Tag Archives: work

Should’ve learned to weld…

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Monday evening. Milepost One in the long march towards the three-day weekend. One of my go to responses to many events at the office these days is an exasperated reminder to the world that I could have learned to weld, apprenticed to be a plumber, or picked up any number of practical skills that ensured my long term employability. I’m told that at least one of my high school teachers recommended that amidst my perpetual struggle to grasp the basic concepts of algebra. Perhaps the old crank was on to something after all.

Instead of doing something productive like learning carpentry, I went to college and promptly put the thought of alternatives out of my head. I do wonder sometimes at what kind of difference it would have made had I found myself practicing an occupation where the end result is something to physically show for your efforts at the end of a day’s work. At least part of me thinks that’s got to be personally fulfilling on some level. Or maybe from where I sit it just seems more fulfilling than being the guy who churns out the memo with the fewest spelling and punctuation errors.

At the rate my bits and pieces seem to be grinding down, I’m not under any delusions of transforming myself into a tradesman at this late date. Between the shoulder problems, lower back pain, clicking knee, and the occasional bit of foot trouble behind a desk is probably the most reasonable place in the world for me to stay. While I’m there, though, I’m going to spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking that I should’ve learned to weld. With all the wisdom of hindsight I think a career that results in something less ephemeral than a voluminous stack of PowerPoint slides would have suited me.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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I usually give WAJTW over to three short, unrelated snippets of stupid that I’ve encountered during the week. From time to time, though, a single issue is of such magnitude that I feel it’s worthy of undivided attention. This week is one of those occasions.

For the last two months, we’ve been hearing around the office all manner of things about a “climate survey” conducted earlier this summer. Most of the time these surveys come and go without much notice. I don’t know exactly what the responses were in this most recent round of questioning, but I can only surmise that the results were beyond bad. It’s the first time in almost 13 years that I’ve ever seen an organization actually do something in response to their survey.

I should draw a line of distinction here between doing “something” and doing the right thing. So far, my little slice of the organization has been talked through the survey results on five separate occasions. We’ve now had two sessions with different groups allegedly to discuss what our perceptions of the problems are. Today marked (I think) the 8th time that we dedicated at least an hour or more of the work day to this topic. You’d think by now there would be more than a passing awareness at echelons higher than reality of what the issues are, who’s responsible, and the effects it’s having across the workforce.

What I’ve seen so far is that we’re spending a hell of a lot of time talking about things. What I haven’t seen is anyone actually doing something with the mountain of information they’ve already been given. I’ve been around long enough to know that the game plan probably involves talking about it for so long that people forget there’s actually a problem… Which in all likelihood makes much of the last two months a very large effort to check off the “we hear your concerns and are doing something about it” box.

On that score the powers that be are right. They’ve done just enough to demonstrate initiative, but not nearly enough to make a damned bit of difference… and thus does the great green machine go rolling along.

Unglued…

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I’m not ashamed to admit that I was as close to coming unglued today as I’ve been in at least four years. At one point around 2:30 this afternoon, email was hitting my inbox and I was taking on so much verbal guidance that I’m pretty sure I could see the code in the matrix. I wish I was joking. There was a minute there this afternoon when I’m almost positive that I could hear the synapses firing in my brain.

In the middle of my boss talking to me I squeezed my eyes shut and rubbed my temples, muttering something to the effect of “I think I’m losing my mind back here.” At least I think that’s what I said. Whatever it was that came out of my mouth in that moment must have been a doozy because the boss’ face was a decided mixture of curiosity and concern when I opened my eyes. It wasn’t my finest moment. Then again, it wasn’t anything close to a good day, so I don’t know why it would be.

I don’t mind hard work – physical, mental, it makes no difference to me. I’m the guy who comes home from his day job and spends another four hours at the keyboard chasing the dream of making a living and a life from the written word. I’m the guy who spends hours on the yard until it looks “just so” and order has been restored from the chaos. With that being said, I need to note that there’s only one of me. I can’t change one thing sixteen times and have any hope of keeping up with the two dozen other things people want. I wish I could tell you that I could. Hell, I wish I actually could do it all but there are limits… and I’m old enough to know better than to spend all day every day working beyond those limits. Nothing good comes from that.

So tomorrow I’m going into the day knowing that I’m already running close to max RPM. Some people are happy enough to rev the engine until it blows apart. I’m not one of them and will make decisions accordingly.

Research…

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There’s always a fine line when a project starts between wanting to just do the work quietly and wanting to blog about every step along the way. In the interest of not giving away the store before it’s even written, I’ll try to keep my discussion points fairly general in terms of the next product in the jeffreytharp.com pipeline. Suffice to say it’s not going to be quite like any of my previous efforts.

