts in her Email client to keep track of communications tasks (ie. status report she needs to send out)
• Her Drafts folder is her 'Working on' folder

• Maintains a list of Calendar events
• Stuff happening over the next few weeks/month
• Mostly activities (e.g. dinner, parties)
• Remembers things like Rent on her own
• Gets notifications via email for Utilities: Pac Bell pings her 5 days before her bill is due, which prompts her to write a note to herself to remember to go to the website to pay

Lori's dog Friday

• Maintains 2 folders for her dog Friday
• Adoption stuff and Vet stuff
• Keeps track of tasks and information on the outside of the folder
• Recurring tasks:
  • Front-line flea treatments happen on the 15th of every month (keeps this in her head)
  • Heart medicine every other day

Do you ever remember something you had to do, but can't remember if you already did it?

• Yes, need to go back and look at Sent mail
• Sometimes has to call or email people to confirm
• Heart medicine for Friday is easy to keep track of because you mark off dosages on the medicine bottle

Tools

• Uses email primarily for communication
• Verbal, face-to-face meetings is the next most common form of communication
• Rarely on the phone, usually only with 3rd party vendors (e.g. Health insurers)
• Does not really use the wiki

• Uses a daily calendar to remind herself of when things are due (Outlook???)
• Uses the month view to see:
  • Meetings
  • Out of office info
  • Project due dates

Printing

• Health insurance forms are mostly paper
• Blank forms come in digital form
• But filled out forms are always paper
• Prints stuff out sometimes, but needs to shred most things for privacy reasons

Organization techniques

• Archives email
• Archives all her task lists
• Has a big task list for next month ???

• For the Fire code project:
  • Listed out all the tasks she could think of, even though she wasn't going to do all of them now
  • And then figure out what she needs to do most urgently and what needs to get done Today

???

• Maintains a 2006 benefits folder
• Create sub-folders...for what?
• Non-current stuff...???
• x2006

Maintaining focus

• Doesn't have a rigid system
• A lot of things are driven by deadlines (e.g. Health plan applications, Payroll due dates)
• Lori leaves messages open on her desktop if she thinks she can/needs to get to it within the next couple of hours
• See 'Personal Task Management Techniques' for more

Pain points

• Entering information is a pain point. Putting information in the right context so that she will trip over it at the right time.
• Putting stuff on the calendar doesn't really work.

• Her system doesn't have enough cross-checks
• "If I don't flip a page, sometimes I will end up missing stuff"
• It's hard to keep information on-hand when it's needed. Must sift through old email to find info.
  • e.g. Someone sends her a change of address request. She writes it down on her task list. When it comes time to do the task, she has to go back into her email to find the change of address information. Sometimes if a person has moved multiple times, she needs to make sure she has the right "latest address".

Takeaways

• Heavily context-driven. Likes to have information where it makes sense (ie. Tasks on the outside of Project folders.)
• Has a good memory and feels comfortable relying on it for routine things (e.g. Rent)

-- MimiYin - 03 Apr 2006