Tips for working hitch work (month on/month off, 2 weeks on, 2 off etc.)

[OilToil]

I couldn't find anything on this topic, so I was wondering if anyone here could share experience or tips on how to stay organized and aligned working an extended on/off schedule.

My specific situation is working 28 days on/28 days off at a fairly remote upstream oil and gas facility. When I'm off, another guy (my back-to-back (b2b)) is on. We get a few hours of handover on crew change day. We don't have a way to contact each other outside of those few hours.

I keep a list of what I'm working on and decisions/progress as I go, but I don't feel that it's very effective, and I almost never find myself looking at what my b2b has left me. The most use I get from it is when the plant is having operational difficulties when I'm coming in, knowing what the short term history has been and what has been tried already, other than that, I search the shared email box (all our email is sent to/from this shared account).

I asked that we stop foldering things, because there were hundreds of folders from all the previous people who had this job, and figuring out if something had been filed in equipment by equipment number, or under the project it's associated with, or as part of something else was impossible.

So is there anything better than a list in a spreadsheet of what I've worked on and a giant folder of mail to search through?

 

[MikeHalloran]

In Windows, I've used Agent Ransack to search for stuff.
It's really good at finding stuff in nested folders.
It's what MS Search should have been. ... and no stupid cartoons.

Way back when, I worked in a car part factory where the maintenance shop ran 24/7/365. Those guys kept a paper journal at the supervisor's desk, and were pretty religious about keeping it up to date, because handover happened at every shift change, and they were too crazy busy to talk much.

For my own reasons, I've kept work journals for the past decade or so, by day and by project. My b2b was just myself at some later time, trying to figure out what happened back then, who I talked to at what phone number, what they said, serial and model numbers of stuff that gave trouble, etc. Where I'm going with that is that journals work better when you stick to facts and write in complete but brief and clear sentences.

Omit rumor, speculation, and opinion; an opponent's lawyer might be reading it someday.

Include a date/time stamp at the beginning of each paragraph (<F5> in Windows Note), and leave a blank line between paragraphs. Using a keyword at the start of a paragraph makes a long log easier to search, visually or electronically.

I've tried using spreadsheets, and Word, for log files, but I always go back to Note, or more recently gedit in Linux, just because plain text files are easy to search and easy for anyone to read.







Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[OilToil]

Thanks mike, that helps. I guess my problem is sometimes I spend too much time describing what happened, rather than what I did or what I would like my b2b to do. I find it hard to work without background information, but it makes the notes very very long (we handle a very wide range and very large number of issues). I've built a tool that allows me to expand a 'journal' entry so that only the most recent update is visible by default, but all my previous updates are in there.

 

[MikeHalloran]

<tangent>

Before Windows shipped, and for a while thereafter, I used Lotus Agenda for staying organized. I think two people could share it as b2bs, but it doesn't matter; IBM killed the product when they bought Lotus. They offered me a discount on Lotus Organizer, which looked cool, but fell short of being even close to a replacement. Agenda does not run well in any version of Windows; it basically demands unrestricted access to the hard drive, which it flogs mercilessly.

Then IBM said they had rolled the Agenda technology into Lotus Notes. I've met a few people who used Notes, and it sounded nothing like Agenda. My boss and I scheduled a day-long demo of Notes. The IBM guys couldn't even get the two laptops they brought to talk to each other, not over a network, and not over a cable either. They spent the day bullshitting us about what Notes could do for us if we could get it running. ... when they demonstrably couldn't do it. I don't think I've ever seen a demonstration go worse, but they kept soldiering on, reciting their scripts and telling us what we would be seeing on the screen if the product were workng. Total waste of time.

I would pay with my own money for a modern version of Agenda, but so far, nobody has managed to catch up to it.

</tangent>

I'd like to learn more about your journaling tool and how you use it.



Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[cvg]

have begun using Microsoft OneNote lately and it makes it easy to document things with a lot more capability than just text. I am now using to help organize my work across all my projects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_OneNote

 

[dwallace1971]

Like cvg, I've been using OneNote, along with the Getting Things Done methodology with great success. I think such a system would work well with more than one user. There are some great references on line and you can get a copy of the Getting Things Done on Amazon.

"On the human scale, the laws of Newtonian Physics are non-negotiable"

 

[loki3000]

at the end of your period you should write a short summary of what projects are open, what seem to be the problematic areas...