Email faux pas

Last week, I sent an email to an in-house editor to chase up an invoice that I'd sent but hadn't heard back about. Having had problems with a previous invoice on the same project, I just wanted confirmation it'd been put through okay. This morning, while I was putting together my mental to-do list over breakfast, I realised that I still hadn't heard anything. So when I sat down at my desk, another, this time more urgent, email was top of my list. Then just as I waiting for my computer to start up and was composing what I was going to say in my head, it suddenly occurred to me that I might've sent my last message to the wrong person ... the editor in question has a very similar name to someone else I've worked with at a different publisher and of course, they're right next to each other in my address book. Lo and behold, when I went back to look at my sent items, I had indeed got them muddled up!

I sent off a quick email to the right person and soon got a message back to apologise for not replying and saying that the invoice had gone through - relief. Now, I'm just wondering whether or not I should drop the other editor a quick message to explain and apologise for the random email? The fact that it's been nearly a week and he's said nothing, makes me think he probably just deleted it, so perhaps it's better not to draw attention to my stupidity!

What counts as work?

When I'm working, I usually keep a note of the hours I work on each project each day in my diary. It's partly to keep track of what I need to invoice for and also to keep an eye on the number of hours I'm working each week from a health point of view. I only write down hours spent on "actual work" that I'm going to invoice for though.

Yesterday, I managed to spend more-or-less the whole day at my desk without writing down a single hour in my diary. It was a day spent catching up on "admin"; checking over the work I've done while I was away, sending it off with accompanying emails and invoices, replying to non-urgent e-mails that I hadn't dealt with, getting together a new bookkeeping folder for the new tax year and getting going on a couple of new projects - looking at documents, reading briefs and sending more emails with answers and queries. It felt like a really productive day and by the end of it, I felt like I was back on top of things after nearly 3 weeks away. I couldn't help feeling a little disappointed though that I had no hours written in my diary to show for it!