Zen at Work

I put my zen training to work today. Specifically, I used the technique I learned from Thich Nhat Hanh's book.  When I was walking and found my brain running at a hundred miles an hour, I stopped, I looked around me, I breathed, and then I focused on simply walking and breathing.  It worked very well and pulled me down a couple of notches a couple of times.

I am two days into the UAT on my portion of the project (this would be the UAT that I pulled out of my butt on four days notice) and things are moving rapidly forward, with good feedback from the users and most importantly, no major findings yet.  There have been a couple of minor configuration issues that we'll take a look into as we go along, but other that the very long days, things have been going well.

I am settled in for an hour or so of relaxation and then I am going to curl up and spend a little time reading.  One advantage of the high work load is it keeps my mind off the tangles of my personal life. I will of course work my way through them too, but for now, they are pushed aside. That ability to focus on the immediate and the external has stood me well over the years.

So, let me leave you with a snippet of the song running through my brain tonight...

It's one I've mentioned before, from John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band (on Eddie and the Cruisers):

Tender Years

When the moon hung soft and low
Catching stardust in the light
You held me closer and closer
There was magic in the night.

A sweet love song, a melody
That I still can recall
Two young hearts filled with dreams
To walk away with it all.

Whoa, whoa tender years
Won't you wash away my tears
How I wish you were near
Please don't go, tender years.

A summer love, a beach romance
Sought her kisses in the sand
Two young hearts filled with fire
Lost in never-neverland.

 Whoa, whoa tender years
Won't you wash away my tears
How I wish you were near
Please don't go, tender years.

Whoa, whoa tender years
Won't you wash away my tears
How I wish you were near
Please don't go, tender years.

Whoa, whoa tender years
Won't you wash away my tears
How I wish you were near
Please don't go, tender years.

Deep and Peaceful

Thirteen hours of work today. Hosted a pair of UAT kick-off meetings, bounced through a couple of technical meetings, coordinated some test case construction, and then came home to spend most of the evening reading and responding to 109 email.  What a day.  Tomorrow however looks relatively sane.

I am planning to go to bed early tonight, spend a little bit of time writing, and fall asleep.  I wish I had more exciting things to tell you about - but work seems to be the order of the day for the immediate future. The project I am working on has three functional parts - and now two of them are delayed.  The only part of the project that is still moving forward is mine - but there is now a very good chance that we are going to slip the whole project again (which is actually a good thing, as it will give my team more time to polish their applications and systems). We should find out in the next couple of days I hope.

So, here is hoping that the dreams tonight are good and the sleep is deep and peaceful.

Struggling Into The Morning

I'm struggling into the morning today. I slept well enough, though I woke up a little early then I had intended to, but it seems to be going well. Black coffee and oatmeal, sunrise and "Haven" on the DVR.  I am estimating that I have four to six hours worth of work to do today, maybe more - I really have two things that I want to accomplish. 

First, I have to prepare the PowerPoint presentation for Monday's meeting, which I anticipate is going to take two or three hours, then another two or three hours working on the actual test materials. I've got the whole test cycle broken down in stages, so I am going to try and roll it out, one block at a time, which is less them optimal, but the whole project is less then optimal.

I am going to try and move easily and smoothly through the day. A simple breakfast, then, maybe a movie, or maybe just come straight home and work. I have to do a couple of loads of laundry at some point during the day, so I may do them here at the apartment complex, and I may do them at the laundromat. It will depend on whether or not I have an urge to get out of the apartment later in the day. 

I definitely want to head over and get a pizza at Patxi's today, in part because I am pretty sure it's going to be a hectic and busy week, with more than it's fair share of stress moments.  I am going to try and keep focused and move easily through it, but I am not sure I am going to be able to. I think I am going to have to use all of my stress management skills to make it.  Actually, sitting here thinking about it, the week should not be too bad - it's going to be the first couple of days that are very difficult, but once I make it through them, I should be all right.  I will have to keep telling myself that as the week starts.

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.)

53 Hours

Well, if you're wondering what happened to me - it's Thursday, I've worked 53 hours in 4 days.  Fun. Not. 

I ultimately caught the role of functional test lead for UAT because....no on planned UAT, no one appointed UAT personnel, and I have the skills and ability to bring order from chaos.  (No modesty here, that happens to be one of the things I am good at.) 

Now, I won't kid you, it is an uphill battle - I am going to try and roll the UAT out one step ahead of the testers. Prepare block one, roll out block one, and then while the testers are moving through block one, be working frantically on block two.  There are about six blocks, all told, of varying degrees of complexity and it is going to consume the next two weeks.

I haven't had much time for anything else. I wake up in the morning, I start working, I work through the day, I come home and have dinner and then go back to work. I have deliberately decided not to work tonight, just to give myself a bit of a rest.  I think 53 hours so far this week is enough, and I know I am going to wrack up a few more hours in the run of the next two weeks.

