This has been a really anxiety-inducing week and I can’t much talk about it, which leaves me wondering just how much value these notes will be for me in the future. Let’s see. Perhaps there’s something in how I’m managing it that might be worth revisiting.

This week I’m waiting for a decision. I’m not even waiting for the decision to be made – that’s almost certainly happened. I’m waiting for the decision to be communicated. This is the terrible time: not when the coin is in the air, but when the coin has landed but not yet seen.

I’m trying to maintain momentum everywhere else. I dont know if it’s causal or not, but I’ve done a lot more exercise this week. I’ve got a rowing machine, and I’m slowly getting the body back to the place where it remembers the pattern. It’s good. It’s mindful, or mindless, or maybe mindfulness is mindlessness.

That is to say that meditation is the process of centering the self in the body. Pain is experienced within the body, and forces the mind into the body. It is harder to meditate without a thing to draw you back. If you don’t have pain – well, wait a while, and you will. But in the interim we focus on breath.

Rowing when you haven’t rowed in a while is meditative, because you have to be in your body and thinking about how it’s moving. It has to do this action, and then this action, and then this. And because this is just exercise, and it doesn’t actually matter, you can try different things. What if this action first? Ah, then it pulls muscles here. Or this? Or extending this?

Safety again, you see. Same as last week. The dynamic of freedom and responsibility.

Within work – there’s so much change. The organisation is still a lot of organisations pushing against each other. Overlapping responsibilities at a distance generally just means duplication that nobody knows about. Overlapping responsibilities with the person sitting next to you is tougher. You get along like continental plates. Something will give, eventually.

My team is feeling the pressure. We’ve had three similar things thrust on us simultaneously, and I’m trying to line them up to reduce pressure on everyone downstream. I keep thinking about the bottleneck part of the Theory of Constraints:

Every process has a constraint (bottleneck) and focusing improvement efforts on that constraint is the fastest and most effective path to improved profitability.

And wondering if I’m working on the bottleneck or not. I think that’s my whole job – to expand the bottleneck or, more pessimistically, to move the bottleneck somewhere else. It was people. We didn’t have enough. I’ve fixed that and now it’s something else. But the people also beget more work. Everything is exponential. Every solution contains within itself the seed of more problems.

I don’t know, folks. I’m feeling tired. These decisions are never made with all the information I would like, and I am not right as often as I would like, and part of accountability means that other people can judge how right you are. It’s not easy. It’s good and it’s interesting and I enjoy it, and it’s not easy.

Another full week, and then I have a week off. I’ll see you then.