Returning to work: Needing more context

Every time I return from a break I think about writing this post – and then forget.

Returning from a break can be a very frustrating experience for IT users and one of the main reasons for that is that all of those so-called scheduled tasks have been queuing up in the infrastructure waiting for you to plug-in or turn on.

There can be quite a number of them: system updates, password expiry, anti-virus updates, password expiry, application updates, browser updates, etc.

The main challenge here is that the activities aren’t really “scheduled”, they are just set by a simple daily, weekly, monthly elapsed agenda without any context. Any break in the system being online means that the activities are just queued up waiting to happen.

Personally, the ones that I find most frustrating are the password expiry ones. You always have a lot to think about when you return from a break, thinking about new passwords is one that you shouldn’t really be burdened with. What I find worse are the passwords that expired just before I went on holiday.

It can’t beyond us to do this in a less intrusive way. We only have to understand the context a bit better and schedule appropriately.