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Do You Know When You’re Done?

Personal Growth, Work Life November 18, 2013 Comments: 2

I was just plowing through a few household chores, feeling effective because I could see immediate results as things were put in their proper place, wiped down and such. I felt like I accomplished something – a feeling that is hard to come by in our modern world. Particularly at work.

Back when we were mostly an agrarian society, it was easier to see when we were done – animals fed and given clean stalls, garden weeded, wash on the line to dry. A person could end the day with a sense of accomplishment. Most of these tasks would still have to be repeated the next day, but a person could rest knowing that the job was done for that day; stability had been maintained.

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Now there might be a quota of orders to fill in a warehouse, or parts to be made on an assembly line or projects to be worked on in an office but done is a bit harder to see and feel. So what if I made and received a lot of calls plus dealt with many emails, I didn’t get done because there are still more. That quota in the warehouse or plant might have been met, but there are still more behind them that the workers can see. The quota is lodged in a computer somewhere.

We need to feel a sense of accomplishment, but we’ve made this nearly impossible to achieve. That stability that previous generations could build seems nebulous to us. How do we capture and nurture it again?

I wish I could say that I have an answer that works for me. Even as I was whipping through the straightening and minor cleaning of my house this morning, there were glaring hints of the larger jobs that have been neglected for one reason or another (time, know-how, money).

One thing that I can say, since I have been aware of this accomplishment deficit, is that I make a point of reviewing what I have completed every day. Even if it wasn’t something that I intended to do, or is very minor. By consciously focusing on these checked off, crossed out tasks I can somewhat counteract the weight of all the partially done tasks in front of me.

What about you, do you know when you’re done?

Coloring, Color, Colorful

Random thoughts November 15, 2013 Leave a comment

Did you like to color as a child? A boxful of crayons and a coloring book, a rainy afternoon, a good spot at the table – happiness was mine. I envied the kids who got the big box of crayons but I could do a lot by blending colors. I manage to revisit this simple pleasure periodically – with my own boys, then nieces and nephews. The kids grow out of their coloring stage and my urge goes dormant.

My Crayon Stash

But not the joy that I get from color – I am not a monochromatic person – my preference for color is always active. Over the years the colors on the palette that attract my eye the most have changed. In childhood it seemed that everyone said their favorite color was blue, so I decided that I wasn’t a fan. Until cobalt blue came into my life. And I had a sweet little electric blue car for a few years. Plus combine blue with green and I can feel my muscles relaxing.

Walk through a garden with its green and splashes of color and suddenly you realize that there are countless shades and tones to a single color. I dare you not to smile. Your heart not to feel just a bit lighter.

I live in the suburbs, more green that many cities, but mostly shades of concrete. Bleh. When I can get in the car and drive away until green is the predominant color, I can feel my breathing getting deeper and my eyes seem to see more clearly – cleansed of all the suburban tans.

I do wear the neutrals – your grays, blacks, browns and tans – as a basis for some type of color. I would have made a terrible Goth going around trying to add a spot of color to everyone else’s outfit. Just ask anyone I see regularly who wears too much black.

How about you – how does color affect you? Or doesn’t it?

Intellectual Calisthenics

Personal Growth, Work Life November 13, 2013 Comments: 4

Some weeks just seem to be overfull of mental obstacle courses – over this wall, through that muck, around the barrier, dodge the danger zone, swim this channel, start this next obstacle course. And again. Oh my.

photo credit: Wikipedia, Marine Pull ups

The brainy neuroscience folks like to tell us that this is good for our minds, keeps us sharp. Hmm, I feel more like I have a puddle in my head after a couple of days like this and can’t be trusted to decide what’s for dinner. I don’t really care in those moments that I might be lowering my risk of dementia. In fact I tend to feel slightly demented after too many days of intellectual calisthenics.

One good puzzle here and there and I agree, my brain is the better for the exercise. For instance in the calm quiet as I write this, it has been a good challenge to remember how to spell calisthenics. (My fingers don’t want to spell it correctly and resent that I keep using the word.) It’s when there is a relentless string of exercises that things get wearing. Like I’m in my own extended, real life version of a disaster movie. How much more can be piled on?

(That last question is rhetorical, I don’t really want to find out. I thought that I better put that point out there, just in case some force wants to explore the answer.)

Well, the sun is shining and that is a November feat not to be ignored, so perhaps I should take a break from intellectual exercise and go get some of the physical kind. The leaves need to be raked, so I’ll think about that as I take a walk and soak up some sun rays.

How have you exercised your own mind lately? And how do you feel about it?

The Cold is Coming

Random thoughts November 11, 2013 Comments: 4

The sun has melted today’s light layer of frost from the still green grass and shrubs. I read a brief article in the paper a couple of days ago that our autumn is protracted this year because it started out and stayed mild for so long. I read a different article early last month that predicted a cold and snowy winter (of course I believe that was the prediction for my area last year too, which was far from the truth). Cold is coming.

Frost on dying peony leaves.

I’ve lived in places that experience all four seasons for most of my life and I do like three of them – it is a toss-up whether spring or fall is my most favored. But I haven’t ever been a fan of winter with its limited color palette; difficulty in getting around in snow, ice and slush; few hours of daylight; and nippy temperatures.

I can only think back on a handful of times in my life that I enjoyed winter – a few blissful afternoons sledding with friends, learning to ice skate, and the stark beauty and silence of a frigid winter night with the crunching crust of snow underfoot as almost the only sound. Certainly joyful things have occurred in winter months, but these were not dependent upon the winter weather as part of their charm.

We humans like to make adjustments to our general environment to suit our own needs, so in my imaginings I have wiped away winter. But the wild green growing things that are now settling into dormant slumber need this respite to thrive. And I can’t deny them this necessity since they offer me so much the other 3 seasons of the year.

