Last week, in California, I met the amazing Meggin who leaves such astute and beautiful comments here. It was great – or terrible timing – depending on how you look at it. Terrible timing, because, one of the first things I said to her was:
In a while I’ll spin this into a really positive sounding blog-post, but right now? I can’t do that because I’ve spent half this morning in tears.
Great timing because she gave me some good advice. So – rough week. I’m pretty chilled out travelling, but packing and timezone changes are still stressful, and I get claustrophobic in MTV. I spent the week jetlagged, came back, and I’m still jetlagged. I enjoyed the weather, wondering around San Francisco, and a day at MOMA. It was great to meet Meggin, and hang out with Maggie and John, and connect to other female engineers based in MTV who I had only seen on video chat.
Anyway, circumstances have meant that I’ve been figuring out what to do next. Stay on my current team with more travel, or move to a new team. I’ve been trying to work that out in the context of wanting to move back to Europe sooner rather than later, of enjoying what I work on currently, but being tempted by this other challenges, and not really wanting to spend so much time in California – it would be different, if I was going somewhere (a city!) where I’d actually enjoy spending time.
It’s been difficult – hence the tears, and the lack of blogging – I couldn’t write about this, but I was sufficiently absorbed by it to be unable to write about anything else.
Coming to a decision has really forced me to think about – what is most important to me? What compromises will I make? For the right project I could be willing to travel more, but the right project depends on a number of things, not just the project itself, but the people involved, and the potential for personal growth.
So I’ve been asking myself questions. What do I want to work on? What level of pressure can I live with? Who do I want to work with? How much will I compromise? How do I want to organize my schedule? What matters to me most? In the end, certain events made the decision was very clear, although still not easy.
I’m switching teams – I know, again. I’m going back to my original manager, and I’ll be working on docs. I’m excited about the project, the people on the team (50% women! Yay!) and I’m really happy – and lucky – to have this guy as my manager, because he’s awesome. They all are. The project is a really good fit for me, I hope. Social was too, and I am fortunate to have been part of that incredible experience, but – for a number of reasons – it’s time for me to move on from that, and this is, I’m completely sure, the right place for me to move to.
A few weeks ago, I got frustrated with a pattern I’d observed. I would, in non “crazy” week work out 5-6 times. Then the following week something would happen – I’d have to take a trip, be out every night, get sick… something. And work out maybe once.
This oscillation and unpredictability – sometimes working out a lot, sometimes hardly at all – was not working for me. It was messing with my energy levels, my eating habits, my sleep cycle, and my happiness.
Eventually, I hit a wall. And I realized that I either had to start living in such a way that I made the things that I think are my priorities a priority, or I had to admit that my priorities were different. And I realized that that meant sometimes ignoring, sometimes just not doing as good a job at the things people try and make my priority (typically via my inbox, one of the many reasons I loathe and avoid it). I also realized that it would be easier if I were to return more to my preferred schedule of early mornings and early nights, rather than the later schedule that my boyfriend and teammates (and, really, most nerdy guys) seem to live on. But, I also realized that with a clear space of time free from travel, this was an opportunity to make this change.
I didn’t write about this, and I didn’t really tell anyone until I’d successfully done this for a month. I just set myself a simple goal, reminiscent of my “one positive thing” approach.
The goal: work out five times a week.
I set no restrictions on length, time, or diet. It was pretty much what you can fit in, when you can fit it in, and eat whatever will enable you to do this.
One week I had Girl Geek Dinner, Awesome Foundation, and a trip to the border to do my visa. I got up early and did 30 minutes on the cross trainer at the gym in the office before work, and I went to spin class after a day in the car even though I had a splitting headache. Total workouts that week? Six. After about six weeks of this, it’s still a conscious setting of priorities, but the big change has been that exercise is no longer a chore, it’s something I want to do.
I’m happier. I have more energy. I’m sleeping better. It’s been nearly two years since I dislocated my kneecap, nearly 18 months since I messed up my shoulder, and I finally have a workout that I enjoy, that is not causing me “bad” pain. I am loving spinning. Last week I actually did “the double” – 6am, and 5:30pm. I felt amazing – although the next day hurt!
Yes – some things have slipped – not as many as I thought, though. The truth is, none of them are as important to me as this. For me, it’s been a question of accepting that there are some things I will not do, because they are not as important. And if it is important, I will arrange my life so that I can get up early for spin class, or just some time on the cross trainer. Next week will be challenging, because I’m travelling – but my priorities don’t really change, even if my location is temporarily different.
