Ran across The Inner Game of Stress: Outsmart Life's Challenges and Fulfill Your Potential ($16 @ Amazon) at the the library, was feeling stressed so thought I’d read it. Was a mixed bag for me, some of it made sense, some of it I had a hard time with – just didn’t seem to fit my view of the world, you might find it a better match. But the interesting part…was interesting, and one part in particular stood out; a categorization of stress level that equated to having a fever. I won’t reprint the entire chart because it’s part of the book, but here’s my paraphrased section of it:
On the day I read this I felt like I was at 101. Not good, but not a trip to the doctor either. I think that’s a pretty useful way to view stress in terms of health. Are the mappings exactly right? I don’t know. Do most people live at a stress temperature of 98? Not sure either, but I still like the scale and think it’s good enough.
The part it doesn’t quite capture is that stress is variable. I can have a bad day and my stress goes up to 101, then back to normal over the weekend. On the other hand if I’m in the 102+ range, even if it goes back to normal (doubtful) it’s probably going to climb back up again more quickly and with provocation than it normally would.
Still, if you had a temp of 101, would you go to work or take the day off to recover?
The harder thing to learn is to handle things differently so your stress level doesn’t go up. I’m all for that, but in practice I’d rather start with a strategy for dealing with stress and then learn how to avoid or reduce it. The book covers some of that if you decide to give it a try.
I’ve written here and there about my attempts at time management and the idea that as you spin more and more plate, it’s easy to guess wrong about whether you can really spin one more or note. Lately I’ve had the almost perfect storm of distractions hit at once; family, work, SQLSaturday Orlando, small but valued client wanting some help, user group meeting, and it really hurt. I came dangerously close to dropping a few things and just barely made everything work. As a measure of that stress I’m even now trying to pound my inbox back into reasonable shape from it’s current level of 200 messages…after removing all the junk.
There’s a tendency here to think that I was doing too much, but in practice most of us can’t afford to work at 50% capacity just in case multiple storms happen at once. More realistic – and sustainable – is about 80%, reserving the ability to surge if needed. I’m generally confident to surge even more when needed, but I don’t want to try to sustain that beyond a week or two, which is good because most sudden problems typically resolve that fast or less.
It’s a real world problem that happens. I had one project that needed to be finished as a chunk and once done, all the remaining projects were time boxed. I had to work on the user group, had to put in time on my local event, had to do other things. In a lot of cases you can tell the client you need a few extra days, especially if you have a track record of being reliable, but here I could only move one thing and not very far. What remains is to work harder and longer for the crunch and sometimes cut corners that you might not. Here’s an example: for the user group I typically spend time time trying to get a sponsor that will cover the price of the food and come to the meeting, both add value. This time I just paid for the pizza to get that chunk of time back.
Alas, this isn’t really a SQL post, but thoughts on efforts to share work that has been previously done by one person! For the past two years I’ve handled almost all of the work leading up to SQLSaturday Orlando, bringing in volunteers close to the event to help with logistics. It works pretty well because I have all the pieces of the puzzle and know that I have to get it done. The downside of course is that I add more work to a list that is already larger than it should be, and I’m not training anyone to take over sometime in the future.
The latter is a fundamental challenge of most businesses, and most fail badly at it. Ideally every leader should be grooming someone to be their replacement, just as they themselves should be preparing to move into the job that their boss does (note that I’m not suggesting a coup!). It doesn’t happen for a lot of reasons; lack of time, lack of candidates, fear of being replaced.
For me, my excuse has been lack of time. Dividing up tasks takes time, explaining how to do them takes time, checking on them takes time, doing them yourself when they don’t get done…takes time!
This year I’m trying harder to share, and I started that by including some of the key volunteers on all the email related to the event. It lets them see how I communicate, what kind of responses I get back from speakers and sponsors, and start to feel like they understand what is going on. Last week we met at lunch for a planning meeting and to divide up more tasks, and it’s quite a dance. Volunteers want to own tasks, but aren’t sure what is involved – is it really an hour task? Or the “how” worries them, what should a message to a sponsor who isn’t responding look like? For me, there are some things that I’m not ready to let go of – key sponsors is one – and there are other tasks that are critical path and require some faith to let go!
In one case I asked Jack Corbett to request funding for the event via UGSS. First I had to add him as an admin, then he emailed back that he didn’t see the funding option. That required an email to our MS guy to fix that, then back to Jack, then finally get the request done. I’m worried that I’m annoying the daylights out of Jack, and he’s thinking the same – trying to help just added work! Some of it had to be done anyway, but it feels slow at times.
Management 101, right?
it’s the nature of managing anything that delegating takes time and adds complexity, but you hope you benefit from it in the long term. For volunteer events the more people that have ownership of it the better the event becomes, so it’s worth some pain to share the work and the knowledge.
I enjoy woodworking as a hobby and as I try new things I find that my work habits during the learning stage tend towards chaotic and I wind up with stuff every where. Part of that is just enthusiasm, wanting to move ahead and do stuff, part of it struggling so hard to master ideas and techniques that I wind up with tunnel vision. That often leaves me with tools, notes, and everything else stacked all over the place.
