User blog:Taldin/Much To Do About No Things

One of the things I think I did wrong last year on the last expedition, so to speak, was to just concentrate on surviving the week. And I'm obligated to do a status report at work, so perhaps to up the challenge this year, it's time to actually put together some quests to make stuff happen.

So. Year two is going to be about being more creative, more assertive, and more outgoing. Since the housemate is actually mostly better, the latter is going to be about finally getting out and doing more exploring -- at least in theory.

On to year two!

Week One
Sometimes you have to commit to things without counting the cost, and be willing to step outside the boundaries other people put on you. In the past week, I've been willing to leave work on time (more or less), succeeded in spending more time with friends I'd not spent alot of with lately, and left the house to run errands early rather than wait for the housemate to wake up.

Why this is an accomplishment: I'd let my social life suffer for being a caretaker. It's very easy to say 'someone needs me,  I can't go somewhere I want to go,'  and let it become a habit.

I also bought plane tickets for a friend's wedding. Three months ago, I didn't think I could get away. And even though it's only an overnight trip, it's still proving that I can.

Week Two
The lesson of the week was to be more patient and wait for proper opportunities sometimes, rather than taking risks that don't have a high payoff for a higher chance of failure.

The goal he set for the week was to finish out one of his projects, and to do it right -- and he mostly succeeded. (Some of the work came home with him. )

The bigger goal for the week was 'don't drop everything you're working on to address a problem right away' -- to say 'can it wait for a little bit?'   And to set boundaries a little better.

All in all? A productive week.

He even managed to make a dentist appointment and balance his checkbook.

Week Three
One of the harder thngs to do for me is to pry myself away from my desk and my work. I think that having someone to train has changed that - but it also showed me that I'm better at my job than I realized.

In wargaming, there's a principle called 'force multipliers' -- things you can do to add strength to existing units rather than adding more units.

This week I trained my replacement on the book I've had since 2004. It wasn't an easy thing - I kept wanting to do things for him. And at the end of the day, I had to sit with him and walk through the various bits and pieces on every single docs implementation issue on his (formerly my) list of action items.

He's a smart guy, better than the person we hired him to replace. But he's also got a thousand odd page manual to learn, and he can't be expected to look at a single command and go, 'oh, it's this one on this page' and recognize what's different, because everything is new to him.

Still, the goal for the week was to make sure I took the time to add to his force multiplier instead of doing things for him -- and trusting someone to do the job instead of hand holding him through it.

Week Four
The wedding was amazing; but then again, aren't they all? It was admittedly, amazingly bright, but when friends are getting hitched, nobody twitches too much. You have to endure to be in the moment, for the people that matter. And that's part of the important bits.

Part of what I had to do this week was to let go of my legacy work. To not look at what happened the last time and say 'that's going to happen every time', because everyone is different, and I can't do everything alone. (Well, I could when I was younger, but let's face it, I'm not getting any younger.)

On the subject of letting go:  it's hard to let go of work that you know you can do. It's hard to let go of people that you want to keep. But we only have two hands, two arms, and one brain. We only have the moments that we live in, have lived, and hope to have. Sometimes to get something new, you have to let something - or someone - go.

Coyote teaches that we do not mourn the people who have left us; we should celebrate our history, both good and bad. Where there were bad experiences, we learned to live through (and sometimes with) pain we didn't have before. Where there were good experiences, we learned what it was like yet again, to be happy for new reasons that day.

Leaving those things behind changes none of those facts. Letting go of the past does not diminish their impact unless you choose to forget. Letting go of a future that no longer seems certain is learning to hope for a different future that is possible.

Week Five
Getting people to step into battle is like being a general motivating troops to step into the line of fire. Speech contests, doubly so. People would rather jump out of an airplane than speak in public, in front of an unknown audience, and so getting people to go compete in our name was a tough sell. Trickery was involved, but at the end of the day, they proved me right about them - that they were competition material. They won.

