Always on holiday...

Many apologies for the delay on my next post, been a little busy and a little under the weather along with the rest of the country. Which brings me onto holiday cover on your journals, I hear that some journals just close down for the time the office admin is on holiday (vacation for you US guys), with a message saying we are away but will be back in 2 weeks. This is what we used to do but thought, hang on if I try to order something off the internet I am not usually told that the office is closed for two weeks, come back then. So why should an editorial office close down? We have a pool of people working on our journals and allow a certain amount of people to be off at the same time, we also keep a strict holiday chart for people to look at before they book anything big like that trip to Blackpool or Disney, we also keep a set of holiday cover notes in the form of a manual (online) for people to access to cover the journal. We have many checklists and sets of guidelines per journal which helps a great deal for our cover and has worked reasonably well for 2 years now. We also try to do the same if people go off sick as papers still need to be given out and emails need to be answered. I wonder how others do it. I know I touched on this at Christmas but holidays are a problem and unfortunately we can’t ban them. I know you Americans only get a few minutes holiday a year and us Brits get 10 months holiday a year (ha).

Now we are back...

Happy new year to you all, I do hope you all had much fun and games with the latest of festivities and many apologies to you if you were working over the festive period. (Ha, that’s your own fault, get on a time management course).
Don’t know about you lot but my office was like the Mary Celeste between Christmas and New Year, everyone must be out shopping or recovering from hangovers or just sitting watching the Queens speech. Hmm I wonder which.
The trouble is though it is all very nice taking the time off having fun, but look at the mess you come back to. Hundreds of emails, loads of voice mails, list of to do’s have grown ten fold. How do you cope with the world of email? I mean we never used to have it and we all coped reasonably well. Whenever I go on a course now some bright spark always throws a spanner in the works by saying ‘I do not get time to do that because I have 5 million emails to answer’. My answer to them is usually ‘use that trash button a little more pal and get on with your day job’. Email has become a mine field now, what needs to be prioritised? How long do I spend on email a day? What needs answering? What needs trashing? It is all quite difficult to manage and I am sure there are courses for people to go on ‘how to handle emails’. At least I do not get spammed emails on Viagra or extensions anymore and I am not talking hair extensions.
January is a bit of a dull month, it is dark, wet, cold, blimey don’t I moan in my old age. Some exciting stuff coming though. The EON newsletter has just gone out, and again what a great issue, I really must say that this newsletter is worth the membership alone, well done all those involved. You can also get a free one day trial now with ISMTE at http://ismte.org/amember/signup.php you may wish to have a look first to get a feel of what the ISMTE is about. You can now also register for the 2 conferences being held in August. Lastly I want to know who is reading this blog, you can make comments even if you are not a member (nothing rude). Just to get a feel of who you are and what you do. Talk to me or are you too busy with emails :o)
Toodle pip.