Hidden work

Earlier this week some material I had ordered for the workshop arrived.  The material, Macor, is a machinable glass ceramic produced by Corning Incorporated.  It has a low thermal expansion coefficient and is NMR transparent making it an excellent choice for variable temperature parts used within our magnets.  Of course a neat material such as this comes with a hefty price tag and had to be special ordered from the US, as I couldn't find a NZ or Australian vendor.  There's no point in having such raw material laying about the lab, so I wanted to get the Macor and prints down to the workshop before the week was over.  Even though the workshop has already made these same parts many times out of plastic, I had to tweak the prints for the material, which of course took longer than expected.

Yesterday I mentioned that I had reviewed a draft of a patent application that our group will be filing in the near future.  While I reviewed the text yesterday, today our lawyer came back to me with a request to update some drawings.  As such this afternoon I ended up formatting 20 pages of figures.  Again, this was work I hadn't scheduled into my day.

My point is that hidden work can take up a significant amount of my time.  To be better about managing my work expectations I need to allow some time each day so that I can take on these tasks as they come up.  Additionally, I should be more aware of work I have on the horizon so that I am not side tracked by items at the last minute.

In addition to the above work, I had a meeting today regarding the upcoming academic audit of the University and I was able to get my microcontroller to talk with my ADC and DAC devices via SPI.