I have had a pretty appalling week in terms of the difference between what I wanted to achieve, and what I did achieve.
Things outside my control:
Re-aggravating shoulder injury. So much pain. Increased sleeping due to pain killers. Two trips to chiro (feeling a lot better now – finally).
Car is broken and needs a bunch of work, so we have to decide – do we buy a new one?
Server issue on something I was working on sent me down a rabbit hole where I assumed it was my fault.
Hotel sent me away with someone else’s bill (turns out, you can’t use that to do your expense report).
Things I planned/did badly:
Did not plan for a 4-day week (supposed to be on holiday today. Instead I will try and do a couple of hours work whilst packing).
Did not plan for sorting things out in order to go away. Including – checking everything for an event we’re running the week I return.
Did not plan for coming back after a week away.
Agreed – in fact, suggested – that I should go back to New York for two days, the week I get back.
Got overwhelmed and panicked.
Did not break what I was doing up well.
Did not say no. The biggest stress has come from working on something for my old team. A series of events have meant that I wasn’t able to make much progress on this until Monday afternoon. I’ve been stressed by and resenting that what I’m doing is some way away from the circumstances I agreed to. Could also have postponed a couple of meetings.
Prioritized that over the one thing that I really hoped to achieve for myself and my new team this week – getting readability.
Broke my email once a day as I tried to get through the backlog before I go away. Probably necessary, but could have structured it better rather than just going to email “between” things or instead of thinking about what to do next.
Things that worked well:
Broke things up better once it was apparently that someone else was going to have to finish what I started.
Was transparent about what I wasn’t going to get done to my new team.
Have amazing colleagues who are taking control of the event stuff whilst I’m gone.
Spoke to another amazing colleague so she can finish the feature I’ve been working on. Outlining what was happening and how it was working made me feel more capable of doing it myself in the short amount of time left!
Very lucky that my chiro was willing to be flexible and fit me in.
When working through the evening, (9pm Wednesday, 11pm Thursday) took a break for dinner. Wednesday was just a sandwich and some time with my book, Thursday I went out with work colleagues. Reminded me how much I love my job and how awesome most of the people I work with are.
For a long time, I’ve been doing this thing where I GO GO GO like a crazy person and then crash. And I always come up with a plan, like “take on less”, or “be more organized” or some other strategy. And these are helpful, absolutely, but at best they seem to result in a different kind of crisis.
Lately, I’ve been feeling a little burnt out. There are a number of reasons for that, but here’s the big one: I’ve not had more than 4 days off work in a row since I started in January – and that was a long weekend. And normally I’ve spent at least some of those long weekends doing non-work-work. Writing talks, papers, whatever. And I’m exhausted. I want to lie down and sleep for a week, frankly. I’ve booked a week of vacation off for early-September, we’ll be going to Nova Scotia and Price Edward Island with my parents, and I can’t wait.
But, I’m going to come back and it’ll be GO GO GO again. We have an event for female university students coming up, plus there’s Awesome Foundation, Girl Geek Dinner, and training for… something I agreed to do a while ago and don’t exactly know what it is. A talk in Seattle. And – more travel. When I was less than delighted by the number of trips I was looking to have to make to MTV, I said, “it would be different if I was going somewhere cool, like New York”. Be careful what you wish for! Because I am, in fact, set to be making a number of trips to… (you guessed it!) New York. On the one hand, much better than MTV – shorter flight, no time-difference, a city, and I love MOMA. On the other, I find that travel tends to eat a lot of my unstructured time.
The point of all this is, I’ve been stressed and unhappy, and thinking about what it is that I need in order to feel… frankly, less like a crazy person. Something I recently said to my manager: “I always meet my obligations. One day I’ll have a nervous breakdown because I’m insisting on doing all the things I’ve said I’ll do, which the people who asked me have probably forgotten about. And that’s how I’m going to die”.
How about – no nervous breakdown. So I made this list of what I need outside of work to stay sane, which I’ve broken this down into: “most days” and “most weeks”.
Most Days
Exercise.
Read something that is not digital (Kindle doesn’t count as digital to me).
8 hours sleep.