I haven’t set down to a writing effort yet that didn’t start off with research… and that’s where the lion’s share of my self-imposed writing time is allocated at the moment. I’m doing my best to spend an hour a day sourcing background information in the hope that once I have a stack of notes, I’ll actually be ready to sit down and put words on the page.

What I supposed you need to know now is there is a fresh work in progress. What I hope you’re going to see at the end of this trail is a deeply personnel (and intensely sarcastic) look at my relationship with life, work, and social media. It may not be of interest to anyone. It may not sell a single copy. But from the preliminary research I’ve done so far, I’m wholly fascinated by the ground this effort will end up covering.

Break’s over…

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So a few of you (probably those who haven’t been around very long) might think that after a four day hiatus from posting I’d be back and better than every. Sadly, only part of that is true. I’m back. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been gone. And the muse didn’t see fit to endow me with a week’s worth of brilliant posts for your amusement. Trust me when I tell you that I’m far more disappointed than you are about that particular turn of events. If you spend enough time writing (or trying to write), disappointment is just one of the emotions you learn to live with as a constant companion.

I’ve extended the long weekend one extra day so instead of throwing myself back to the wolves tomorrow I’ll ease into it on Wednesday. I’ll try not to rub in the fact that it’s only going to be a two day week for me, but I’m not going to lie and tell you that doesn’t make me awfully happy. Instead of brilliant posts of experiences on the road, I’ll be reaching into the old grab bag this week to see what notes I have left over from posts that never quite got fleshed out. It’s not the most original approach, but there are a few nuggets in there that are likely too good to waste. In the meantime, I’m sure that by mid-morning Wednesday the restive effect of these days off will have been worn away and I’ll find myself with plenty of new stuff that needs saying.

It’s Monday again and even though it’s not a “school night” for me, it definitely feels like the break’s over.

Gratification…

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I know my sense of how the universe works is probably a little off by “normal” standards, but I find something deeply gratifying about telling Outlook to turn on my out-of-office message. It’s one of those rare bits of the day that feel like I really got something accomplished, namely that I’ve officially told anyone trying to track me down that I won’t be checking voice messages or email for the next seven days.

That’s not strictly true, of course. I’ll still be tethered as tightly as ever to my own electronics, but for these next few days anyone looking for me at my desk or eagerly awaiting a response is going to have to cool their jets while I go do other, more interesting things.

Because there are no free lunches in this life, I know all this means is the pile of things on my desk, jammed into my inbox, and waiting on me to “push three to hear your messages now” will be immense by the time I get back next week. That’s just going to have to be next week’s problem. I’ve only got the RAM onboard to be concerned with so many things at one time and frankly none of the issues on or around my 50 square feet of cubicle are even close to making the cut.

The wrong metric…

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It occurs to me that when it comes to the amount of time we spend at work that it could all come down to tracking the wrong metric. Since early in the 20th century the “standard” has been the 8 hour day and the 40 hour week. That’s well and good I suppose if you’re churning out Model T Fords by the million on an assembly line. In that kind of work there’s no allowance for people working at varying speeds. Most of the people I know these days aren’t working on a 1920s assembly line, though.

Instead of manning the line at the Rouge River Complex, we’re all sitting at our keyboards banging out emails and memos and slides. If I happen to be super efficient and complete my assigned memos and slides in six hours, I’m still at my desk for two hours regardless of whether I’m doing anything constructive or staring blankly at the ceiling. The reverse is true as well. If I’m an utter slacker and can’t get all my emails sent in eight hours, there’s no force compelling me to stick around until they’re done. As far as my unscientific observation of the eight hour day and 40-hour week is concerned, I can only conclude that we’re basing our business model on precisely the wrong metrics. We’re managing to time rather than managing to outcomes.

If I, gods forbid, were a boss, why would I care if someone got their assigned work done to standard in six hours? Maybe in theory I could then assign them 20% more work, but in my experience that almost never happens. If your mission in life is to get X done every day, once X is done, I say go home. Go to the park, the bar, the ball game. The threat of having to do X+20% doesn’t do anything more than make the typical drone slow their roll to make sure they don’t pull too far ahead of the pack. Sure there are a few over achievers out there who throw off the curve, but when I look around they’re the exception rather than the rule.

So there it is – the thesis I should have written for my MBA. A Savage Act of Defiance Against the 8-Hour Work Day: Managing Performance Instead of Time. It feels a little like there’s a “philosophy of management” book in there somewhere… which means I should mention that the thoughts herein expressed are the sole property of the author and protected under the copyright laws of the United States. All rights reserved.