It’s a pattern I see in beginners with SQL too. They are intensely focused on syntax, trying to map how it works to whatever tool set they used before, and the early work is rough. As they begin to get over that first bit of learning curve they can then start to think about how do more interesting things.
You could call it lack of discipline and that’s true to an extent. On my new projects I need to slow down, clean up more often, try to see which tools I’m really done with and can put away. But it’s also true that I often don’t know when I’m done with a tool. Maybe I think I’ve done the final drilling, but then I find I missed something, or drilled a hole in the wrong place!
Many years ago I worked with an engineer that was meticulous about his work environment. He laid out a set of 8 pencils and pens in a certain way, had his log just so, and as he worked he would pickup a pen, use it, and then put it back in the right place. At the time I didn’t entirely appreciate the discipline it requires to build good habits, even if I still tend to think that one was a bit much.
Another story from even further back, I had a co-worker who drove a car that didn’t have the now entirely common warning buzzer if you left your headlights on. He had devised his own system; each time he turned the headlights on he took a clothespin from the ashtray and put it on the door handle, that way there was no way he could (reasonably!) exit without noticing the clothespin and that would cue him to turn off the lights and put the clothespin back on the ashtray. It worked well enough, though sometimes it did seem like a man that could do that every time could just as easily remember to run through a mental checklist each time he turned off the car.
For me, I find it’s easier to build bad habits than good ones, and probably true of most people. Good habits require you to make a continuing investment of energy that doesn’t seem to have a clear pay back. It’s also important to remember that while we might have good work habits on something we do all the time, we may have to build those habits on something new – think starting to use SSIS if you’re new to it.
Steve Jones sent me this link on time management that discusses two things – getting ‘ambushed’ at the start of the day with unexpected tasks and the power of ritual. It was timely (as it were) because I’d just had a miserable day where I had some goals to hit and spent most of the day reacting to calls and requests.
The article puts the emphasis on making your list first, and then reading email. I like that, but I’m not sure it’s always possible depending on the job and situation. In the case of this particular day I elected to prioritize things that I felt would benefit from immediate attention at the expense of my planned agenda. Good decision or bad? It felt bad at the time because it wasn’t what I wanted to do – I wanted to finish the final 2% of something I’d been on for longer than planned and put it away for good.
Ritual, aka patterns, are definitely one of the ways that most people win, including me. They aren’t inherently good or bad, they just are. I don’t think you get the big wins by never changing from the pattern, but you don’t get the big wins by deviating a lot either.
Not sure I’ve learned a lesson though I know it’s there to be learned. One thought that does come to mind is that I think this is marginally easier when you work on or with a team because you can get some feedback - ‘should I change course for this?’. I usually work solo and just have to make the call on day to day stuff.
I've written a few posts in the past about time management, and thought I'd post an update with some lessons from the past few weeks. Typically I do pretty well with keeping up with what needs to be done and when, but there are times when I struggle - part of that is the real world, part of that is not sticking to my system, part is needing to tweak the system from time to time.
My most recent challenge came as we finished up a phase for an internal project, but decided to invest more time in some administrative tools now rather than later. That came at inopportune time, but still seemed like the right thing to do. For the better part of 3 weeks I was immersed in understanding the next step, figuring out what should be done now versus deferred until later, and then building the table design and specifying the UI tools to support it. Not the hardest work in the world, but it does require concentration. Concentration doesn't work well with answering email, so all of that was put off until end of day, and by then I only handled the ones that were really important.
Three weeks later I finally reach a stopping point (which isn't the same as done) and have a definite feeling of lack of awareness about what needs to be done and when. I spent a few hours working on the inbox to clean stuff up and creating tasks, then another hour scanning and updating my task list as some things could be dropped for various reasons. I also modified my task categories, ending up with this:
Right now the hardest thing for me to do is manage the due dates. Many of the tasks in the list have no real due date, they will get done as time permits, probably in batches, and some will just never get done. I check the list about once a week to see what I have to get done regardless of due date, but I definitely wish for a more sophisticated system.
The lessons? One is that I can't afford to go dark for more than a couple days without pain. That means reading it all, and then doing it or tasking it. The other is that better organization of the tasks in a way that fits the way I work definitely helps, and has to evolve as the work changes. For a while I had networking, blogs, reading, article ideas all grouped under Professional Development.
I keep thinking a better way to make this work would be to do less!
Many of us make a living by working on tasks while monitoring email, taking a few calls, and in non uncommon cases also keeping up with Facebook, Twitter, and more. Often it's multiple tasks, and we get better at plate spinning. To a degree that's good, because if you want to move into management, consulting, or run your own business you won't have the luxury of just doing one thing. In fact, it's that move away from doing one thing (and being good at one thing) that is the deciding for many of us to prefer being 'just' an employee. Nothing wrong with that.
But, getting better at plate spinning doesn't decrease the cost of doing it, or at least the decrease in productivity for any one task. I'd like to think I'm reasonably good at juggling multiple tasks, but it is tiring. Ever watch them spin plates? It's fun to start with, you think you can add one or two more, then you hit the point where it's an all out sprint to keep them going. When you're well rested and energized, you can do it for quite a while. But then you get sick, tired, or maybe someone (often you) decides you can always do one more plate - and then you start dropping things. Hopefully you drop the things that matter the least, but regardless it usually means you've failed to do something you committed to - how much that matters depends on your ethics and pride.
