On Saturday, I Ramble

It was an even 60 hours by the time I logged out of work Friday, which was a mostly unproductive and frustrating day. I made it a point to take most of today off just to give myself a chance to recover. I was mostly successful. 

Here is what the day looked like - I got up about seven this morning, after a long night sleep.  Breakfast with Tony and Ty at the Hickory Pit, then I zipped home for an hour long teleconference. When the teleconference wrapped up I dashed out and met the guys at AMC 14, where we saw "Skyfall", the new James Bond movie.  It was...excellent.  After we came out of the movie I made the comment that it has that one thing that all good Bond movies have to have - that ability to thrill you.  An excellent addition to the Bond canon.

From there, we had lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings.  Then, I came home and just relaxed - I did some work related email off the Blackberry, but mostly I watched "Carnage" on the DVR (based on the play "God of Carnage"). It was a strange and amusing movie, a good choice for easing through the afternoon.

After it ended, I curled up and took a nap for the better part of two hours.  I had set the alarm to wake me after an hour, and it did, but I needed the extra time so I simply stayed in bed. All of the hours I worked last week caught up with me and I needed to get the batteries recharged.

I am tired, all in all. I am on the borderline of being burnt out at work, so I need to be careful and "brush back" to a degree and make sure I don't let myself get unhealthily overloaded.  Part of the process of brushing back is to remember to take time for myself, in simple ways, and give my brain a rest. I keep letting the frustrating things at work get under my skin and make me short tempered, which is a wicked little loop to get caught it.  It becomes a feedback loop of frustration and I have a tough time breaking through it.

I do give a lot of credit to the counselor that I went to several years ago for work stress, in that I am putting a lot of the techniques to use and though my stress does occasionally peak, it rarely stays at the peak.  Generally, when I go through a peak period I start laughing about it - finding the humor in it, realizing that most of the stress and unreasonableness at work has nothing to do with me.

One of the key stress triggers I run into is when I am told to one thing, start work on that thing, and then get told to either do it differently or to do something else.  This stop, start, and rework has been one of the killers on this project - wasting a tremendous amount of time. I estimated at one point that some very routine and ordinary tasks were taking up to three times as long as normal to get done because of the constant rework.

That was part of what sent me into a stress loop on Friday.  I'd been asked to create 250 test scenarios, so I got the team working on it. It was slow going, as I had predicted, and we made some progress but not as much as project management would have liked.  I provided the feedback on the progress - and after a days worth of work, was told to do it a different way. Now, the different way is faster, but it was not what I was originally told to do, and it completely skips one of the purposes of the exercise.  It was very frustrating and I expressed that frustrating. (One of the key things I learned from the counseling was not to lock it up inside.)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I was a big fan of the books, having rabidly consumed all three in short order. Layer on top of that I saw (and own on Blu-Ray) the three Swedish movies starring the incomparable Noomi Rapace. With all of that in place, I was still looking forward to the American version, with Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara.

So, let's cut to the chase.

It was an enjoyable movie. It was slickly shot. It was well acted. Ms. Mara created her own Lisbeth Salander, which was definite necessity. But, if you haven't seen it already, I would definitely still recommend the Swedish version. Rooney Mara did a good job with her portrayal of the character. But, I think for the duration of three movies Noomi Rapace inhabited the character completely. She was both more vulnerable, more believable, and more intensely sociopathic - in short, she broad a wider range to the character.

One of the key things I came out of the American version of the movie with was a difference in scope. The new version is slicker, it is more tightly shot, it is a much more beautiful piece of film and Mara and Craig are great. But, it is also a movie on a far more limited scope - fewer sets, fewer exteriors, fewer actors. Fincher glosses over a lot of the story, while remaining true to the core of it, and for me at least, that chopping off of the edges detracts from the scope of the story itself.

However, with all that said, I would still recommend the movie - it is a slick piece of entertainment and Lisbeth Salander is one of the great characters of the last decade, so though Rapace and Mara differ significantly in their portrayals of the character - both turn in excellent performances. I was curious, as I left the film, whether I would have felt the same way if I had seen the movies in the reverse order. Of course, the answer to that question is something I can never know.

So, with that quick review, I am turning toward Christmas. I have a good conversation with T.R. this morning, where she is nestled tightly in the bosom of her family across the country. I followed that up with a desultory conversation with my brother D., and then I've idled my way into the morning with black coffee and the morning paper. Today's plan is breakfast with friends, then a get together at my friend Bob's house, which will probably run into the early evening.

So, with that said, I wish you all a merry day before Christmas, whoever you are and where ever you are.

Daily Life: 7.5 Minutes

Today at work I spent the day in small things. It was not a deliberate choice, but rather the result of circumstances. My manager is on vacation, so I was filling in for her. One of my analysts was on vacation so that redistributed some of the daily work load. My lead analyst was in the final stages of a block deployment, so I was taking her daily calls as well.

It the space of a normal work day I dealt with 67 unrelated items. They ranged in complexity from writing a complex data analysis string for a strategic partner to explaining to someone where they could find a document they were looking for. At the end of the day it turned out that I had dealt with a different subject once every 7.5 minutes.

The day passed in one long blur. About midway through it I realized I was probably not going to get anything complex accomplished, so I just settled in and rode the shallow choppy waves. My work is often split between three distinct areas and that is one of the things that can make it so challenging. There are the short choppy waves like today, there are the deep cyclic waves of projects, and there are the items related to managing personnel. I have great folks who work for me and we have worked together in different iterations for years now, so many of the personnel issues that other managers have to deal with (the internal bickering, the pettiness, the small minded meaness) simply do not exist in my organization, for which I am thankful, but there are still the daily issues of managing personnel - coordinating workload, coordinating schedules, assisting with priorities, change management, etc.

As long as the three forms of my work have a divider it is manageable. When the dividers evaporate and I am having to deal simultaneously with all three forms, then it can become highly stressful - steer a project, answer a detailed time sensitive question, and deal with personnel issues all at once, well that is a challenge. I am thankful that this year has been busy but manageable. I actually came out of the short choppy day today in a good mood, energized rather than exhausted by the flow of the day. Tomorrow should be relatively quiet - is the A Friday, so most folks will be out and I can, hopefully, focus on a couple of the "deep cycle" things I have on my plate.

Stress is relative of course. I went to lunch today with my friend Don. Don has a fairly stressful job himself, but when he joined me he made the comment that he had rented the movie Defiance (with Daniel Craig and Leiv Schreiber) and that quite obviously stress was a relative thing. If you haven't seen the movie I would recommend it, it is a good drama. Here is a link to the IMDB entry for Defiance. Don is right of course, all stress is relative. We might have work stress, but at the end of the day we shut down the computer, drive home into the beautiful California evening, and enjoy the lives we live here in this small slice of paradise.