I think that actions are so much more important than words. My question: the priorities that you would like to think you have, are they reflected in how you live? What – simple – goal or rule could you set yourself to align your actions with your thoughts?
For the cool-down at spin class, the instructor put on some Andrew Lloyd Weber, I think something from Phantom of the Opera. Yes, it was pretty random. But, for me, something of a blast from the past. It was a song I used to sing, back when I had singing lessons. And then as I wondered out of spin class I thought about what an awesome workout spin is, and if maybe I would enjoy having riding lessons – the one kind of lesson that I wanted, but didn’t get when I was a kid. I had music lessons (piano, trumpet, singing), took gymnastics, dance, swimming, and tennis. Evenings after school were busy.
I toyed with the idea of starting singing lessons again now, thinking it would be something different, and it was something that I used to enjoy. Riding lessons would be cool – my boyfriend goes go-carting at the weekends and I think it’s good to have an outside hobby here in the summer. The problem is the usual one – hours in the day, and that I’m already struggling with what and how to balance the passion I pursue outside of work – community stuff? Exercise, since I should be able to kickbox again soon? Writing? Lego video games (OK that one is not a serious contender). I’m getting really into spinning again, and wondering (as I did before when I was really into spinning) whether getting a spin instructor qualification could be the kind of crazy-audacious goal that I could pursue. The other thing I struggle how to balance is social/non-social activities. We have hot breakfast at work now, which is awesome, but it means that I don’t have Cate-time over breakfast a couple of days a week, and I’m feeling the lack of that.
In the interview for the profile (the one I’m trying to be quiet about for now), I was talking about the advice I want to give to high school girls. In this, as in the OSBR article, I am fixated on choices – keeping choices open. I don’t think the problem is that women don’t choose to be entrepreneurs, or engineers, or scientists – I think the problem is that the choice is not a free one. I worry about how gender-stereotyping in respect to math takes choices from girls, because they come to think they are bad at it, when they are not. Research shows that female math teachers who are anxious about math pass that anxiety on to their female students, but not their male students. That anxiety surely reduces the choices that girls feel they have. Research also shows that women pay a penalty in likability for success, whereas men are more likeable, the more successful they are.
And so I talked about choices, and making sure you have as many as possible. However, there’s a flip side to having choices, and that is the responsibility to make them. I worry that in my non-work time, I’m trying to do too many things and the result is that I’m doing none of them well. I’m reluctant to add new things to the mix whilst that is the case. How much worse would it be to spend all my time like that? At work, I’m ruthless in cutting things that won’t help me be awesome at being a better engineer – email once a day, minimal meetings. In my “free” (ha!) time, it’s hard to be ruthless like that because I don’t know what my focus is.
Over breakfast with a fellow doer of things, and inspiration, we talked about the conflict between those that talk, and those that do. It’s easy to talk about a lot of things, it’s hard to do even a few things – let alone many. Some people think the idea, or the name, is important; I don’t get that. I have a lot of ideas of how to spend my time, many things which I would be happy to do. My friend is the same. The decision of what not to do is important, because wanting to do everything so often seems to mean actually doing nothing. The question is – what will you double down on? What will you commit to? What will you cut?
So – I’m going to hold off finding a singing teacher, or signing up for riding lessons. Maybe I’ll start by buying the equipment I need in order to increase the number of spinning classes I can attend (bike shorts!) and see how that goes before I make any big plans. That I have choices to make, means I’m lucky, so I’m mindful to take advantage of this good fortune, by choosing, committing to, and doing.
How about you? What are you doubling down on? And what, as a result, are you putting on ice (for now).
When stressed, I’m prone to bemoaning the lack of hours in the day. I think if I could just get an extra, say, two hours a day, that would be one more activity I could get in.
When happy (and for me, happy usually means productive) I reason, “We all get the same 24 hours in the day, and we all get to choose how we spend it”.
I said this to someone, and she recommended a book – 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think (Amazon). Which I downloaded to my Kindle and didn’t read until… recently. I’ve been on a bit of a kick reading books that I hope will make me happier/less strung out of late.
I found it an interesting and helpful book, but it has the same problem as The Happiness Project (Amazon) – what does a New York writer with two kids and a wealthy husband have to say that will apply to everyone? The kid stuff was irrelevant to me, and some others were just annoying, like the edict that getting ready should take no more than 20 minutes. Not all of us have naturally great-looking and manageable hair! But there was a lot in it that was helpful.