If there is a project management take-away it is this - it is all in the planning. Succeed in the planning and you will succeed in the project. Fail in the planning and you will fail in the project.

An Inauspicious Start

Well, it has not been an auspicious start to the day. My work laptop struggled through a series of installs and reboots, locking up twice and forcing me to cold start it. That ate up a solid hour of time.

Then, I turned my attention to three urgent data requests that originated from legal. Then, into a status meeting that got totally co-opted for another subject. Followed by direction for the immediate turn around of some test related material.

That pretty much ate up the morning, meaning I got zero time to work on the projects assigned directly too me.

I took a hard hit on a favorite stress trigger of mine. Let's see if I can accurately describe it. The trigger gets hit when I am assigned a project, or a portion of a project, and after going through the discovery phase I start working on it.

Then, I get asked or tasked on something that is "part of the project" that I had never heard of and it is revealed that it was included in the project as a result of a meeting I didn't attend, or a conversation I was not part of, or an email exchange that did not include me.

That instantly slams into my fairness stress trigger. I think that it is unfair to hold a person accountable for an action or a task without first making that person aware that they are on the hook for it.

Fortunately, a walk and a simple high protein lunch have helped to pull that stress level back down from it's peak. It in a few moments I will head back to the office and dive back into the fray. I just keep reminding myself that all projects, good or bad, end.

Later That Evening...

Well, I was able to get some productivity out of the day - granted most of it came during the evening when I was working at home.  The afternoon was mostly consumed in a pair of meetings about UAT (User Acceptance Testing) and some follow on conversations.  The UAT meeting was scheduled for an hour, but extended well beyond that.

They have appointed a test director, and a good one at that.  I definitely don't envy him.  He echoed what I have said in that, during the course of a career, this project is a once in a lifetime event, it is so chaotic and so scattered.  It actually heartened me to hear someone else say that.

At one point during the afternoon meeting I was pointing out the difficulty of the task (the math simply does not add up).  The UAT cycle is pretty much a pure mathematical fantasy.  I may have to write an entire post on that, since it is a perfect object lesson on what not to do during UAT. 

May All Beings

There is a decision point that I seem to hit every other weekend or so.  I try and decide if I am going to do any work on the weekend. If I thought that by working on the weekend I could gain some ground on the week, I would be more tempted to do it. But, the general result is I work extra hours in the weekend, and then I still end up working extra hours during the week, so it is definitely a zero sum game. 

This weekend was no different, but, here I am, Sunday night, watching Once Upon A Time and quite happy that I didn't work this weekend - with the full awareness that I am going to be working long days this week.  I have one major task that I want to accomplish this week, so I am going to try and stay focused on that, try and keep a disciplined approach to it.

Today was a good day, all in all.  The switch in time impacted me this morning when I woke up at about 4:00 AM, so I expect to pay for that by hitting a hard wall before too long.  I can already feel the first edges of sleep trying to steal over me, so I suspect it will just be a question of "when do I give in", followed by a bit of tossing and turning, then a swift and smooth journey into the land of sleep.

I feel like I need a day off, but the Thanksgiving holiday is just around the corner, so I may hold out until then. I also may take a day between here and there.  Perhaps to celebrate one of the milestones at work as it passes. We can list that as one of the failures of our current project management, they do not celebrate the milestones that we reach and pass.  This is just another thing in the litany of things that make this program the object lesson in how not to run a project.

I had an easy afternoon, alternating between reading and watching the DVR, then I had dinner with Tony over at Mama Mia's on Hamilton.  Excellent pizza and Tiramisu. Earlier in the day we'd gone to Cupertino Square to see RZA's "The Man With The Iron Fist", which was an enjoyable old-style Kung Fu movie. One of the players in the movie was the actress Jamie Chung, who happens to be portraying Mulan on "Once Upon A Time".  She is a very beautiful and talented actress. 

On that note I am as ready for the end of the day as I can be. I hope you had a good weekend and, as the sign on the wall in my office says:  May all beings find happiness and be free from suffering.

A Natural Emptiness

I did my best to stay "off the grill" today.  I need the low key weekend and so far it has been pretty good. I stayed up late last night reading "The Cloud Atlas", slept well and woke refreshed. I watched "Fringe" and "Haven", then met Tony and Ty for breakfast at the Hickory Pit. I did a walk through at Fry's, then home for a while. I met Richard for lunch at Pacific Catch over at the Pruneyard.  After that, a few quick errands and then home again.

I will say one thing about the level of work and personal currents running now - they have inspired many vivid but half-remembered dreams as my subconscious stirs around. Today, when I woke up, and then at various times through the day, I thought about the metaphorical boxes that I find myself in as I move through my ordinary days.  The power of habit is a powerful thing.  Our lives are infused with a hundred habits, from the simple to the complex and then back again. Somewhere in there, underneath that layer of habits, is our true self.