We hadn't won the speech contest in a few years. We hadn't won the speech evaluation contest in longer. We'd never swept both at the same competition before.

I guess those who don't go, coach and teach.

One of the odd life lessons I 'learned' this week was 'always make your bed at the start of the day.'  That for him, it was his way of starting the day by imposing order on his otherwise chaotic world. I did it for three out of the five days this week, and didn't find a ton of personal value in it. I think the takeaway is not every lesson speaks to every person.

Week Six
A lot of people are afraid of the dark; I haven't been since I was a kid, when my mom scared the heck out o me with glow in the dark eyes and magnets. Mostly because my bedroom had a pull chain for a light that you couldn't shut off from your bed, so every day ended with having to do things in the dark. At least, unless you had a flashlight, but then if you lost that, you were in the dark again.

There are no monsters in the dark, more often than not, unless you're walking around a bad part of town at night by yourself; but in the safety of your own home, the worst that can happen is that the cat is somewhere you aren't expecting. (I've had that happen too.)

Work proceeded apace, and it just seemed like it's like hiking up hill every day and not seeing much progress. But the thing about work is that sometimes it's less about how many pages you do in a day,versus how many items that you test thoroughly instead of blindly copyig the input. You have to keep going no matter how far it seems to be.

Week Seven
Intuition is the art of figuring things out based on limited information, or sometimes in spite of the information. And the minion I have was taking information as given -- which was the wrong call. There were things that had to be documented because it affected the documentation - even though the Engineer had marked it 'no.'

Me, I remembered where everything was and what it would likely affect, so it was a little frustrating to have to tell my coworker where to go and what to do -- and it wasn't obvious for him. I get it, though. But I have a lot more experience with this sort of stuff, so I, as I call it, 'eat, sleep, and breathe this stuff.'

But the lesson of it is this:  "Trust but verify -- not verifying is going to burn you sooner or later.  It's not about not trusting someone.  It's about being responsible."

Week Eight
The fires that started last week in the Napa Valley area were about two hours driving north of me, but they still had their effect. We spent the weekend hiding in doors from the smoke, which apparently stretched all the way down to San Diego.

Fire is no joke; it's a different reason to be prepared than for an earthquake, and the dry weather, lack of rain climate we enjoy here became our undoing as the fire couldn't be contained until later into the next week. People -- thousands of them -- were impacted, many lost their entire homes and posessions, and are displaced. Having to start over. The local news is all over the stories of people wondering if they can recover, compared against people who are stubborn enough to reopen businesses and people who defended their holdings against the fire despite not being trained to do so.

Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time this last week having to bail out the coworker who procrastinated until the last minute before admitting he was in over his head and asking for help. Not helping would impact the quality of our docs, and make my praise of him to the engineers who have to deal with his shortened review cycle dislike me.

Helping meant giving up my weekend, and a trip to surprise my girlfriend for her birthday.

My work isn't more important than my relationship, but sometimes it sure seems that way....

I don't like getting people in trouble; but apparently the coworker had been hiding his dilemma in his status reports. So nobody knew he was in trouble until the end, and I was frustrated enough to gripe to our manager about it. She said something that surprised me:

"You're doing the right thing.  You can't just cover for someone -- they never learn to fail unless you let them fall.  By bringing this to my attention, you're helping me help him because it tells me he can't work unsupervised, and I can give him the tools to succeed."

That's... really hard for me to do -- speak ill of someone. Always will be.

Week Nine
"Choose your battles wisely." I've been told by many a person -- where to put up a fight, and where to go along with the status quo. I'm one of those people who believes in Getting Things Right, and so any time someone does something or says something that's wrong to me, I speak up. I have an opinion and I'm willing to exercise it; so whenever someone cautions me thus, it comes across as 'don't fight.'  There was a point last year where I told someone I wanted to fight this one, and they backed me up -- right until the point they didn't, when it mattered the most.