For example, I’m prone to thinking that people work more than me and sleep less, but in fact people tend to over-estimate the amount of time they spend on chores, or at work (they think about the days they worked 9-9, and forget about the morning they took off for the dentist and leaving early on Friday) and underestimate the amount of time they spend sleeping, and relaxing.
She also advocates focusing in core competencies (“broadly, those who get the most out of life try to figure out and focus on core competancies…”), as someone who gave up cooking as it was “inefficient” this is obviously something I identify with! Getting a cleaner, acknowledging the relationship between time and money – paying someone to clean my apartment gives me a chunk of my weekend back, for example. There’s lots of helpful things to consider if you’re feeling time-poor and cash-reasonable. The standard for entertaining as well, is interestingly used to demonstrate how things have changed now it’s normal for women to work outside the home.
The conclusion, though, is that we need to structure our relaxation time in order to get the most out of it. I tend to become stressed about time because I feel that I don’t have enough unstructured time, so this isn’t that helpful to me. I can see if you work from home then going out and doing things with people might be how you want to spend your leisure time, but working with people I want to spend a good amount of my down time alone!
Inspired by the book, I actually kept a detailed spreadsheet of how I spent my time in 15 minute increments. The first week I tracked my time somewhat obsessively, the second I was a little more relaxed about the tracking but still more aware of how I spent my time. I used Google Docs for this – it was handy to be able to update from any computer/my iPad or even my iPhone, if you want to try this, you can find my spreadsheet here (it’s not editable, but you can make a copy).
I know I can’t have more than 24 hours in the day, but what I want is a feeling of time-abundance; to feel less rushed, and less pressured. The spreadsheet was helpful because it made me more aware of how I was spending my time and look at the big blocks of time that I actually found to do things I wanted – like read novels, go to the gym, or hang out with my boyfriend. Half an hour in the morning having breakfast at my favorite coffeeshop before work with my book gives me a space that makes me less stressed and happier – that’s half an hour well spent. And taking time in the afternoon to go for spin class and then going back to work wasn’t as derailing to my happiness as I thought it would be. It was also nice to see how little time I spend on email (people expecting a response may not feel the same way), 2 hours on work email and filing an expense report, 45 minutes of which was whilst watching the video of TGIF (usually I do a little bit of code stuff here too). Both weeks I managed an email-free day, which is nice. I don’t know if this was related, but the first week I was motivated to get the writing I wanted to do done on Saturday, and had a completely guilt free day off on Sunday, which was amazing. The next week that wasn’t possible, as I had to spend Saturday in the office.
I don’t know if I’m going to keep tracking. It’s helpful because it’s making me more mindful about how I spend my time, but I’m not doing anything with the data. But I definitely recommend trying a week of detailed time-tracking to see how you’re spending your time, and if you in general want to be more mindful about what you’re choosing to spend your time on, then I recommend the book.
Meanwhile, what little things do you do to create feelings of “time abundance”?
Women, especially, seem to talk about work-life-balance – and it’s synonym, work-life-integration (a la IBM) a lot. But what does it mean?
The cop out, d’uh, answer is, different things to everyone.
I’ve come to think that what it means is that the pieces that make up your life (work, family, friends, exercise, hobbies, etc etc) have an arrangement, and a quantity, such that if this is how your life is going to look like for the next 3 months – 6 months – a year – that would be okay. You wouldn’t feel that something large was missing, nor would you feel like curling up into a ball and crying at the prospect.
Of course, it isn’t static. Life changes, and there will be spikes – good and bad – any change is a spike. At some point, you’d seek out new challenge, and that would be a spike. A change in circumstances would be a spike. A holiday would be a spike, or three spikes, as you try to get stuff finished up before leaving, take a break, and come back to a pile of work. Hopefully the spike in the middle would be a pleasurable one.
But my point is, balance is not happening when you’re at capacity and you think, yes, I can do the next three months as long as nothing goes wrong. When has that ever happened? Mostly you make it work, but at what cost? You look back and think “I missed out on X” – and that’s a loss. Even if X is just spending an afternoon in a coffee shop with a book, or a couple of movie nights with your partner or best friend – because living like this long-term leads to greater losses, of creativity, of peace of mind, of relationships. Spikes are okay, expected – but they should be spikes, not normal.
I’m currently reading The Power of Now – rather fuzzy and spiritual for my taste, however the focus on being present is making me think. In a balanced life, by which I mean, a sustainable life, we are not thinking “I just need to survive X and things will be OK, I’ll be calmer and happier and have more time for Y then”.