Leave work before 7.
Most Weeks
Pajama day.
Read a novel.
Read some part of a non-fiction book.
Hang out with friends.
Have date with boyfriend (Go out! Somewhere nice!)
Read enough stuff online to feel more aware of the world and the awesome stuff in it (measured by: 15 links worth sharing on Twitter).
Feel interesting enough/inspired to write 2-3 blog posts (for me, it’s a bigger problem when I don’t want to write, than when I don’t have time to write).
An evening of Cate-time.
Make progress on a non-work project (e.g. presentation, paper, coding), have an an event (e.g. AF, GGD), or some non-work learning (e.g. App Inventor).
Here’s an interesting post on dealing with burn-out.
My goal for July was to deal with bureaucracy and explore more. My success was so-so. I got my work-permit sorted, and found out how to get my tax form from IBM (still do to – ask for it). And my boyfriend and I took a trip to Paris… Ontario.
But, a lot of my organizational energy went on figuring out what I was going to do next. I didn’t get everything done that I needed to. I continued to read a lot of novels.
At the end of last week, I wrote that it had been “a mixed week“. And then on Monday, things went and got crazier. I’m still waiting for the dust to settle so that I can figure out what is actually going on.
A friend is in town for a while. Last time I saw him, he told me of his plan to get rid of all his belongings – after living out of a suitcase for a couple of months he’d released he didn’t need most of them. So we catch up, and he’s done it. Everything he owns fits in two suitcases, apparently. He has achieved the minimalist dream. I told him he should blog about it, but he said, no, it was boring because it was easy.
So I ask him, when is he going to move? His response is what I find fascinating, and what I think he should blog about… he tells me that he got rid of all his stuff, and that was easy, but he’s not emotionally ready to leave.
The stuff was just stuff, I guess. Purging yourself of it might change you, but – my friend is proof – that is may not.
When I moved, I got rid of a lot of stuff. And when I arrived, I got rid of more. I got rid of stuff because I was ready to leave, and disposing of it made that easier. He was working backwards, if I get rid of stuff I’ll feel ready to leave.
I think there are key points where it’s easier to move. On graduation, is often the example. You know the people who stay immediately after graduation, often seem to stay for a lot longer. After a breakup can be a good time to move, you’re unattached and making other changes in your life.
My plan, for a while, has been to move back to Europe next year, maybe the year after. And recent events have made me see that a transition point is going to approach earlier than I thought – at the end of this year, even, in one scenario. I’m going to be doing a lot more travel, and it’s a question of, how long am I willing to do this for? How long will this be sustainable? In the scenarios that are visible, middle of next year is the latest for another transition point.
I could stay here. But I know what I want my life to look like – and it’s an international adventure story. I’m looking out for transition points, because they are natural breaks, where it’s easier than usual to go and start a new adventure. It is hard to pack up your life. It is hard to hit reset and start over with everything. I know – I did it when I went to boarding school, when I moved to Scotland for university, in each stop in my time as an international hobo, when I moved to Ottawa, when I moved to KW. Picking a time when stuff is changing anyway makes it possible. Leaving when everything is settled and “fine” (even if not great) is more difficult because you know exactly what you are comparing to when you’re less than delighted to be living in a strange place and don’t know anyone.
I suspect my next adventure may be set in Paris. I want to be closer to my family, and I want to speak fluent, and flawlessly accented French. That is not something that will happen in the middle of Ontario. Hell, I became more fluent in Ottawa but good things did not happen to my accent. But – I don’t know. I just see a transition point coming. When it is depends on what happens tomorrow, what happens in the next couple of weeks, and what happens in October. We’ll see.
It’s been a mixed week. Some successes – Awesome Foundation! Girl Geek Dinner! Getting my visa sorted! And then a number of things that made me wonder why I was bothering. Mostly stupid things, and you could say that I shouldn’t worry about them – but that is easy to say, and hard to do.