Truth matters. Quality matters. Someone telling me to go along with a project's brokenness because they don't want to go through the extra effort? Is like saying, 'you need to be okay with worse quality stuff than you've been used to.'  Someone telling me that it's my fault we can't hire extra people because I kill myself to make deadlines, so there isn't a 'need' to hire extra people? Is anathema to my work ethic. I can't willingly fail on purpose to get help.

As far as mountains go.... the latest round of edits came back with -eight hundred- changes to be made. For a hundred and twenty five page book. It was a brand new book, and I expected there to be a lot of changes, but not that many.... but they won't get done unless I do them, and so, one step at a time, one fix at a time.

Week Ten
I always worry in the weeks leading up to NaNoWriMo that I'm not going to finish, that I haven't been writing, that I don't write enough, but this past week I managed to muster up the energy and inspiration to write a few thousand words in a three part story that hung together nicely. It was also some prequel and development work for my novel-to-be's Big Bad, so it had a purpose.

Life is like a story. You either experience it as it happens, and write about it afterwards, or you plan ahead for things and take the story in that direction. It's changing the ending by changing the present. And I've spent entirely too long in one place doing the same thing, and the story has been the same -- up until now.

This is the week I declared I wanted more independence from the life I used to be leading; took one step back from where I was going, and started looking for new roads.

Week Eleven
November is always one of my favorite months out of the year. I get to let my creative side loose, for better or for worse, and I start writing what promises to be a brand new novel. Some years it works better than others, but it's a habit I enjoy having - having a reason to write every day for a month.

The uncommon part of doing NaNo is the idea of doing it with someone else; the willingness to go out into the night and meet up with strangers who have that novelwriting bug in common. Going with my friends is one thing - I know I'll have someone to sit with and talk to. Going alone, however, is a bit odd to me, because now it's like going to a party where you don't know a single person -- shyness and social anxiety and introvertedness are always hiding in my shadow.

But I went, and even when the original venue got changed at the last minute (literally: there were people in the parking lot redirecting folks) I decided not to just go home, and made it to the new location. Except because it was Halloween, you could never tell if someone was there for the party or just there having pancakes. I was glad I went, and I had a good amount of fun.

Another thing for this week was the idea that I have habits that I've built up over my life, the way I do things, how I act and react to things in my life - and how to be rid of those habits. I've been challenged to try and think more positively about myself, and the things that I do, instead of seeing myself as 'not good enough' -- a problem I've had my whole life!

Week Twelve
I'm a 'get it done' and 'get it right' person. I've spent the past few weeks churning through over eight hundred edits on a small manual, because it was a brand new manual, and just that rough. I celebrated by meeting up with an old friend for lunch; my former Zumba dance instructor. (If you don't know what it is, it's an exercise type where you have an instructor lead you through a choreographed workout to mostly Latin dance music.)    We talked about how people view the world, and especially when it comes to meeting new people. Whether we are afraid of strangers, or open and welcoming; she is far more open than anyone I know, and it's one of her best qualities. I'm a little more introverted most days, but if I go out with a purpose to meet people, or if I'm needing information from a stranger, that's when I kick up my extroverted side. I recognize that most people tend to keep to themselves, because so many of us have been taught not to talk to strangers, but everyone's a stranger until you introduce yourself.

On the other hand, then there are old friends. If you're lucky, you have more friends than you have time for -- not many people get to that point, especially like me; I develop fewer, but deeper friendships, which is a far cry from when I could call everyone I met my friend. I'm pickier with who I spend my time with, but that's also because of the time crunch I'm always under.

I think the difference is that I want to keep the friends who want to keep me, even if we don't see each other often at all.

Week Thirteen
There's never enough time for all of your ideas and all of your things that you can do - need to do, that sort off thing. Never enough money, sometimes, too. We have to choose, and some things take longer than others to finish and sometimes higher priority stuff gets in the way. It's hard to give up on those things -- hard to say, 'this is never going to get finished.'   It's about choices, and figuring out whether First In, First Out matters more than 'Last In, First Out' versus 'Oh, Someone Else Needs This'  versus "I Want This."