It’s a conclusion that screams out to me, because I’m pretty sure I’ve been thinking “I just need to survive this month” since at least July. I feel like I missed out so much in grad school – because of time, money, commitments, that I created a project (Post Grad Rehab) to help redress that. January is, thankfully, the last month I need to “survive”. Hopefully in February I will go back to living. But, without spending some time thinking how I’ve spent 6 months straight feeling like I’m on the edge of what I can cope with, will I just end up repeating this again and again?
It’s been helpful to make three lists. The first – what needs to change? Second, what’s working? Third, what do I need to figure out?
The first list comprises the things that I just feel I cannot carry on with. I think this is the most important, because these are the big huge spikes that are just derailing and draining me completely. The second list is about taking stock of what is helping – it’s a reminder to keep at these things, and maybe I can find patterns and discover more ways to live more sustainably. The third list are things that may be drowned out by the big things in the first list, but may become big things themselves if left unchecked.
Credit: flickr / Rohan Reid
What Needs To Change?
Travel. I have been jittering about like Tigger on speed. Since April, I’ve made 5 trips to the US, 3 to Kitchener (from Ottawa), one to Winnipeg, and I’ll make my third trip to Europe at the end of this week. And I moved! First, I’m fed up of living out of suitcases. Second, it’s made it difficult to have a routine. Third, I’m an ambivert and travel uses up my extraversion and leaves me unsociable – not great when I’ve just moved to a new place and need to meet people! I just can’t continue living like this, it’s not fun anymore. It’s not – “ooh, new place”. It’s “another plane and another timezone change? Shoot me now”.
Rehab. This is actually my focus for February, fittingly as it will be a year since I injured my shoulder. I have been dosed up on codeine and/or in pain for a year because of lack of health-care, not taking time to heal, and taking (did I mention?) too many planes.
What’s Working?
Work Stays at Work. At the end of the day, I close my laptop and leave it at the office. I have my work calendar – (my only calendar, now) but not work-email on my iPhone. I love my job, but this distinction – shut the laptop, leave it there, is helpful for drawing a line and doing other things.
Gym in the Morning. When I don’t work out in the morning, I seem to have better hair, but my mood is not better, and I have less energy. 6am is a bit early for spinning (7am would be ideal) but going in the evening when I’m tired and hungry and have experienced the cold is actually much harder! I need to keep working at this – hopefully once I’m done travelling for a bit I will be able to get up at 530am for spinning – and not go to bed at 8pm.
What Do I Need to Figure Out?
Email. Don’t laugh – I’m actually working on mobile gMail. Between that and managing my work email, my personal email is a desolate wasteland of dashed expectations. I have emails starred as important from more than 6 months ago that I haven’t got to. I have emails deemed important by priority inbox from over a month ago that I haven’t even read. This is not okay, especially since I’m getting almost no emails from annoying people lately and so these are all from people that I like and think deserve a prompt response. So first – I’m sorry, email me again if it’s important until I respond, (perhaps with a subject line like “CATE YOU ARE A TERRIBLE HUMAN BEING”). I think if I could get on top of it it would be OK, but I’ve thought that before. Mind you, that was some time ago…
Food. Because it’s a smaller office we don’t get dinner here. Yes, I realize, there are #firstworldproblems and there are #googlersproblems. But it is hard to get up and work out at 6am when I didn’t have dinner because there was nothing in the fridge and I decided it was too cold to pick up food. Maybe I could make some soup.
Social Life. This is really “hang out with people outside of work and make more friends”.
Projects. I’m transitioning out of my role with Awesome Ottawa because it’s hard to do remotely and it’s not as much fun when you’re not part of the debate over what to fund. I’ll miss it, but everything says – time to move on and the group is working out ways to organize so I’m optimistic about that. We’ve been lacking submissions on CompSci Woman and I think it’s because Maggie and I are not very good at chasing people to write for us (or getting hold of each other to talk about a new theme!) I need to talk to her to work out what to do about that. Then there are projects in KW that I want to take on, but it is a question of what I have capacity for. What do I spend time on? What do I opt out of?
Creating. I’m really lucky in that I get to work on software that people use every day and even with my dysfunctional relationship with email I do think it is genuinely something that is helpful to people (who haven’t discovered Twitter – I’m kidding. Mostly). That’s awesome. Create something useful, absolutely what I want to do. But I don’t want to stop creating things just because they are interesting, or fun, and I don’t want to stop writing here, either.
