I start work at about 10:00. This might seem late to the skylarks among you, but I owe it to my natural body clock: it prefers me to start late and to finish late.

The NHS Scotland eLibrary runs from an office in the leafy West End of Glasgow. Just fifteen minutes away from my flat, I walk to work every morning.

I say hello to the other librarians and make coffee while my computer starts up.

The morning is usually spent doing ‘reactive’ tasks: responding to email from my bosses, agents, users with enquiries, partner organisations. There are usually about 60 messages in my inbox and my task for the morning is to reduce that number to zero.

After lunch, I get my best work done. This is when my body clock allows higher functions to kick in: I write journal articles, catalogue resources sometimes, design promotional materials (printed materials, e-fliers and websites), manage the department’s training and outreach plan, attend meetings and train users. I manage my tasks with a rolling ‘to-do list’. During these hours, I never procrastinate and the afternoons are fruitful.

I don’t train as much as I used to. When I first started here two years ago, I would do about three training sessions a week. I got to see a lot of Scotland this way. More often than not, my appointments would be in Edinburgh, Glasgow or Aberdeen but I would frequently visit towns in the borders and highlands.

These days, I coordinate the department’s training initiatives rather than deliver the sessions myself. This means I am now largely office based: a mixed blessing. Life can get a little stale beneath fluorescent lights but I do not miss having to start work in the middle of the night to get to an 8am training session in Dunblane or Bonnybridge.

On Monday and Wednesday, I finish at 4:45 so that I can walk through the park to my evening job at Glasgow University Library. Here, I manage a small team of four Library Assistants and five shelvers and run the Lending and Enquiries desks until 8pm. The demands of two jobs occasionally clash but this can generally be avoided with time management.

On Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, I work until about 7pm. In the evenings, I have dinner with friends followed by live music or theatre. My days usually end by talking to my girlfriend (who lives in Montreal) or by reading Philip K. Dick novels late into the night.

Instead of the hoary old around-the-table format, I told the team that I would hold a ‘surgery’. I have no idea if this is an example of recognised managerial practice: it just struck me as a good idea at the time.

At a typical meeting, all of our team members would usually attend simultaneously. The idea, of course, is to maximise communication between team members and to ensure that we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet. It’s a good intention. The de facto result, however, is that people get bored after twenty minutes, drift off, make doodles and become increasingly anxious about the slippage of their projects out in the real world.

At the surgery, however, the only individual who needs to be present throughout is the chairperson. The other attendees can drift in and out and make their contributions on an individual basis.

I told the team by email that I’d be in the meeting room between 2 and 4pm and that they would be able to drop in and see me at some point between those hours.

It was very successful. Everyone I wanted to speak to came along on their own volition and I think they were grateful that they only had to gawp at my wobbly face for fifteen to twenty minutes each instead of two achingly long hours.

The main benefits of the surgery format, as we found them, were as follows:

• Smaller investment of time per person
• The time spent with each attendee could focus upon their individual achievements, plans and concerns rather than those of other people
• The less formal structure seemed to elicit more candid information than in a traditional full-team meeting
• We avoided the curse of Groupthink

I’m sure there must be disadvantages to this format too. There must be circumstances were the whole team needs to be present – i.e. when the information needs to be ‘broadcast’ by one individual and received identically by a large number of people – but for this scenario – where the information was ‘broadcast’ instead by attendees and received by the chair – the surgery was perfect.