Telling a friend about one of them, she gets it, telling me I shouldn’t be bothered by it but understanding that I am, likening it to the first negative comment she received on her blog (which, of course, she still remembers). And I think about how insane it is that I can’t remember the first positive comment from a stranger on my blog, but I can remember chunks of the nasty ones. How I’d forgotten I was on the radio until the recording came on my iPod and creeped me out (“who’s that talking? Oh wait, it’s me?”) but I definitely haven’t forgotten the couple of mixed press articles about things I’ve done, or the article where they misspelt my name.
In interpersonal relationships, a ratio of five positive to one negative interactions is needed, from Wikipedia:
After studying married couples for many years, psychologist John Gottman has proposed the theory of the “magic ratio” for successful marriages. The theory says that for a marriage to be successful, couples must average a ratio of five positive interactions to one negative interaction. As the ratio moves to 1:1, divorce becomes more likely. Interpersonal interactions associated with negative relationships include criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.
When doing things, I don’t know what the ratio is, but I do know that it’s very easy to dismiss the nice comments as people “just being nice” and take the nasty ones to heart. By nasty I don’t mean constructive criticism – the kind people who say, “have you thought about X” and then offer you something – time, a contact, a piece of information – that will help you do that. I mean, just straight up, “you suck” with no acknowledgement of the time, effort, and energy you put into doing whatever it was sucked. It’s stupid to get worked up about, I know. If they have nothing nice to say, they were likely not your target audience.
Personally, I do things for two reasons. Either I find them interesting, or I think they should be done. “Have people tell me how awesome I am” is not on that list, and please, should it ever be that way, shoot me. So – why does “Having people tell me how much I suck” make the list of reasons not to? It shouldn’t. I know, objectively, that the more successful you are and the more you do the more people will try and belittle what you do, and at times somehow manage simultaniously to try to take the credit for it. I know that. And yet, each time it happens (as it did twice this week) I’m hit, afresh, with feelings of guilt, inadequacy, and frustration. And, too often, I wonder if they have a point.
Deep breaths. Focus on the reasons why. When I dislike someone’s means, remind myself that the ends – and their intentions – are good. And, as a reminder that set-backs are not necessarily the end, this week a battle that I had been fighting for several months, was won. I hadn’t thought it would be, and I’d had to go and focus on other things. But then, someone else didn’t give up, and the result is that we all win. And the following day, something happened to remind me why I thought that battle was important in the first place.
But, again, all of this – easy to say, hard to do. So tell me, how do you avoid taking things you shouldn’t to heart?
I discovered something new about where I live at the weekend. The nearby drugmart doesn’t sell bagels. I’d always assumed that they would, but when I tested that theory I found it lacking. Living in a small place, there wasn’t anywhere I could continue on to and so I ended up at my boyfriend’s apartment practically in tears saying “I hate it here”.
Something of an overreaction. To be fair, I was a little strung out because after nearly two months of deliberation my paper got accepted (yay) and I was given… two and a half weeks to make edits. Of course I get this news last thing on the Sunday night of a long weekend, and it hangs over me all week. My earlier paper was invited to be extended as a journal paper (something I’ve been ignoring with everything else that has been going on) but I should be able to put some of the stuff that is being cut from the second paper into that… Meanwhile, I discover that my work permit has come through and I can leave the country again (!), making tentative plans of New York next week and MTV the week after into reality.
Except MTV is infeasible because I have to do these papers – the timing of that trip is more flexible than my attitude on travelling with two laptops. But, what better motivation to get cracking on Saturday morning than a trip to NYC?
And instead I’m having a crisis on where I live. There are so many things that I love about KW – my job, the people at work, the office, the people in the community and the amount of stuff happening. It is, in so many ways, an awesome place to live.
The problem, for me as a city girl, is not things to do, but when I’m not doing things. Going to the grocery store is such a palaver because it’s so far away (although I did end up trying a closer one that I’d been nervous of because it looked sketchy. It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought). I’ve finally found a tasty Lebanese place that will do lamb kebab sandwiches (perfect post spinning – protein, and just enough carbs so stop me from keeling over), but it’s a 10 minute drive away in the middle of an industrial park. There is nowhere within walking distance to pick up Asian food (there is one really good pizza place, but I try not to eat that kind of stuff) and there is only one place we will order in from (tried others, with varying degrees of fail). The result – for me – is that whilst it’s easy to go out, it’s actually really quite stressful to try and have a night curled up in my apartment with a book. I flit about enough, that doing a weekly grocery shop and stocking up on stuff just seems to end up being wasteful – I never know how much I’ll be home. Mostly I shop for clothes etc when I travel, in the US, Toronto or Ottawa, but I ended up doing some shopping the other week, and it involved going to two malls – at either end of KW – because they are both small and don’t have a huge selection of shops.