I got an amazing response to my In Pursuit of Awesome post, here and on Geek Feminism. It’s inspired me to write a series of posts where I explore some of the tips I wrote about and related topics in more depth.
Credit: flickr / kimili
I ran into my manager from IBM the other week. He gave me some really good advice:
If you say yes to everything, you allow other people to determine your priorities.
This is something to bear in mind as you approach capacity and have to start saying “no”.
Someone I mentor and an organization I work with had that issue lately. Her “friend” manipulated her into running a project. It was stressful for a number of reasons:
She felt manipulated, and guilty that she had ended up in this situation. In the same situation as she was in, I would have ended up in the same position. It was hardly her fault, and the only person who should have been feeling guilty was her “friend” (of course, he wasn’t).
The other people involved in the project were not treating her well. The woman she reported to was disgustingly rude to her and in general was not respectful of her time – turning up late to meetings because she was “so busy”, etc. When saying yes means saying no to other things, and the people you’ve said yes to don’t seem to appreciate that, it’s frustrating. And not a good situation to be in. Saying yes to this did not only affect my mentee, it also affected what we said yes to as an organization because many of our resources were invested in it. As a result, their disrespect of her, also seemed like a disrespect to all the people we are supposed to serve. At the end, they didn’t even say thank-you. I was – and still am – furious.
The project did not align with the priorities of our organization. My mentee was with me when my former manager dispensed this advice, and it struck a chord with us because it was apparent that in manipulating her into taking on this project, her “friend” had determined her priorities – and the priorities of our organization.
All this meant that when things were rough, my mentee didn’t have a story to tell herself as to why it was worthwhile. Instead, she had feelings of guilt and betrayal about getting involved in the first place. Eventually, she was so upset, after her supervisor was really horrible to her (essentially berating her for not being psychic) that she was on the phone to me at 1 in the morning a couple of days before the preparation ended and the three day event began. It was then that we talked about the base case: that she had fulfilled her commitment, and the commitment of our organization and she wasn’t going to allow this supervisor to speak to her that way. She could walk away.
She made that clear, and I was really proud of her for standing up to these people. I want to give you a happy ending – but there wasn’t one. There was a truce. The outright rudeness stopped, but my mentee still wasn’t appreciated, and wasn’t treated with the respect she deserved for the tremendous amount of effort she put in. In the end she learned some tough lessons – she won’t work with that organization again. I hope she’ll also be more wary of this “friend”.
I think we both learned about the worse case result of allowing other people to determine our priorities. I have personally been tremendously lucky in terms of the opportunities that have presented themselves to me, and the experiences I’ve had. I’ve allowed other people to determine my priorities, but it’s worked out very well for me. However, this came just as I’m thinking about having to be more selective in what I say yes to, and this experience reinforced that message.
The perils of a reactionary workflow have long been clear to me – being reactive means jittering from task to task. I’m not a manager. I’m a programmer, and sometimes a writer – for those things, focus is crucial. I avoid a reactionary workflow like the plague. For example, I tell people I’m terrible at email. This has been the case since I realized that being responsive to email was causing a reactionary work-flow and, er, stopped responding to it. For quite some time, I only checked email once a week. However, a couple of days ago I finally got to the backlog of *cough* several months *cough* and realized that actually I wasn’t that bad at it. The important stuff had been dealt with – mostly I was filing and deleting. To me, being good at email means spending the least possible time on it. By setting expectations really low, people are happy when I respond at all and people who know me make an effort to communicate by other means. Result, I spend probably about 15 minutes a day on email, with the majority of that being on my iPhone (so in non-productive time).
However, making an effort to avoid a reactionary workflow with respect to email, that’s all for nothing if I say yes to everything and don’t determine my own priorities.
The first thing is to know what my priorities are. What’s important to me?
Finish grad school. Seriously, I need this to end.
Working towards mastery as a software artist. Maybe I will eventually end up in another area, but I love working in tech. I love to feel like I’m creating things that make people’s day’s a little brighter, or easier.
Giving back, in a way that maximizes my impact on things important to me: the community in places where I live, and women in CS and Engineering as my wider community.
I don’t have a balanced life. I don’t think I want to. But there are things that are important to me that all need to have some time: my priorities above, my health (the gym!), and my friends, family and significant other.
My top priority right now is 1. I don’t know that I’m doing a good job of making it number 1, but in my head it’s the most important thing. 2 months – and I can be free.
