Tag Archives: productive

More bad juju…

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So, I was sitting here fat, dumb, and happy marveling at the free time I’d managed to carve for myself this evening before the realization set in that what I hadn’t done yet was sit down and knock out tonight’s blog post. Usually I have the stub of an idea or at least a few hastily scratched notes before I bug out of the office for the day. Today? Not so much. I left there this afternoon at a dead run in fear of touching anything on my way out. You see, every single thing I touched today turned into a big steaming pile of shit in my hands. I’ve discussed this mysterious reverse Midas touch before, but I’m always just a little surprised and thrown out of sorts when it shows up. It’s arrival means the day is going to be chaos from start to finish. No exceptions. No easy outs. Just me, trying desperately not to brush up against anything I can avoid until it passes.

Today was most decidedly one of “those” days. In fact sitting down to write this at all caused great fear and consternation that whatever was plaguing me all day at the office might somehow have survived the trip home. Since you’re reading this, no doubt those fears have been somewhat put to rest. It means at least that I’ve got a few hours respite before I walk back into the hot mess that I left on my desk this afternoon. I hope those brief hours are enough to purge whatever bad juju settled on me today, because honestly two days in a row of everything ending in disaster is just too much to contemplate. If tomorrow wanted to top today in terms of sheer wastefulness of time and effort, well, my desk might actually have to burn down, fall over, and sink into the swamp. Given my track record so far this week, I’ll just ask that you believe me when I say that doesn’t really sound like much of a stretch.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Priorities. So here’s a little friendly advice from your kindly Uncle Jeff: When everything is the most important, absolutely nothing is important. All claims of being able to multi-task aside, it’s been my professional experience that when you’re trying to give equal attention to three things at once, all there of them are going to end up being half-assed at best. Want to do a good job on something? Go ahead and focus on that one thing until it’s finished or at least until it’s at a logical place to pause and then go work on something else. Repeat this process as needed until everything is done. Jumping randomly from this to that with no actual planning or thought behind why you’re doing what you’re doing is mostly guaranteed to end badly for everyone involved. In those cases where you can’t take this advice, be prepared to apply a large helping of “I told you so” when things go to hell in a handbag.

2. The happy customer… 12 hours later. About 12 hours after singing the praises of Amazon Prime and Amazon customer service, an email landed in my inbox informing me that the price of membership is going up $20 a year. Sure, it’s probably just a fluke, but it feels an awful lot like this Amazon just decided that since I like them so much, I won’t mind paying an additional 25% premium for it. This is clearly what happens when you say something nice. Therefore in the future, I’ll try to remember to only raise criticism and keep the kudos to myself. From here on out everything sucks and is bad, regardless of how much I like it.

3. Situational awareness. Snap judgements aren’t always right, but I’ve got a pretty decent talent for looking at where things stand and knowing when there’s a bad moon rising. I almost wish I didn’t. I’d probably be a happier human being if I wandered around not particularly aware of what’s likely to be over that next rise. Some days having decent judgement is a gift, but lately it’s felt like a real curse.

The trouble with being a vegetable…

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After the better part of 12 hours of not doing much more than was absolutely necessary to sustain life, the only thing I can really say is that being a vegetable isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be… mostly because it’s 4PM, there’s no laundry done, dinner isn’t started, the floors haven’t been swept, and the whole house has a vague tinge of “disaster area.” We’re going to continue to ignore the odds and ends outside that still need tended for the time being. As it turns out, I’m apparently not a vegetable kind of guy. I’m not a run out and sign up for a triathalon guy either, but sitting around doing nothing clearly isn’t my speed. Apparently I just need a handy day-long reminder of that from time to time.

So, the rest of the weekend is going to be about triage… prioritizing those things that actually need to get done and doing them, while putting off whatever random tasks and odd jobs fall somewhere into the nice to do category. As you can see, blogging was clearly job one on the “must do” list for today. Once that’s settled, it’s on to the “start dinner” task – also highly rated in the must do category. Once that’s settled, the priority of the remaining items falls off sharply. If I had to take a wild guess, the rest of the day will involve some combination of reading and writing. Come to think of it, this day would have been greatly improved if I’d have lead off with those and eased into some of the other stuff. Now I know. And that’s half the battle or so I’ve been told.

Wasted Sunday…

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This hasn’t been the sunday I thought I was going to have. Mostly it involved dragging the computer down from the office (not all that hard since it’s a laptop) and spreading out the dozen odds and ends I’ve been putting off around the kitchen table and taking them on one after another. The good news is that I just shredded the last bit of paper and closed the last file. The bad news is that I’ve been sitting here in the kitchen hammering at the keyboard since almost 8:00 this morning. That’s pretty much the working definition of a wasted Sunday. Sure, it’s all stuff that needed done and I’d been putting some of it off for weeks now, but that doesn’t make looking at the tail end of the weekend any easier… Especially when you know you’re going to spend the next five days hammering away at a different keyboard. I’m glad it’s all done, I just wish I could have figured out a way to do it in half the time. You know when going down to the crawlspace to shut off the outside water spigots counts as a break, you’ve seriously misspent your day.

For the time being, I’ll take as much comfort as possible in knowing that getting this particular pile of stuff done now frees me up next weekend. The long break coming after the next two work weeks is definitely a high point. I’ll do my best to live in the moment, but for the record my head is already in Western MD complaining about how friggin’ cold it is up here.

Perspective…

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There’s nothing like a retirement party to put a career in perspective. We all like to think of our working lives as being productive and valuable and perhaps that maybe after 30 years of work, we’ve left our mark. Most of us, of course, would be wrong in thinking that. Sure, there are exceptions – Hyman Rickover is the father of the nuclear submarine force; Henry Bessemer made steel economical; Watson and Crick identified the double helix structure of DNA – but for the average schmo sitting in a cubicle there aren’t going to be entries in even the most obscure history book – unless you create your own entry in Wikipedia.

I attended a retirement luncheon – a function that no one ever really wants to go to, but that guarantees a long lunch without anyone getting on your case – and had the dismaying realization that even the people working next to you don’t really have a clue what you do on a day to day basis. The highlight of the “ceremonial” portion of the event was the soon-to-be-departed employee’s supervisor saying a few kind words. One would hope to hear how they made the workplace better, or contributed to the war effort, or saved homeless kittens in their spare time.

What this particular career boiled down to was this: A supervisory musing about how he’d “always remember the great report you wrote about the problems in Peoria.”

Wow. That’s perspective.

For most of us, that’s how a career is going to end. Think on that next time you’re working late on an “important” project or skipping vacation days to make sure a project is finished on time. In 20 or 30 years when your middle of the road colleagues are sitting around a table at a middle of the road restaurant bidding you farewell it’s likely all you’ve done is written a great report about Peoria.

Live your life accordingly.

Editorial Note: This is part of a continuing series of previously unattributed posts appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Sucking…

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I don’t know what kind of freight train hit me a little after noon today, but I am well and truly tired. Actually, check that. I’m flat out exhausted. It feels about half like the flu, with the dizziness, achy muscles and joints, and almost complete inability to actually sleep. Whatever this is sucking the life out of me needs to knock it the fuck off and I mean right now, because it’s taking every bit of effort I have to focus on getting through these couple of lines to bitch about it. That’s clearly not the recipe for a good and productive day.