Never without… my Atoma notebook!

Nathalie Vanceunebroeck considers herself lucky with the digital tools that simplify her job as a management assistant. But she will never part with one thing: her Atoma notebook!

“I have been working at Elia for nine months now as a Management Assistant for our Deputy CEO, Frédéric Dunon. My main task is to manage his agenda, to prepare his files for meetings and to ensure that he has all the information for constructive consultation in a timely manner. This is necessary because his days are very often fully booked with meetings from morning to evening. We use SharePoint as a common platform. I also plan his trips abroad. In short, I take care of all the practical and organizational matters so that he only has to worry about the content.

In 1991 I started my career at Siemens. At that time, we still used paper diaries and internal notes were written by hand on carbon paper if there were multiple recipients. When Outlook made its appearance with the electronic calendar, we were a little suspicious. How could we consult the agenda if a computer problem arose? In those first months, in addition to Outlook, we also kept a paper agenda ‘just to be sure’. Today it seems unlikely, we can no longer imagine working without Outlook or Teams!

I admit that there is one old school attribute that I do hold on to: my Atoma notebook. Early in the morning, Frédéric and I sit down together to go over the agenda of the day and of the following days. That gives me the opportunity to ask questions, to determine with him what the priorities are, to get input to answer emails, etc. That is important for my work, but often we have very little time. I quickly take notes in my notebook with a blue pen, and mark in fluorescent the things I need to follow up so that I can easily find them. Those are little habits that reassure me. 🙂 The advantage of Atoma notebooks is that you can easily remove the leaves and put them back in another place. As far as I’m concerned, no digital equivalent can match that! But I assure you that I no longer have a paper agenda! 😉

A little anecdote. I have two children, now 22 and 26 years old and I still have the (red) Atoma notebook in which I have carefully summarized for them over the years the most important rules of conjugation, spelling, grammar, the tables of multiplication, etc. The notebook served first for my son, then for my daughter. They remember it very clearly today and they laugh a little at ‘mom’s rules in her Atoma notebook’. Who knows, maybe one day it will come in handy again…

What I’ve noticed about Elia is that everyone here uses ‘tu’. We even address the CEOs by their first name and by ‘tu’. That’s very refreshing. It was different with my previous employers. There, that hierarchy was much more pronounced. This informality at Elia lowers the threshold. You feel less inhibited to address each other. This creates a pleasant working atmosphere. I have not regretted my move to Elia for a moment!’