I went on a date this week. I did not lose my temper. I did a lot of work-related writing and fell back in love with writing for work. I had a meeting with my mentor. I drafted an application for a job. The musical I’m helping to write got a really lovely review. I took my partner to a hospital appointment, told work colleagues that we were going to a hospital appointment, mentioned to the concierge on the way out that we were going to the hospital.
It has only struck me right now, as I write this, that all of those people probably think we’re having a baby.
We’re not having a baby. Hey, unrelated, did you know that chainsaws were invented for surgery involving cutting through bone?
I’ve had plenty to think about this week. I’ve written a lot of words. All of them are work related. Having joined a team where there’s little documentation, I worry that I’ve swung too far the other way. For example, I found myself documenting the decision to start documenting things and had to have a word with myself. I made sure to document it.
These documents are useful in raising discussion points but also recording that a decision was made. I’ve been in a lot of meetings recently where there was a vague sort of finger-pointing: you said you’d do x, no I didn’t, I said I’d do y, no, yes, no, yes….around and around for ever. I remember who said what, because my brain operates in frightening and thrilling ways, but since nobody can see inside it my memory has as much weight as everyone else’s opinions.
All of my meetings have minutes. All of the meetings I run have minutes and a note that says what we agreed to do. This stuff is written down. People will always ignore some of it, but other people won’t, and I personally am grateful for it when I can point to the minutes of the last meeting and ask whether things have been done.
They haven’t, of course, but the thing is we don’t waste any time at all wondering whether they agreed to do them or not. We press straight onto why they haven’t been done, and this generally puts everyone in a much better mood.
I’ve got my end of year review on Monday. I had a weird moment where a colleague wrote to ask me for feedback and included the phrase “I don’t really care about end-of-year”. And this is remarkable to me, because I think as engineers if we’re not seeking feedback, both regularly and at the end of the year, we’re missing out on really useful information about how we’re working.
I get that for some people it seems like a box ticking exercise. I imagine some people have so much self-confidence that they think they’re doing a great job regardless, and now I think about it maybe that means the corollary is also true. Maybe there are folks who are convinced they’re terrible. Me, I don’t know. Genuinely don’t know. I know I’m putting my best in, but I know that it’s only through feedback that I understand the impact I’m having. Especially at these higher levels! Especially as what I start to wonder is whether I’m convincing other people to do work that I think is important!
Anyway. In part it’s a very silly game. I get that. I get that when I hear about managers encouraging their reports to change their objectives before the end of the year so that they map to what was done, instead of what they thought they’d do twelve months prior. If the system isn’t flexible enough to allow for that then the system is irredeemably broken, but I personally have found a kind of OKR-ish, give me a thing to hit and let me define how I think I’ll get there thing, pretty helpful for tracking how I’m doing.
And that helps me get better. And I care about that.
I spoke to my mentor about going for this new job. We had a disagreement about feeling guilty. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve felt guilty about work things. I feel bad about plenty of things, but guilt to me has an extra complexion: it is the knowledge that you could have done things differently and they would have been better. It is rare that I do something badly, knowing I could be doing it better, but just decided not to. For me, that’s guilt.
There have been plenty of times when I’ve weighed up options and picked what looks like the least bad. Some of those times I’ve been wrong. But there’s no guilt there. I did my best with the information I had.
I felt guilty once. I was working on a system during a meeting. I should have been doing one or the other, but doing both meant I wasn’t focussed on either. I busted production. I busted it bad. I felt guilty about that: I could have worked better. I do work better, now. Guilt is good, I think, if it helps you recognise that you feel bad for doing things in a way you’re not proud of.
For all other purposes, it can get in the bin.
Caffeinated Punctuation 