The challenge here is that when you're spinning two plates and you're doing it easily, when that third task comes along there doesn't appear to be any reason not to do it - you don't want to look lazy, you want the money, or just like the challenge. You go from 50% capacity to 75% - and that still leaves room for one more right? We need to stay at a pretty high utilization rate to earn the money, satisfy customers/employers, but at least for me, stay short of the point where any minor snag means I deliver something late.
So the title is about measuring, and maybe that's not the best title, but I do have a way for you to assess the cost of the task switching. Stop doing everything and do just one thing. Turn off the phone, email, instant message, blog reader, etc, and just work for 4 hours. Then turn it all back on again and think about the difference. I've made it a habit for the last several years to spend 3-4 hours on Sunday morning working on tasks that are either nice to have, or require serious concentration. It's relaxing to be able to focus and stay focused.
We can't go back to doing one thing at a time, if there ever was a time when it was that way to start with. But we can work on more accurately understanding our utilization rate and the strain it's placing on us, and then use that to make decisions about things that come along that we didn't expect.
Recently I posted about Managing My Todo List and I had a question via email about what notepad I was using - good to know I'm not the only one that sweats the details. For the past few months I've been using a Journalbooks 91340 that I was given by a friend during an office visit that is actually 7x10, and has worked well. The downside is that I haven't found a source to just order a few, all the places I saw online want you to order a 100 copies...at about $8 each. Not sure I need $800 worth of notepads.
I'm trying out two different new models, one is by GBC/Acco, the 9"x6" Professional Series Select with 80 pages, spiral bound. Even though I purchased at Staples I couldn't find an exact match online, this is close. Was about $7. Not cheap for 80 sheets of paper! The other is also from Staples (and perhaps other places), the 5.5x8" Rolla refillable notebook. It's an eight ring binder with the rings exposed, paper that pops in - the refillable part. About $7 too, 80 sheet refill $4 and change.
All these get marketed as 'executive' notebooks, which I believe is marketing for 'we will charge you more'. Not sure any of them worth $7-8 compared to a 8.5x11 pad. The other part that aggravates me a little is trying to pick something and be able to get it again - they have stuff in the store you can't find online, and vice versa. More marketing scheme I imagine.
Of the three, I liked the Journalbook best, maybe just because I've been using it. Others will do for now, or maybe they'll grow on me. It's only paper, but it's a tool, and I like to use tools I like. Funny how we all like different tools/approaches, but good to work through the process, pick one, and then just stick with it.
I was mildly amused by my friend Steve Jones blog post Finding a Direction about not really wanting to spend a couple days in meetings. The amusement is in part because I know he's just as contrarian as I am, but really it's because we have an entire generation of workers that have grown to believe 99% of meetings are bad. I won't argue that I've been to a few bad meetings in my career but in general meetings (and I mean face to face meetings) can be very productive if you follow the rules of good meetings. I know there are entire books, but here's my list:
If you think about the bad meetings you've been to I bet they violate most of those ideas. What do you do when your boss runs bad meetings? Suffer. Send them a link to this post. Buy a meeting book and pass it around. And then perhaps still suffer.
We're knowledge workers and none of us are dumb, a few are astonishingly smart. Good things happen when you put a lot of smart people in one place, but it's not even close to realistic that we can do great things without some interpersonal contact. What are you saying/projecting when you don't want to meet with others on your team? That you're too smart to need help? That they are too dumb to help? That you'd rather do 'ok' rather than 'great' rather than ask for help?
There's also something to be said for the old platitude of 'attitudes are contagious'. If you're determined to be miserable you probably will be!
Not a SQL related topic today.
I first noticed Tripit on Joels Blog and so far it solves a problem I've had from time to time; making sense out of all the various email messages I get when I book a trip. Their implementation is simple, just forward the email from the vendor (Expedia, etc) to them and they parse the message and then put it back into a standard Tripit format. For the most part it works painlessly, identifying which items go to which trip and only occasionally telling me that it didn't recognize the email format and would just add the information as unparsed text to the trip report. I still throw all those notifications into my travel folder just in case, but so far this is easy and effective. No charge so far and nothing I've seen about how they intend to monetize, will be interesting to see.
As an owner of a small business one of the constant struggles is time management, and more importantly, finding time to think long term and not just short term. It's the nature of business (and work) that we tend to focus on tactical items, those things that have to get done today, or that we have to put time into today in order to meet whatever timeline we have.
I've always believed in doing what needs to be done first, then doing what you want to do after, if you have time and energy. Do the dishes, then read a book. It's a smart strategy because it makes sure you do have the time and energy to get things done, but it often means that the strategic thinking part is either done when you're tired or just gets deferred. But it is a short term strategy? Or am I just defining "what has to get done today" incorrectly?
I haven't answered that to my own satisfaction yet, but it's important. I've seen way too much short term thinking as an employee to want to fall victim to it now that I work mostly solo.