3, giving back, is the most interesting area from this perspective. Opportunities – implicit or explicit – are everywhere. Which ones will I take? How can I make the biggest impact? There’s talk about an Awesome Foundation here in KW, and that would be amazing. But do I want to repeat myself? I’m wary of seeming to come in with a “Y’all aren’t awesome enough, and Imma gonna show you how it’s done” attitude – this is not at all how I feel, I’m falling in love with my new home. Furthering the interests of women in CS and Engineering – can I make that part of my work? Should I? Is that my 20% project or an additional thing I take on?
Another of my mentees jitters from one idea to another. So we’re working on something at the moment – new ideas go on an “ideas list”. She’s committed to just writing them down for a while, rather than immediately acting on them.
Perhaps that’s advice I could take myself. Spend some time exploring the ways in which I can give back and take a little time to think, reflect, and pick those that are most impactful and most interesting.
How about you? Do you know what your priorities are? Are you saying “yes” to the things that best fit with them?
I got an amazing response to my In Pursuit of Awesome post, here and on Geek Feminism. It’s inspired me to write a series of posts where I explore some of the tips I wrote about and related topics in more depth.
Credit: flickr / Jayjay402
Let me offer you a scenario. You move to a new place and someone tells you about something awesome they’re starting; it fits with your interests and you think “I could get involved with that”.
Then, your inner monologue kicks in. What does it say?
Great project, if only the timing was better. I have this huge new job and that’s going to be a challenge, and I have to meet people here and, I mean, I haven’t even unpacked yet! I don’t know enough people here to be really useful, and I think it’s just too much for me to do right now. In three months, I’ll look at it, maybe the timing will be right.
Or:
This is the kind of thing I really want to get involved with here. I don’t know many people yet, but this will put me in the way of meeting them and I’ll be able to bring a new perspective because of the things I’ve done where I lived before. Work is going to be challenging so it’s good if I have something else that I’m passionate about that I can work on to get me out of the office sometimes.
The myth of the “right” time was on the initial list of things that I had, but didn’t make it to the final one; I forgot about it. But re-reading Sheryl Sandberg’s great advice – in “Don’t Leave Before You Leave” caused me to revisit it. In the article, she talks about how women planning on getting pregnant start turning down challenges in preparation for needing to cut back as their life changes, and why they shouldn’t. It’s great advice, and not just for women planning a family.
There is always a reason why now is not as good a time as some other, future time. In the future, we’re always going to be (at least) 10 pounds lighter, more on top of work, better organized at home, more at peace in our personal life. We’ll be getting up earlier and not sleeping in at the weekends.
I tell you what, future-Cate is a zen-like, organized creature that present-Cate never manages to live up to.
It’s important to recognize that the stories we tell ourselves are just that, stories. People change, and yes, no doubt you can become more organized, or thinner, or whatever it is you want, but I think it’s crucial to recognize that even when that happens – we’ll still have some other inadequacies we perceive in ourselves that will make it “not the right time”, if we allow it.
Someone asked me recently, how do I find time for everything. I hate that question. My priorities are different, and as a result I make time. I have some (fairly small) optimizations (something I explored more in Finding Your Cognitive Surplus in Grad School), but really what it comes down to is that we all have 24 hours in each day and we each get to choose how we spend it.
WISE was surprising in that is came at a “right” time – I was looking for a new challenge and had just freed up some space in my life. But then – I got offered a job in Shanghai and spent most of the summer abroad, not working on a proposal getting funding. So even having found that elusive “right” time things didn’t go smoothly, because other stuff happens.
I started Awesome Ottawa as a grad student (so without a huge amount of extra money), knowing that there was a good chance I would move for work on graduation. It was in many ways, the “wrong” time for me. And yet – it’s been great and I would have hated to miss out on it.
Stop waiting for the “right” time, and try to find a way to make time instead. Yes, sometimes it is genuinely the “wrong” time. But not as often as we think.
My friends and some of my colleagues have been mocking me for “outsourcing my life”. I don’t think that expression is accurate though – it’s more that I’ve been outsourcing details in order to enjoy life more (and achieve more). For me, it’s all about leverage. How can I leverage myself in order to do more?
Relinquishing Control
My dad is a wonderful person and I love him so much, but he has a terrible problem delegating. He takes on too much and agrees to do things that he should have someone else take care of, and it drives my mom crazy. I worry that I have a tendency to do this too, so I’ve been forcing myself to give stuff away to other people. I tell myself that even if I don’t think they will do as good a job as I would, at least I don’t have to do it – in the worst case, I just have to fix it and that will take less time than actually doing – because starting is the thing that takes most time. But it turns out, I rarely have to fix things I delegate.