To come back to the work I was supposed to be doing when I was instead having a crisis… I don’t enjoy writing papers. It’s a lot of work, in a very rigid structure, for what? A trip to Switzerland – the best part of which was the date in Geneva with my boyfriend and the train ride to and from the conference through the stunning country. The new paper is in Singapore, somewhere I’ve long wanted to go, and we’re likely going to make it a holiday. Unfortunately the timing of it means I’m supposed to simultaneously be in Singapore and Seattle. Thankfully the time-zone difference makes that almost possible! I know, I’m lucky to get to go to these places, but the reality is – and anyone who travels for work says this – mostly it’s not fun, and you barely see anything. In California, I just end up at work 8-8 and yes, the campus is amazing, and it’s much warmer in winter, but unless I’m somewhere for the weekend as well I barely get to see anything. It seems that I spend ages on a paper, send it away, wait for ages, have to make the changes they request in a hurry, wait some more, travel, and I get to list one more thing that is somehow supposed to be an “achievement” but really just feels like a chore.
So – the question I have to ask is, why am I doing this if I hate it? Why am I more likely to be doing something that I feel “obliged” to do than something I actually want to do? Because I don’t like to let people down, and because I feel that I need to prove that I was smart, talented, and hard-working enough that me escaping rather than graduating from grad school is not completely my failure. That I didn’t just learn about things that make a terrible manager, and walking away from a sucky situation – that I also learned how to play the publications game. With this latest paper, I met the goal I set myself – of two on-topic publications – that would prove that if I had been willing to pay thousands of dollars to bang my head against a brick wall for a while longer, I’d have an MSc. Comparing this to working on products that get used by an unfathomable number of people, it seems like I shouldn’t care. But I do.
Meanwhile, why do I live here, if I hate it? Because it’s not for ever, and because mostly the good outweighs the bad. It just didn’t seem that way, that morning. It’s rare that you don’t end up having a trade-off between where you live, and what you do. Pick the city, or be tied there by your partner’s career, and you’re constrained by what’s available and how far you’ll commute – and of course, often these constraints limit your career, and I refuse to to let that be me. Pick the company, decide that the opportunity is more important than the location and you end up living where the opportunity you follow is.
Mid- way through June, I paused, and wondered – why was I focusing on little things during a month of big things? I hope that end-of-May-Cate realized that this was something that June-Cate would need to stay sane. This month’s focus gave me permission to make time for small, unimportant (but important to me), things in order that I wouldn’t get buried by the big things.
The big things were – launch. I’ve been working on Google+, it’s very exciting to share what we’ve been creating with the world. Unfortunately, my visa didn’t arrive and so I couldn’t be in California with the rest of my team (a big thing, yes, but one I can do nothing about. I’m trying to stay calm and wait it out). I’ve now started working on a 20% project, which is really cool. The article that I’ve been working on went through several iterations and will be out soon. I gave an Ignite talk (this has been a vague but big-scary goal I’ve had for a while, it was good to stretch myself in this way). And my co-author refined and I edited my first journal paper. Since he’s done most of the work for it, he’s first author – but still, exciting! Towards the end of the month, two other big things came up – first is the panel Serena and I are working on, and second is a web-profile, which I’m going to keep quiet about until it’s out. But still – exciting! Not exciting but still big things – I actually got sick, as in, go to the doctor, give me antibiotics sick. I tend to get the same couple of things again and again in response to stress, and I don’t think I’ve ever needed an emergency doctors appointment before. That sucked.