Renewed…

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Based on the email that arrived overnight from my domain registrar, it looks like http://www.jeffreytharp.com will be sticking around for at least another year. I suppose that could be good or bad depending on your point of view.

Taken wholly out of context, the email left me thinking about the issue of renewal in more general terms. It strikes me that this is a chance to evaluate where this blog has been and where it’s going, what’s worked well enough, and where I’d like to nudge it in slightly different directions. None of that is the work of a single day and certainly not of a single post.

Lately I’ve been kicking around the idea that I need to tighten up the focus of my writing a little bit. As you’ve no doubt seen, what shows up here tends to be sort of wide ranging, off the cuff ideas and commentary. That’s one of the aspects of this blog that I’ve always enjoyed. It has occurred to me, though, that in order to make it more than just whatever happens to be on my mind at any given point in the day (and to broaden its appeal beyond people who know me and want to see what I happen to be ranting about), there needs to be some kind of method overlain onto my particular brand of madness.

When it gets right down to where the fingers meet the keys, I don’t know exactly what I want this space to say about me and what I’m trying to do with my small slice of the internet. I have a hard time imagining that I’d be able to stay focused on just one or two main themes after I’ve spent the last seven years blogging about whatever notion captured my interest. With all that said, I want to believe it can be more than what it is currently. You might say I have a passion for this kind of writing. The commitment I’ve made to keeping this page current – now racing towards it’s eighth anniversary – is the longest commitment I’ve ever willingly made to anything in my life. If that doesn’t speak to passion for an activity, I’m not sure what would.

Now if I could just gin up a way to make this work a little less pro bono and a little more income earning, we might be on to something here. Then again that one time when I tried to make my living from history, my first passion in life, it quickly turned into work and a situation other than fun. Maybe I’d be best served by not trying to make a buck off of this one and just keep doing it because it’s what I love.

All of that because Go Daddy sent me an email. Sometimes I really do wonder just how the hell my brain works.

The right cover sheet…

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I wish I’d have had the wherewith all to jot down a few notes today. I think it might be instructive in describing exactly why there is currently so much dissatisfaction with the state of things. To illustrate my point, here is my best recollection of an actual conversation that took place just after I got back from lunch:

Other Person: “Uhhh… he’s adamant that we get that random tidbit of information from that guy who doesn’t want to give it to us.”

Jeff: “Yeah. Well, this report has to be sent in by 1:00, I need to finish that thing that was due Monday but no one told us about until this morning, and that other thing that needs approved four levels above me before I can send it out at noon tomorrow needs finished by the end of the day. Oh, and I haven’t had time yet to prep for the meeting I’m nominally supposed to be in charge of tomorrow, so there’s that… but I’ll add the random tidbit to my list and see what I can find out after I managed to carve out some time to hector the Air Force into doing something they’re probably not going to want to do.”

Other Person: “So… Do you want me to look at the slides for tomorrow?”

Jeff: “Sure.”

As far as I can tell, today was mostly about learning to put the right coversheet on the TPS report. Again. And Again. And Again. And again. I’m fairly sure this is real life, but it feels so close to fiction that it’s almost frightening.

The incredible shrinking staff…

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For most of the last four years my little corner of the bureaucracy has held fairly steady at a total of eight people. Sure that’s a couple short of a full load, but close enough that the job got done without too much trouble. A year ago, one of our host moved on to other opportunities and we were down to seven. A few months ago another chose to go test the waters elsewhere and we were down to six. After that, keeping up got harder. Today, we assembled for the farewell lunch for the next to go out the door and by the end of the week our number will dwindle to five. Life will be harder yet when that work gets farmed out, but I’d be the last guy to condemn anyone for doing what’s in their best interest.

Only a fool would believe that we’ll hold at five for very long before the next departure and the next and the next. There’s a upward limit of doing more with less. There’s an equally fixed limit on even being able to to the same amount with less. Eventually you simply reach a tipping point where you accept less or you apply more resources to bring the scales back into some semblance of balance. At least that’s the way we learned it at my fancy online business school.

Now the discussion focuses on who’s covering what, who’s going to be out when, of needing to look closley scheduled leave, and how many balls we can collectively keep in the air at one time. Those are hard discussions and even harder decisions, but they’re decisions I have the advantage of not needing to make. Giving up my supervisor’s hat strikes me as a better and better decision every single day. I’m just a poor simple working drone, the part of the equation where the “equal and opposite reaction” takes place.

For me that means it’s time to start making my own hard decisions about what the future holds, what I’m willing to accept as a matter of course, and what I’m willing to push back against. Even if nothing comes of it, it’s probably well past time to start filling the options box back up. I can’t help but think that I’ve seen this movie before. I’d just hoped it would be a little longer before I got to see the replay.