It can never all be done -- never all be bought, never all be had. You need to figure out what you want, and be willing to give up some things you originally wanted sometimes to do it. Because even when stuff does get done, it gets outdated, needs replacing, that sort of thing. It's about growth and change sometimes too.

And that brings me to the idea of Never Getting Things Right-- because even if it is right Right Now, it might not always stay that way. The idea of 'because we've always done it this way' is rough because of our want to keep things the same, versus learning how to do things differently, too.

I believe in contingencies, backup plans, and the like. I think being unprepared is the worst feeling in the world, and to not have a way to pick a choice B if plan A doesn't work is a good thing.

Week Fourteen
With the end of his work release, it was time to look into picking up the pieces. Going through a backlog of over fifteen hundred e-mails, going back into manuals he hadn't touched technically in some time, and coming up with new ideas to reorganize them. Also, cleaning up his desk. Thanksgiving was quiet. Just him and the housemate, really. He had been invited to a place up in Oakland, an hour plus off, to spend it with mostly strangers, but he elected not to; he'd opted out some time ago.

The phone call home was a little bit upsetting -- he found out that he'd been mostly written out of his own family by his siblings. Because he hadn't been reaching out to them, they felt no reason to do so for him. It was only a little bit upsetting, though, because it was what he really had wanted all along - he didn't mind being alone.

Week Fifteen
The end of the NaNoWriMo contest always promised a return to normal. Except the last week tended to be one of distraction, and our hero did the horrible thing of opening up a text update for the Wiki and lost his biggest streak to date.

This was not the most horrible thing to happen to him all year, though, at least.

On the other hand, it kept him coming back, for what was going to be his fourth year in a row, it looked like.

Life going back to normal meant actually cleaning things again, and re-learning good habits, like eating better rather than eating out all the time, and generally trying to be less irritable about not getting things done.

That is what life is, really; choosing what to do and recognizing that some things can't be done because you picked another thing to do; figuring out what's really important to do, and what is doing something just to do it.

The flip side of Sir George Mallory climbing Mount Everest 'because it was there' is finding out that a) it killed him  and b) he never did it -- to wit, some challenges are greater than we are.

Week Sixteen and Seventeen
Things got out of control. Like, really out of control; he stopped being able to do anything more than a couple of days without losing even the start of a streak. It wasn't about not caring - it was a focus problem.

He hoped.

He told himself it was okay to take a break for a little bit, to basically not figure out what to do every day, like he had been. He took a couple of steps back and learned to let things go for a little while.

Life, and the things you do with it, have to make sense. They can't be done just to do them, to go through the motions, or it's not really living, is it? It's about enjoying the things that you do more than hating them. It's about remembering to breathe, and remembering to stop obsessing over things you can't change.

It's about knowing when to quit, and when it's enough.

On the bright side? His holiday shopping was done.

Week Eighteen
For the first time in a number of years, he took an actual holiday. Like, stopped caring about so many things, and just dropped everything for a few days in a row. It wasn't by design, but it became an honest choice. It's easier to let something go when you don't have much invested; easier to walk away from things when you don't have much choice, but staying away is the harder part. You feel like you've abandoned your post, shirked responsibilites, and gotten lazy.

You feel guilty. You feel like you're a failure, no matter how consistent you might be.

Holidays are supposed to be about taking time off to recharge your batteries; I spent mine having fun. Enjoying myself as best as I could, and catching up on life.

Sometimes a holiday is an excuse to change what you've been doing. And maybe, just maybe, turning that into a new trend.

Week Nineteen
Focus is part of every habit. You have to be dedicated. You have to want the thing that lies at the end of the effort, the finish line at the end of the road, eyes on the prize, that sort of thing. You have to do it for as long as it makes sense, too.

It's harder when the year has been rough, and I am very, very, glad to see this one go.

