An Elementary Evening With Pattern Scars

A very ordinary day at the office, which was very nice. I ran into a bit of a wall today as I maneuvered through a series of back to back meetings. I often feel that I could significantly improve my working day if I could just figure out how to go to fewer meetings.  Unfortunately, I find myself deeply engaged in a company that has a strong culture of meetings.

Outside of work, I cam home tonight, took a nap (interrupted again), then a nice hot bath, then a pair of family phone calls, and I've spent the rest of the evening watching three episodes of Elementary back to back.  That is an excellent show - Lucy Liu and Jonny Miller have great chemistry and it's a well written show, full of the quirky details that I love in television or a movie. Once I finish this last episode, I am going to spend the rest of the evening reading in "The Pattern Scars", which I am about half way through.

Chasing The Last Hour of The Day

I am chasing the last hour of the day.  It was a long one. I started at 4:30 AM with email review and then basically moved from meeting to meeting through the day, with a pause for a department luncheon, then back to meetings.  All in all, twelve long hours in the day.

I stopped for a burrito on the way home, then unwound by cleaning the kitchen sink and the bathroom sink. I think I needed the zen flow of it.  I watched a pair of sitcoms off the DVR and then basically decided I was finished for the day. I am going to head for bed shortly, curl up with a book, and probably manage to last an hour or two, if I am lucky.

A Glass, Full

The day was one long meeting or nine long meetings all strung together.  Either way, the end result was the same.  Though it was a smooth start to morning, including time with T.R., the first meeting threw me headlong into a foul mood. I don't mind consulting on other parts of the project, but I dislike it when people attempt to off load their work on me, especially since I have a full project load myself. 

There are two analysts assigned to developing some custom reporting - the only challenge for them is neither of them has the depth of knowledge to design the reports they need to design.  Like everyone else, they're under heavy pressure from upper management - so, in the meeting today, they attempted to foist the detail work off on me. 

Now, under normal circumstances I am always glad to help - but these are not normal circumstances, so I refused to commit to the task unless management decides to assign it to me.  If I am a glass of water, then I am a very full glass of water - we can always pour more water in, but some of it is going to splash out. 

So, after that meeting put me in a foul mood I struggled through the morning.  At lunch, I decided to log out, commute home, take a nap, and try and reset the day. It worked and I was able to salvage both mood and productive out of the afternoon.  Then, a simple dinner (grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches), and an easy slide into the evening.  In a short while I am going to slip into bed and read a few chapters in "The Cloud Atlas".

Work, Cloud Cuckoo Land, and The Cloud Atlas

It was a long day at the office, with some pretty serious stress peaks in the early morning. The thing that sent my levels climbing was being pulled into a schedule meeting.  In an project, managing a schedule is a full time job. To that end, we have a master scheduler.

The problem with our current project is...he is not very good. In my current role, on this project, I do not have schedule control responsibilities (though, I have been pulled in a couple of times to write part of the schedule, but that is another stress point). Because our scheduler is not very good, he has to have everyone present in the meeting, for when he runs into things about the schedule he doesn't understand - which is all the time. Prior to departing for vacation my boss had provided schedule updates and estimates for the two meetings I got called into today.

So, basically, all I did was say "as was provided". A pretty much pointless waste of two hours.  The rest of the day though, I plowed through writing a new set of requirements.  Here is the challenge that I ran into - I have a portion of the project that is current in the test cycle - and yet, at the end of last week they added what translated to 150+ new line items for the requirements document.  Too crazy.

I would give you a nice entry about my personal life but I didn't have one today.  I worked about eleven hours, came home, ate a simple dinner, took a short nap, then got up and watched the presidential debate, while answering the occasional email on my corporate Blackberry. I do have one bit of feedback - I think presidential candidates should be wired with Tasers and when they fail to answer the question asked, they should be shocked.  In about three minutes both of the candidates would have been laying on the floor, twitching. A pure evening in Cloud Cuckoo Land. Fortunately, I plan on recapturing some good hours this evening by reading "The Cloud Atlas", which I started on Sunday and I am already enjoying.