That search for the true self is the quest that can consume our days, if we have the courage to undertake it. Sometimes I think I have that courage, but then other times I don't think that I do. As we go through life, life inspires us and wounds us in equal measure.  Each event, each inspiration, each wound, is a thread on the tapestry of our life. Our life is not a single thread, not a wound, not an inspiration, but rather it is the sum total of all of that. Often, we cannot see the full sweep of the tapestry unless we find some way to take a step back, to get a little distance.  To do that, we have to go off the grill, we have to fnd a place of stillness from which we can observe, from which we can experience.

It's a little after nine o'clock PM here right now, I am sitting on my chair in my living room, everything turned off except a single light and my laptop.  I close my eyes and I can hear the sounds of traffic in the distance, through the open patio doors, the quiet rush of the freeway a mile or so away. The clock on the kitchen wall ticks loudly in the stillness.  The sound of my fingers on the keys is a distinctive rattle and click.  There is a distance conversation from the courtyard, but distance enough that I hear the murmur of voices but cannot make out the words. It's a beautiful moment all in all.  Simple and still. There is an emptiness within me, but it seems as if it is the emptiness that should be there. A natural emptiness.

A Need For A Magnificent Obsession

One of the things I've learned about life is that life is always an unexpected journey. We never know the direction we're going to end up traveling in. It is guaranteed to be a surprise. Sometimes it turns out to be a lucky surprise and sometimes it doesn't. I think the ability to embrace whichever turn of fortune rushes towards you is a gift. I think that as long as you look at it that way you will make the best of the circumstances whenever they happened to be. Lately my life seems to be comprised of twists and turns. Not only my life but the life of the people around me. Maybe it's just a heightened sensitivity on my part or maybe we have entered into a season of twists and turns. I kind of like that idea. After all, life is the ultimate force of nature.

As I mentioned earlier it was a crazy, busy, week at work. I worked way too many hours in way too short a period of time. Today, which was my day off, was rewarding. First I slept in a bit, then I met Tony for breakfast over at Goodies II. After that I ran a couple of errands, including a rather fruitless search for a special type of VGA cable. Then I met my friend Marjorie, from Southern California, for lunch over at Hobbies. I only get to see her every couple of years when our paths cross either here in Northern California or down south. So was very nice. 

From there, I stopped at computer central, and then Best Buy, all in a fruitless search for that VGA cable. There is a design flaw in my Sony laptop. It has to monitor ports, a VGA port, and an HDMI port. Unfortunately, they are side-by-side, and separated only by about a quarter of an inch. Take a look at your VGA cable and notice just how wide the connector is. Do you notice the little screws that secure it to the VGA port? Do you notice the little flange at the edge of the connector? Well, that little flange is enough to prevent you from plugging in two monitors. Now, I've seen VGA cables without that flange. I think they're one point I actually had one. It might still be around here somewhere. But, from this moment in time, it looks again going to have to do surgery on a VGA cable so I can hook up both monitors to the Sony VAIO. Well, I guess it's nothing my Dremel tool can't fix.

I don't really have any special plans for the weekend, other than the routine stuff, I think I'm going to try to take it easy through the weekend. I need some quiet time. I need some time to listen to the silence. I need some time to be alone with my thoughts. It always kind of amazes me how difficult it is in the modern age. We run, constantly, and we never stop. Even when we think we’re stopped, we’re not, we’re running. It's like we are the servants of the mad master and we don't even know it. Well I'm going to try and shake that master for a bit this weekend.

About four years ago I was in a strange place. At the time I characterized it as seeking a magnificent obsession. That is about as close as I can come to explaining it. I think I'm slipping back into that time and space. I think that's part of the journey of life that, periodically, it takes us back over familiar territory. It takes us back to those places where we still have a lesson to learn. I am not sure what that lesson is, I didn't know then, and I don't know now. All I know is that inside me there is a need for a magnificent obsession.

Oh, and speaking of Magnificent Obsession - I happened to turn on the TV tonight and stumbled upon Casino Royale, the old one, with Woody Allen, Peter Sellers, David Niven - and the very beautiful Ursula Andress. This is a picture of her from the first movie I ever saw her in "She" as "She Who Must Be Obeyed".

What A Week

What a week.

I worked 51 hours in 4 days. On the plus side, I checked two items off the work list.  But, in terms of what else I have done this week, work was pretty much it.  Life continues to move at its own pace and I am hoping that I will get a window this weekend to write a bit and record a few of the things that unfolded, but for tonight, I am going to watch a pair of sitcoms and then settle in to read myself to sleep.  I am entering my three day weekend and though I will be doing some work, I am going to try and not do a lot.  Tomorrow I've got breakfast and lunch plans but nothing after that.