not talking about work

I am struggling with this blog and work. I think making things open makes them better, but I’ve also been aware that sharing early can have unintended consequences. If you don’t believe me, then I know you’ve never had a doctor wonder aloud whether the shadow on a scan could be cancer.

I think that working in the open when you’ve not formed a minimum viable idea is dangerous, because there will be gaps, and people will fill those gaps by themselves.

I’m also the semi-public face of someone else, and that means that this communication channel becomes a semi-official public face of that person. I don’t want them to have sign off on everything I write, not least because then they’d have to suffer through my poetry, but I’m also very aware that I’m caught in the awkward position of consequently not writing about work.

And my work takes up a lot of my time and my brain at the moment.

There is definitely an element of laziness and bad faith to this, because if I really wanted to I’d write everything and then edit it, reflecting carefully on inferences that could be drawn and whether what I’d written could be shared.

That would be extra cognitive load, and honestly I don’t write to give myself extra cognitive load. I write mostly to get stuff out of my head. It is one of the reasons that my blender barely goes past two. I don’t want to spend the brain energy world-building beyond that which already exists.

Consequently writing and speaking honestly about what is happening is very easy and very practiced, and the few times I’ve branched into surreal stuff it’s been very short. I’ve never expanded on the consequences of cannibalistic giants or demonic cuties serving coffee.

Perhaps I should, but I’ve never truly been able to shake the imperative to write only what I know. And my knowledge of Hellspawn trapped in a corporate gig is – I mean it’s not zero, but it’s not as much as I’d like to have if I’m going to write about it, you know?

Anyway. This has been a long excuse for why I’m still not able to talk about what I’m doing, and probably won’t in the future.

Sorry, but also not sorry.

some other small things

a work thing

A presentation I was planning to give to a small group of colleagues internally has been selected for a conference. At the moment apparently more than 300 people have expressed an interest in seeing it.

That is a lot of people.

I have a week to be so comfortable with the material that I can do it twice. Luckily I have a nice, easy, low-stress job which gives me plenty of time in the evenings to practice it oh wait no I don’t. I’m absurdly excited about this opportunity, but so nervous that I won’t get the message across. It is also, boringly, something else that I can’t yet talk about.

My life is not nearly as mysterious and exciting as it comes across here, I promise.

a date thing

there is no feeling more sublime than when you pay for dinner and they say “are you sure?” and you say “yeah, you can get the next one” and they do a little smile and say “sure, I’ll get the next one” because that means there’ll be a next one.

a meta thing

I’m not happy with these at all. I’ve not said much, and what I have said has obscured the truth rather than revealing it. I’m going to think more about what I do with this time and medium.

we play with live ammo here

I had the gentlest of slap-downs today from someone with more experience than me, and it was deserved, so I’m going to talk about what happened. This is almost certainly the first time I’ve talked directly about something happening on this blog ever, so forgive any rough edges.

I was rewriting a presentation for my boss, taking on board some feedback we’d had about it. I was footling about in the speaker notes, writing in my usual overly flamboyant style and exaggerating the message. It was purely for my own workings – if I explode all of the words I can around a topic I can pick out the ones that actually matter. I’ve got a slide that’s six words long, and it took me one hundred words to get there. If I’d had time to write more, I could have written less.

Anyway. The gentle slap down was a colleague reading it and saying, dryly, “You have captured the direction but directed the style.”

Or, as I took it, “The idea is great. The execution is dumb.”

The reason I’m talking about this is because in the space that I work I’m so close to the centre. I am writing this as a reminder that working in a high trust environment means not letting playfulness be the enemy of good work: that despite my mother’s insistence I still sometimes forget to tidy my toys away after playing. And I can’t forget that now.

It’s a minor blip and the rest of the presentation is really excellent, and I’m so excited to watch her present it. This time just with the direction.

pity the addict

I took the smallest sip
A little lip-full 
of coffee

it was wicked
and sweet
and strong

and the memory of it makes me tremble