0152E: Web-Enabled Coordination and Collaboration

I find myself leveraging my online communication and coordination skills a lot more this week. Sure it's part of my job given I do handle the company's marketing efforts and that includes our social media channels. But what I'm talking about goes beyond that.

On the one hand, there's our gaming-related stuff, which has a rather active online component as of late since we're still in the process of preparing for a new game. Heck, gaming is the only reason that I maintain a Dropbox account is to access gaming files that we share. This includes PDF copies of various game books and character sheets as well. Working out of a shared folder means that the GM for this game - who will actually be Mahar instead of Tobie this time around - can instantly get access to our updated sheets without us physically meeting. And we've been chatting on and off in a group chat to address other questions and compare character build and other fun gamer stuff.

And given my relative involvement in Task Force Pride as a volunteer, that also involves a lot of online discussions. Sure we meet every few weeks when we're able to, but there's a heck of a lot of discussions that continue on from day to day. It's kinda of crazy and yet impressive all at the same time. And between the document storage of Facebook Groups and the sharing capabilities of Google Drive, it's rather easy to have files going back and forth while at the same time allowing for multiple editors to work on a document all at the same time.

And sure, I've gushed over a lot of these different cloud-based services and their collaborative features at one time or another but this is one of those time when I actually get to test everything out. I find myself digging into my mental archives of various Gmail tricks and Google features to find solutions to help out the groups that I'm involved in. It's quite the fun exercise in advanced tech geekery.

And admittedly I could use the break from just focusing on my work tasks. The final deadlines are all lined up over the next few days and naturally I'm busying putting all the final pieces together. And that involves a lot of the more traditional coordination over office email or phone calls to my colleagues on the other side of the planet. Fun stuff, but it can get pretty tiring. And as much as I'm focused on getting everything done, sometimes I need to shift gears for a bit to relax my brain and have the opportunity to think about something other than putting the response documents together.

Just one more work shift to deal with for this week. And then the weekend. And then a new work week begins anew. It's an annoying cycle for now given work is work is work, but hey, it can't last forever. Right?