Office Office

Based on almost scientific observations in several corporate zoos, a quick way to evaluate your position and importance in the office is... Office. Here's how.

As a keen new monkey in the open-space cage, you start working with Excel. You'll spend most of your time in there, doing actual work. Day in and day out -and often even during evenings and weekends- data input, processing and interpretation are your friends. Well, not your friends, but your cell-mates.

After a while, if you're a good monkey, you start climbing the corporate ladder and become more important. It's at this point that you'll be switching to Word. Excel is already too difficult and complicated to understand by the new monkeys you're rubbing elbows with now. You're still sharing a cage with them, but there's fewer of you in it, too.

Further on, as you climb even higher, you'll gently transition to PowerPoint. As the air at the top gets rarer and the bananas get sweeter, it's Word's turn to become obsolete, uncomfortable and complicated. PowerPoints are faster, shinier, shorter and lighter in content. These are your friends now. They check the tick-boxes your equally busy new colleagues enjoy. And if you're good enough, they'll assign you your own cage. With your name written on the door.

Sometimes, Project is sidetracking PowerPoint, but this is a niche more granular than I'm willing to delve and hence I'll skip it. Getting lost in details is a time-consuming mistake I generally like to avoid because there are more pleasant ways to waste time.

If you've been an even better monkey all this time and can make it even further, the next step is, well... is actually an ugly little tool you've had with you all this time. Oh yes, even before Excel. It was there since day one. It was the bearer of tasks. And bad news. And more tasks.
Yes, it's Outlook.
Once your worst enemy, it is now your best friend. Your only friend. It's the only thing you'll ever need to do your work. The circle is now complete, everything else in between is gone now: work, reports, presentations, colleagues, friends in the open-space, knowledge, skills. It's lonely at the top, sure, but it's also very comfy. Your corner cage is bigger, with bigger windows. Your new couch is softer. Your ass is both bigger and softer. Your secretary is pretty soft, too. And at the end of each year you get a new shiny toy.

Of course, if you're competent enough the trajectory will not be so smooth and your only circle will be the hamster-wheel of Excel and endless work. And mail. And hope that maybe one day downsizing will save you. There's always hope.