My 5 Most & Least Favorite Activities

     

The List

https://gist.github.com/fool/b0f254ff8c72a5765b6a9138249789d6

My Five Most Favorite Activities

  1. Deliver a talk to many people you don’t know at a conference or meetup
    • This was an easy choice for #1 - I have whatever the opposite of stage fright is. :)
  2. Receive occasional phone calls requesting support from our highest-value customers
    • I always enjoy helping people, but these calls usually have the best chance to make a major impact for a client.
  3. Help train and onboard new support teammates
    • Training was always one of my favorite tasks at Five Maples - I see no reason for that to change elsewhere.
  4. Write and maintain documentation for our software and blog posts for our website.
    • I was actually the one to push for & spearhead the implementation of our internal company wiki at Five Maples. :D
  5. Work with prospective customers to explain our service and the pricing model
    • I enjoy helping people feel like they’re getting value for their money, and this is a great way to facilitate that. There’s no worse feeling for a client than not realizing they’re either way over or under-provisioned.

My Five Least Favorite Activities

  1. Dig through server logs to troubleshoot a customer’s website behavior
    • While I’m always happy to do it, I’ve been bitten enough times by this to dread it. I dread it because of customers who have WAY more than they first indicate installed on their server. This sometimes causes things to go awry in… unexpected ways.
  2. Manage a support team
    • I’ve managed people before. I’m sure I’ll do it again. It’s still not something I look forward to, as I dislike being at the distance that management typically requires from my coworkers (unless by “manage” you mean in a more logistics/scheduling role, in which case, that might not be too bad).
  3. Engage multiple users at once via chat to answer their questions and troubleshoot problems
    • I don’t enjoy doing this because I dislike giving anyone less than my full attention - it just feels rude (even if they often can’t tell). Not to say that I wouldn’t be willing to do this, however. :)
  4. Create video tutorials to help teach users a specific feature or use case
    • I simply don’t consider myself particularly photogenic (which is funny, considering what I said above about how much I like to be on stage). Screencap-based videos don’t trouble me any, however. And regardless - it’s you folks who get to decide if I’m photogenic enough for your videos - not me. :)
  5. Find and recruit teammates for the support team
    • Ever since my best friend let me down after pushing for him, I’ve been shy of recruiting.