Wild Flower

This is a small wild flower that was growing alongside a fence near the deli were I went for lunch today. I loved the simple, wild, beauty. It's been a chaotic work week so far, with 19 meetings in the last three days and one more to go to wrap up the day. I'm fried to put it lightly.

I am looking forward to, hopefully, a quiet evening at home. Yesterday turned into a 12 hour work day where I really didn't accomplish much of anything - other then a lot of time spent in meetings. Today was a little more productive, but over all I have been losing ground at work. Its...amusing. My being psychologically divorced from the outcome has given me quite a bit of relief, though it really doesn't change the workload.

Otherwise, today is Day Nine, and my monkey-mind was whirling with a vengeance last night. I woke at about 2:00 AM with a thousand thoughts, so I had to lay there in the darkness, acknowledge them, contemplate them, and then release them.

All told, the process took about an hour and a half. At the end of it I managed to eek out another two hours of sleep. Ah, the paths our minds dash up and down is pretty amazing.

Now, off to my one remaining meeting...
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An Apple A Day

It's an eight meeting today. Normally I would not have even bothered to come into the office today, since I'm basically spending the day pacing around and wearing my telephone headset. It all means that, at the end of the day, I'll be completely fried, especially since I threw myself into work at 5:30 AM.

I am sitting in a scheduling meeting today and, to tell the truth, it's a pure fantasy land meeting. But, it's a pleasant enough fantasy land, especially since I've started to us my Zen tricks to not care about the outcome. I just do the best I can and then leave the rest to the flying monkeys.

My monkey mind was pretty attached today, though the rapid succession of meetings kept me busy enough that it never really got away from me, except for a time or two. I walked and breathed and pulled myself back into the moment.  The scent of the apple pictured above was a great tool to pull me back into the moment, smelling slightly sweet and crisp.

When I go through an emotionally difficult time the tendency to second-guess myself runs wild. The thoughts of the day become "what if, what if, what if..." and they spin around and threaten to run out of control.  But, I replay all the conversations, then think about them, consider what is done and not done, said and unsaid, actions taken and actions not taken - and the weight of things usually becomes apparent, painful, but apparent.

Then of course, wrapped inside of it was a great little section from "The Bowl of Sagi":

October 7th

If is a very high stage on the path of love

When one really learns to love another

With a love that asks no return

A difficult thing indeed, but a thing that we can accomplish.

Crashing Into Monday Morning

I crashed into a wall of stress when I walked into the office this morning. It arose out of a constellation of three things.

First, while I was out over the weekend a meeting was scheduled for early Monday morning. Because I had no idea the meeting was scheduled I was late for it and then I was unprepared for it. I am most decidedly not a fan of ambush meetings. One of the areas I think we do very poorly with at work is meetings. They tend to be unfocused and unproductive, with each individual in the meeting pursuing their own issues and items to the expense of the collective. If I had a related wish I'd wish that our entire directorate be sent to "Meeting 101" and learn three things - 1.) always have an agenda, 2.) always share the agenda prior to the meeting, and 3.) always stick to the agenda. Just those three things would increase the value of our meetings significantly. So, in short order - I dislike ambush meetings and I dislike unproductive meetings and this one managed to hit both of those buttons in one stroke.

Second, immediately on the heels of that meeting I went into another meeting where, of all things, the focused on one of the trendy management books, on discussing what they thought about it. First, I wasn't aware that I had joined a book club I had no interest in joining. Second - I've been in the working world for thirty years and I've been in supervision/management for twenty. I've seen dozens of trendy management books come and go. I've seen dozens of managers pay lip-service to the magic contents of these books, then turn right around and be a good manager (if they were already a good manager) or a bad manager (if they were already a bad manager). In short, I am highly skeptical when it comes to such books and their real impact on teams. The basics of management never change and success or failure as a manager depends entirely on whether or not you can do the basics. It really is that simple.

Third, I had a half-dozen issues escalated to me this morning that were not items I could do anything about. Technically, the specific support the customers were looking from has to come from another group. But, the issues keep coming to my desk because the responsible group has "dodging responsibility" down to an art form. I get badly frustrated by this because a.) it is not my area of responsibility and b.) there isn't anything I can do to help the customers. I am not sure which of the two irritates me more.