Week Twenty
One of the things about the turning of a new year is that you have to see it as the start of something fresh. The idea that the calendar turns, though, is an artificial construct; the beginning of the year could be any day, really, and in fact there are cultures out there that celebrate the New Year starting on a different day than January first.

Accordingly, any day can be start of a new year, for you, for your habits, for your life to be changed in a different way, saying, 'it's a new year of X' starting from a particular day.

Mine apparently starts not with the first of January, but rather, the 13th-- since this is where I get to start over again with another streak. Still lacking focus, and willpower is in short supply, but change has to happen or things will stay the same, surely enough.

Week Twenty One
He ended the week with a dental procedure (because somewhere in there we decided "operation" was too scary of a word) which left him in a sorta hazy state for most of the weekend, enough that he lost another (much shorter) streak. But the week leading up to that was all about rushing to get changes done to manuals, wondering if he'd ever have time to do anything he ever wanted to again.

There were some good lessons in there -- make time for the most important stuff, but also make time for yourself in there -- and while there are only so many hours in a day, it doesn't mean you can't find ways to be more efficient with what you have and when you do things. And also, giving up on doing things, too.

Week Twenty-Two
I think I need a habit or something that I score points whenever I remember to update the Wiki after 4pm. :P   4:12, this time, 4:05 two days ago... Each of these things mean that there's another streak gone -- this month I haven't even been able to get out of the single digits(!). Something tells me that I should just give up at this point, because I can't find enough to do reliably even with some back burner projects that I haven't finished that could keep me busy for some time, but... excuses aside, it's still an endemic problem that I'm lacking enough focus to come here reliably as what used to be a 'regular as rain' thing for me. I'll get in in the morning, think, 'I should update the Wiki to score a point,'  check my email, get called into a meeting, go grab lunch, hack a portal, and then realize a little after 4pm that I've missed the cutoff time again.

When you don't have a lot to lose, you don't worry as much.

Week Twenty-Three
I think the thing that I noticed the most about having dental work done was the inability to talk without it hurting. It's been a couple of weeks since I had the work done, and every morning I woke up with a sore jaw - chewing on things was painful and talking had to be done in short bursts followed by longer periods of silence. I never knew how much talking I did on any given day until I couldn't without pain. A couple of weeks back I figured out how to give up on doing things -- to let an opportunity go so that someone else could have a shot at it learning. It's always been very easy for me to be the first person to volunteer to do something, because others tend to be more reluctant to do so-- this comes from my high school days, where if you didn't jump in with the answer to a question, the entire class got penalized. I also grew up in a household where if you didn't volunteer fast enough to do chores, you didn't get a choice of what you got to do. I was brought up to be responsible for cleaning up after myself, and yet... I still have a sinkful of dirty dishes every so often as a result, mostly because I'm the only one doing any cleaning. But I think that's not really an excuse - there are so many things vying for my attention, that it's easier just to do the minimum effort and leave the rest for a later when I have more time. I've been doing better at weekly habits at least - promising myself to do things on the weekends, and actually getting them done.

Week Twenty-Four
A lot of conflicts arise when we don't talk to the people we're having trouble with. Our heads fill in the blanks, our fears and anxieties roil around and imagine what the conversation will be like. Sometimes, you're right. Sometimes, you aren't. But until you have that difficult conversation, until you collapse the 'good/bad' possibility into reality, it's going to eat at your headspace. That being said? I hate confrontations. I hate deliberately starting a conversation where I'm sure there will be a fight, where I'll have to walk on eggshells to get from the start to the end. Some of them don't end well at all, and I've just willingly subjected myself to verbal abuse and emotional distress -- but at least it got it over with. I spent part of the weekend downsizing a bunch of things in the closet in the back. They were brochures from a vacation destination that I'll probably never see in my lifetime -- Ontario, Canada. There's a lot of places I could go, but there's never enough time or money to do them all. But maybe there needs to be more, still -- if only I could figure out how to live a little more cheaply to do stuff like that.

Week Twenty-Five
(Placeholder for: being sick, training people, and choices )