Happy Friday

Happy Friday with a quick reminder:

Today, I'm enjoying a cup of coffee at work, refocusing my attention to those tasks that fall into my "Do First" category (and not worrying about those I can "ignore" today), gearing up for a ten-mile training run, some Valentine's Day shopping and finding out if my friends will welcome a brand new baby boy or girl into their lives! Which by the way, do you bring presents to these gender reveal things???

Enjoy the day,

Kira

Priorities

My one year anniversary at my job will be at the end of March- go team! In my professional career I've found it helpful to make lists to get everything accomplished. I live for sticky notes and notepads. Recently, my boss asked our team to fill out a "prioritization matrix." Now, my boss is notorious for being fairly disorganized, so I found it slightly humorous he was giving us a flow-chart of sorts to fill out to help us prioritize.

I've had it sitting on my desk, but finally decided to fill it out. The concept behind the chart is to help you decide throughout your workday which tasks are immediate, which ones you can work in throughout your day, which items you need to selectively invest your time in and items you can delay or ignore. I decided to make mine a "working" matrix of sorts, which is why you see the stickies. Throughout the day as I switched gears, I wrote the task down. At the end of the day, I put them where I thought they should belong. The stickies allowed me to re-prioritize as I felt appropriate.

I thought this was a really excellent activity for several reasons. First, it calls to light all the tasks you do throughout your day, which is great if your job requires you to switch from task to task on tight deadlines. Secondly, it forces you to decide which of those tasks need immediate attention, and which ones you can put on hold for a bit. Most importantly, it called to my attention, the projects I would like to be working on in the future. Not pictured, I added an additional category with this feature.

Of course, I have every intention of making a cute one, but for now, this will do.

It was freezing cold today (freezing and Texas don't exactly go together), but I had to get a quick run in after work. I'm running the Austin half in about a week and half, and it has a significant amount of hills. My hips/glutes have been bothering me a bit lately, but actually felt really good during tonight's run.

Now, I'm off to my new addiction:

Good Dogs Gone Bad

It's a good thing Sawyer has a face this cute:

 For times when he does things like this:

You might not be able to tell from the photo, but I made a ginormous cupcake cake for Kim's birthday celebration on Saturday. I caught him eyeballing salivating over it like a piece of steak while it was cooling, so I should have known this was coming. You would think after the red Christmas cupcake incident (he jumped up on the counter and grabbed a cupcake with RED icing and lockjawed that thing like his life depended on it.) - I would have learned this animal loves him some Funfetti (I mean- it's my favorite too).

Regardless, Kristen and I were both out of the kitchen, and Andy was playing Candy Crush studying, so he was left to his own devices. I peeked into the kitchen because it got suspiciously quiet, and I saw about a quarter of the cake destroyed. Sawyer went to town on that thing, and I think it's safe to say he didn't feel bad about it either. Evidenced by the fact that while I just stared in shock, he continued to lick up the last of those crumbs.

#goldenretrieverproblems

I did have to remind him it was about this time three years ago that I had to bust him out of the humane society, and he has been spoiled rotten well taken care of ever since.