This constellation of events pretty much spun me into a very bad mood this morning. Once I made it through the meetings, I took a few minutes outside to breathe, to don my psychological armor, and to soak up a little sun. Then, I went back to work - one of the things I did was sit down and mentally work my way through root cause analysis and possible solutions for some of the problems I was facing. Fortunately, I like doing that. One part of my job that I still enjoy is productive trouble-shooting. I've always liked solving puzzles. It was very productive session - I managed to draw a six page root-cause analysis diagram and drill all the way down to the very bottom of one issue, coming up with three possible corrective actions.

Once I'd managed to reset the day by actually doing something productive I was able to salvage the rest of the day with productive work. I was definitely glad when the day ended though. I drove home, stopped at Sushi Totoro for a Golden California roll, a Philadelphia roll, and a bowl of Miso soup. I'm slowing winding my way into the evening by watching some SyFy, writing, and beginning the process of sorting my books. A rough start of the day but a gentle ending.

Daily Life: Three Days Later

Well, time can fly under certain circumstances. Sunday was a good day - alternating between lazy and productive.

Monday started out as a good day, but by noon I had a splitting sinus headache. It felt like someone was poking me between the eyes with a sharp pencil which made concentrating at work impossible. I came home early with the intention of taking some allergy medicine and a nap, but it turned out to be a long nap. I managed to swim out of my groggy state about six p.m., long enough to wake up, eat something for dinner, take a shower, make a phone call - and then go back to bed.

Tuesday was an all day meeting (a career counseling training session), followed by a corporate dinner at Fontana's in Cupertino, which was excellent. It did make for a long day though. The dinner was excellent (I had one of the specials, a penne pasta with scallops, mushrooms, and fresh basil, followed by the Chocolate Decadence dessert). It was good to socialize with some of the members of my extended work team (about half of my extended work team works virtually, so we get together once or twice a year, all things permitting). It is always nice to see the people you work with virtually in person. I got home and basically fell into bed though - it was close to a sixteen hour day by the time it was over. I capped off the day with a great telephone call and then I was out like a light.

Wednesday (today) I went into work at about six a.m. in order to put the finishing touches on a presentation that I gave during a working session with our upper management, outlining a project that we are undertaking this year that has been several years overdue, designing and building a very task specific information management system which will interface with another system. The two systems are designed to provide a looped reinforcement framework for operational information exchanges. In non-corporate speak that means it will be two systems that will contained related data which will be cross-referenced and allow for real-time storage, retrieval and analysis. I've been wanting to do it for a while and now is the perfect opportunity.

Following another long day I came home tonight, cooked a simple dinner, watched "Chuck" on my DVR and then paused here for a few minutes to write. It has been a good week so far, but I have managed to cram forty hours of work into three days, so my eyes are kind of heavy right now. My plan for the evening is pretty simple - I am going to watch a little TV, see if I can find some energy to write, and if I can't, then I am going to curl up early with a book. Tomorrow is going to be a challenging day because I am now two and a half days behind, which means tomorrow will be spent reading several hundred email, sorting them, and deciding which ones to act on.

The career session was a little canned and a little to heavily populated with pretty boxes (and for me, a guy inordinately fond of power point to say that, it must have been pretty bad). They did present some good tools but by and large it was mostly rote as far as such sessions go. The working meetings were far more productive and helped provide me with some clarity as to the overall direction for the coming year, explaining some of the things I had observed. There was an awkward and uncomfortable moment for me, but it was one of those moments where that feeling was because, when asked, I did not dance around and instead named names and expressed my opinion. That is always a little awkward for me because I tend to think that naming names is usually counterproductive, especially given the variance in perception.

In this case though, my personnel had reported to me rude and borderline unacceptable behavior from a customer and I felt it was the right thing to do. I am not sure what is going to come it, most likely nothing, but it had to be done. Time will tell. I could have cured a problem or made a corporate enemy. Wouldn't be the first time and won't be the last in either case.