Anyway, in the midst of all this I read a lot of books – especially novels. Made time for breakfast at my favorite cafe a couple of times a week. Went to the gym. Went out to things happening around town. Applied face-masks. Walked to uptown for dinner. Tried a couple of new restaurants. Got a pedicure. Didn’t travel – June was my first month without a trip in… I don’t know how long. Had a guilt-free day off. Basically, I tried to carve out as much unstructured free-time as possible. It’s been great.
July may have to be the opposite. There are a number of bureaucratic things that I’m not on top of – filing my taxes, claiming health-insurance coverage, etc. I also want to get out and explore more – to that end, I may need more structure. My boyfriend and I are going to plan things for the weekends and go and do them, first up is an aerial exploration thing, but we’d also like to go canoeing and stuff.
So July’s theme is Organization. I’m not particularly excited about this, but who does get excited about filing taxes? Some things just need to be done. Exploring is exciting, but it’s easy for this weekend not to be the right time to do whatever it is, the point is to plan and make it the right time.
How was your June? And what are you planning for July?
The wonderful Serena invited me to join her for a panel at a women/tech conference in October. We’re still working out the details, but essentially we’ll be talking about role models – our own personal superheros. if you will.
But what about the superheros you know who not only inspire you, but you can call in a crisis?
What about the superheros who call you in a crisis? I know a lot of awesome people, many of them women. I know all of them have setbacks, periods of doubt. I know all of them have failed. Knowing this, doesn’t make me think they are any less awesome, it makes me appreciate what they achieve all the more.
There’s always a flip-side. Failure. Weeks living on Cherios. Days with too much wine/vodka (what’s your poison?). Mornings where getting out of bed is just too much. Mostly, we don’t see them – and so being a superhero looks easier than it is.
Recent talk I gave, someone fabulous gave me quite an introduction. Honestly, I didn’t think I could follow it. She says, “here’s this amazing thing about Cate” and for each one I think about how that was really the result of me screwing up in some way (the flip-side).
So what’s your super-power? My friend Maggie called it on mine. She said, “I think the main thing you got out of grad school was learning to make the best of a shitty situation”. It’s true, my super-power might be the pursuit of an interesting life. Good things have come as a result of that – and bloody hard work.
Core messages:
Superheros are everywhere (and, actually, they are human).
Get to know as many superheros as you can.
Don’t underestimate yourself – being a superhero doesn’t mean that it’s not hard, or that you won’t fail.
Looking for feedback and ideas. Particularly, I’d love to know:
Tell me about your superheros. What do they do that makes you think they are extraordinary? In what ways have they struggled? What have you learned from them as a result?
What’s a key piece of advice you’d like to tell you at 20? (or at any point?) For me: those arrogant boys are not as good as they think they are, and you are doing better than you think.
Currently, I’m trapped in a stressed-not-sleeping-feeling-ill cycle. Where I wake up exhausted, too late to go to the gym before work, and come home with a headache. I’m not sure why this is, maybe the crazy weather and thunderstorms we’ve been having. Or it might be the oppressive weight that I feel every morning – that it is already impossible to achieve everything I want to do today in the time available. Hopefully this will improve when a couple of things are checked off. I’m giving an ignite talk next week, which I’m rather nervous about, and working on an article (more about these coming soon).
Been to see a movie at the cinema (Bridesmaids – it was awesome, highly recommend).
Got tipsy celebrating something awesome.
Got up early for spin class.
Napped in the afternoon.
Had breakfast in my favourite local cafe with a book.
Bought my teammates cupcakes.
Watched an episode of Desperate Housewives.
Tidied my apartment.
Not a little thing, but definitely an awesome one… this is my first post written on my iPad, which my lovely boyfriend bought me for my birthday. I love it.
Coming up: novel-reading, and a pedicure. And hopefully many other things I haven’t thought of yet!
It’s helping, I think. No noticeable effect on stress-level or sleeping yet but just trying to do at least one thing every day for no other reason than it makes me happy changes the way I look at things, especially how I spend my time (even if only temporarily). I don’t have to be productive all the time, although that is something I need to keep reminding myself!
So – one week into June, how are you doing?
Cookie Consent
We use cookies to improve your experience on our site. By using our site, you consent to cookies.