Sometimes it’s easy. If you’ve been shopping and taken advice on what to buy from your friends, a personal shopper is not a great leap (I did this when I had only a couple of days to get the right clothes to wear for my internship in the UK between 3rd and 4th year). If you do group exercise classes, a personal trainer is not so bizarre (I’ve been training with one in order to recover from my recent injuries). Outsourcing my resume was harder, but I had to acknowledge that it did not work to my strengths and so Maureen McCann of MyPromotion wrote it and she did a much better job.
Now, I’m outsourcing details. I have a PA for a couple of hours a week and she’s mostly been taking care of insurance stuff and scheduling things. It’s great, because I gave her a stack of insurance nonsense and she’s taken care of it (if I was going to, it would have happened sometime in the last 6 months that it’s been on my desk). Also, for scheduling something often I don’t really care when it is, as long as it fits within the current commitments I have. She can pick Monday at 5, and that’s fine. If I have to decide, I’ll end up agonizing about the difference between Monday at 5 and Tuesday at 5. The truth is, there probably isn’t that much of one.
Working to Your Strengths
My teammate and I were talking about being detail oriented – and I am, in terms of programming. One of my friends gave me a little trick the other day, why would you do:
if (myString.equals("something")) { myString = "something"; }
(clue, it involves immutability). I find that fascinating – I just don’t find details elsewhere that interesting. In fact, I find them draining.
Technically, my PA knows a little bit of programming (I would know, I taught her most of it). But if I have a script to write, it would be useless to delegate it to her when I can do it, and have it working in a fraction of the time it would take her to even get started. I could delegate some research stuff, but again – it would probably take her much longer. What I’m finding, though, is the things I give her to do are the things that take me a really long time and make me stressed and/or miserable, and she gets them done really quickly. This means I can get on with the tasks that give me energy, rather than drain it.
Whilst my resume was being written, I read Effective Java (Amazon). Now which is really the more productive thing to do? By doing my own resume, I save some amount of money. By reading Effective Java, I develop my expertise in my field (it is an amazing book) – to me, it’s obvious that is a better use of my time. As a bonus, I have a better resume for it.
Two weeks ago, I was in the wilderness. Last week, I gave a talk. This week, I have a terrifying job interview. All this is on top of my internship. Could I cope without a PA? Yes. But I would be more stressed out and have less time to devote to the things that matter most to me.
Putting a Value on Your Time
It seems like people sometimes think it’s arrogant to suggest that your time is worth more than someone elses. But – we all place value on our time. If you’ve ever opted to pay more for the direct flight rather than the one with multiple connections, you placed a value on time, and perhaps the stress of trying to make connections. It literally had a $ value. At work, my time is worth a fraction of that of a Distinguished Engineer. So we’re going to meet on his or her schedule, not mine. When working, we exchange time for money. So our time has a monetary value, and it varies person to person.
When I was TAing, students would sometimes send me all their code with a description of the problem that basically amounted to “it’s not working”. As a result of this, we had a chat about “iPhone optimizing” their emails. Initially, all I want is the error message. After that, I will accept the small section of code that is the problem. If we still have a problem, it’s most likely a design issue, and I expect them to come in person to see me. Yes, I can compile and run their code, but I would maintain that is not a good use of my time, and is not educational to them. By teaching them to respect my time, I’m also teaching them to debug better. And hopefully disabusing them of the notion that I’m a compiler, which, worryingly, I had to tell more than one of them.
Why is that relevant? Because all the time we make judgments as to whose time is worth more. We just express it in a different way.
Delegating Details, Not Responsibility
I’ve been embroiled in a disagreement with Goodlife, because I want to work out with a trainer once a week just to make sure that I’m realigning myself (I dislocated my right knee, right shoulder, twisted my right ankle, and messed up my right hip – bit of a disaster zone) and I don’t want to commit to 9 months of 3 times a week, which seems to be their (utterly ridiculous) minimum. So I negotiated, or rather, I convinced my trainer who then negotiated with her manager. And then they backed down a little, to 2x a week for 6 months and they would sell any that I had over. I explained that I would be gone for about 2 months out of the next 6 and countered with 2x a week for 4 months and this was refused because they “couldn’t guarantee results” with that many sessions.
This really frustrated me, because I don’t want to delegate the responsibility for me to get back into shape after this many injuries. I just want to delegate the details of what exactly I should be doing to rehabilitate. I also see PT as a complement to the other exercise I do (kickboxing, swimming, rollerblading, body pump, yoga, cardio…) rather as the exercise I do.
