Today I learned:
1. Eating local: We stopped by a farmers market this morning and ran into a friend helping out with her dad selling locally produced sausage under the name Chef’s Natural. I have to admit 99% of our meat and fish comes from places like Costco and Safeway, but today we bought a few meals worth to support a friend. Dinner tonight was exceptionally tasty, and with no chemicals on the ingredient list I even felt watching my kids chow down. Surprisingly, it was not much more costly than the something similar from a big box retailer. A good lesson in eating local and supporting the little guy.
2. Temporary Pain: I spent a chunk of my day working on planning staff resources for 2012 projects. Realizing workload will exceed resources, I started thinking how I could utilize temps to offload some tasks. This made me reflect on past experience and reminded me of a quote I wrote for myself one day last spring:
“Keep your enemies close, and the temps you hire to do menial tasks even closer.”
The motivation for that came from a day lost dealing with two temps hired to do a time sensitive task. That experience taught me there are few things you can actually pass off to a temp to save your staff time. If your operation is lean enough those tasks either don’t exist, or they are done more efficiently and with less supervision by those who already work for you. A good reminder and an opportunity to rethink priorities for the year ahead.
two things i learned today 