Likewise with my PA, I don’t tell her “plan my life after graduation and decide where I should apply for jobs”, I give her concrete tasks like, “please deal with this pile of insurance stuff as per this form”, and “I have to be in location X for an interview on date Y at Z time for a duration of i minutes – please work out how and when I’m going to get there and where I’m going to stay”.
Things We Don’t Do
In North America, it’s normal to have an automatic car. This makes sense to me, because the car does a better job of changing gear than most people do. For the most part, we don’t cut our own hair (if we have any sense – this applies to dramatic eyebrow reshaping too), grow our own food, or produce our own electricity. It’s not productive to implement our own source control systems, or test runners. We don’t create our own crawl of the web, we Google.
Obviously this can go to far, if we say “I don’t need to know how to entertain myself, I have a TV for that”. But one crucial thing that I get from other people is confidence – I get driven forwards because other people believe in me, even when I doubt myself.
As part of this minimalism malarkey that I’m not such an aficionado of, I’ve read a number of times “Don’t outsource – if you don’t want to do something, just stop doing it”. I don’t really understand how that works, I mean what if you don’t want to do your taxes? Will that hold with the IRS?
Delegating does force me to evaluate things though. If I don’t want to give up responsibility, then I actually need to get it done. If I’m going to pay someone else to do it, it should be something that it’s really worth doing.
It also helps me with saying no, which I’m not great at doing. Someone asked me to do something the other day that I really wanted to say yes to but would have been really difficult and caused a lot of stress. Rather than saying yes and trying to make it work logistically, I just delegated it. But if someone’s asking me to do something and I’m literally going to pay someone else to do it so I don’t have to, it had better be a reasonable and worthwhile request that I really want to accommodate.
It’s not Minimizing “Work”, it’s about Maximizing “Great”
I read the book The 4-Hour Workweek (Amazon) and it is a really interesting book that helped me evaluate where I’m spending my time, but I agree with Penelope Trunk – the thrust is not about just “working” 4 hours a week, it’s about making the vast majority of what you do not feel like work (she represented that a little more negatively).
Another book I read recently is Do More Great Work (Amazon). I was working through the exercises in it, and it was great because I realized that Extreme Blue is all about Great Work.
The thing about Great Work is that it’s easy to get caught up in Good Work and not get to it. So delegating good work helps me move forward with great work. Managing my email might be good work, but it’s time consuming and rarely as rewarding or useful as a blog post or a piece of code.
Really, what it comes down to is that there are only a finite number of hours in a day. Delegating is buying a little more time and energy to make a little more progress on the things that matter most to you.
The other day I was having lunch with some other interns, and they were discussing their GPA. It made me question what I was doing, surrounded by 20-22 year-olds who think that a GPA is a measure of achievement and/or a defining characteristic. I mean, to participate in the conversation should I calculate my GPA? I don’t even know how. Should I point out that nonsense courses to lift your GPA don’t actually make you a better programmer? Should I keep my mouth shut and edge away, because afterall I don’t fully understand the Canadian undergraduate system… except this focus I see on grades over substance makes me extremely grateful that I got my undergrad from Edinburgh.
Being at intern at 25 is… weird. Yes, it’s an amazing opportunity. Yes, we have great training. But I can’t shake the feeling that I should be doing more than being an intern at this stage in my life.
My friend Maggie (another intern) is planning her next steps at the moment. She’s incredibly together and only 20 – she makes me feel 1) old and 2) clueless. She was telling me recently, that she’s figured out that before she can work out what she wants to do and where she wants to go, she needs to figure out her priorities.
This made me realize – I’ve been picking themes by which I prioritize my choices. When I left Edinburgh to be a nomad, I prioritized an interesting life and being interesting myself (Penelope Trunk on an interesting vs a happy life). Arriving in Ottawa, I was lost, but my theme evolved to making change, or being the change I want to see – though taking a different approach to programming curricula and the talks I give, through WISE, and through the Awesome Foundation. Even working on defining influence – influence can be seen as the ability to make change.
So for my next step – what’s my theme going to be? I want it to be about how programmers can change the world; through better software, facilitating remote working, enabling connections across geographical barriers and – crucial in this age of information overload – helping people better manage the information they have available to them. What does this mean? A programming job. Finding an open source project to contribute to.
Where can I do this? IBM is a great place to work on all of this, as is the company where I’ll interview next week. And now I’ve identified my theme, I can look out for other places where I could chase this next dream.
How about you – what’s your priority for your next step?
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