I am therefore, deeply grateful that I live in this age of central heating with programmable thermostats – allowing for a comfortable room temperature when it is time for me to get up in the morning. I wince at the discomfort for our ancestors who had to gather their fortitude just to get up and start a fire to be warm.

I appreciate that we have holidays during these cold months which will add splashes of color to the whites, browns and tans nature offers – red and green for Christmas, more red for Valentine’s Day. Colors are important for visual interest and stimulation. Not to mention how they can affect mood.

Every year at this time I watch the birds fly south (I walked past a tree full of songbirds the other day, probably the last for a few months) and wonder how I might do the same. I read about the animals who hibernate, and have been dodging all the squirrels frantically preparing for their long sleep, and wonder if that might be my solution. Knowing that neither option is viable for me, but wishing all the same.

Perhaps you will help me to pass the time, and make it worthwhile, through this cold and dormant season?

Assigning Motives

Personal Growth, Work Life November 8, 2013 Comments: 2

Sometimes I watch these procedural dramas on TV like Criminal Minds and CSI because I like to see the methodology. But the creators seem to think that they must show obscenely deviant behavior to make their point and that is wearing. We have so many of these shows and books that it starts to seem much more common than it really is to have psychopaths running loose.

We do like to know why something happened, why someone did something. It helps us to know what to do with the experience. Most of us will never, thankfully, encounter someone who is psychotic but we do have plenty of incidents in our daily interactions and we assign motives to the other participants in these incidents so that we can categorize the why, make some sense, decide how to react or move on.

For instance, we should all be conscious in our interactions with businesses that their motive is profit – sometimes in a manner that is beneficial to us as well as the company and sometimes at our caution. (I’ll refer you back to my post about my dumb phone, I don’t see the services offered with these smart phones as more beneficial to me than the profit the company gains – or even as equally beneficial.) Businesses have marketing folks to smooth over their profit motive and make their product or service as attractive as possible to the largest pool of potential customers. And buyer who forgets the underlying business motive beware.

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Where assigning motives really gets interesting, though, is in our one on one or group interactions. Have you heard friends or coworkers say things like, ‘he’s out to get me’, ‘she always gets her way’, ‘of course the company scheduled X when I had other plans’? When we are assigning motives, they are usually negative.

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We all do it, but do we ever question what our own motive is in making these assignments? What criteria are we applying to come to this conclusion? Back to these shows, sometimes they come up with these outlandishly fully realized motives from the thinnest of clues. (Purportedly the characters are just that brilliant.) We need to examine the criteria that we are applying for false reasoning, question our own motives in assigning motives once in a while.

Complex and devious motives probably exist more often on these TV dramas than in our own interactions. What do you think?

Unexpected Pleasures

Random thoughts November 6, 2013 Leave a comment

Obligations, have-tos, to-dos, endless tasks mounded here and there in front of us until the end of time. Or so it often appears. Why look up and out when only these nagging things are there to confront us? Why look about when more might present themselves and insist on being addressed?

Well, serendipitous things can happen if you look up and look about and you can miss them if you are mired in the mundane. I had two quite serendipitous experiences last week and I am still smiling in remembering each. Dreary and rainy days, both. Bleh.

Walking out the back door from work at the end of one day with a colleague, we were met by the beautiful sight of a perfect and complete rainbow. The north side ending picturesquely behind trees decked out in their finest fall colors and the other blocked by the industrial building behind ours. The entire arc completely visible, which is even more rare than a rainbow itself and therefore to be savored.

public domain rainbow image

My mom always took particular delight in rainbows, so I couldn’t help but think she had a hand in this gift from nature as I drove home and watched it fade. Quite pleasing and smile inducing, still.

Then on a different day, running errands at the store, I rounded the corner into the dish soap aisle and saw someone I know who I haven’t seen for almost a year. She had her back to me, but I was instantly both slightly disoriented to see her and certain that it was her. (Just to add to the serendipity, when I went to put away the dish soap later at home, it turned out that I still had an unopened bottle in the cupboard so if I hadn’t imagined that I was in need I would not have even been in that aisle.)

We stood in that aisle and caught up for almost an hour, moving over for various other shoppers who were focused on their mission. It was so good to see her and such happenstance it gave me a nice boost.

Neither of these little moments would have been noted if I hadn’t been looking up and around, aware of my surroundings. I’m so glad that I was.

The Power of the Right Word

Business Writing, Personal Growth, Work Life, Writing November 4, 2013 Leave a comment

We learn to speak without understanding the power of language. We just know that we start to associate specific combinations of sounds to the result that we want – combining sounds to produce ‘juice’ gets us a sweet, cold beverage that slakes our thirst. So we say it again when our mouth is dry and we need liquid. Other sound combinations get results too – uttering ‘mommy’ or ‘daddy’ gets lots of wonderful attention, hugs and kisses. Score!

Somewhere along the line we experience the pain of words too. A casually repeated word like ‘dummy’ gains a lecture about not hurting others perhaps. But do we really understand the power of words yet?

Learning that certain words have specific associations to a place – the playground has looser rules than the classroom – teaches us a level of appropriateness, but not necessarily understanding. We have just enough to know how to be hurtful without knowing why we might be hurtful.

I love words – their sound, combining them for just the right effect – I love to read them and to write them. I want to understand them, not just use them. When I am trying to make a point with people who don’t have the same intense relationship to words I like to use an example. If you need a group to listen you can say different things – examples run from ‘Be quiet’ to ‘Shut up’. These are essentially the same command but they have very different connotations for the listeners. If you would like to show authority, but not disrespect toward the group, then your option is clearly ‘be quiet’, ‘quiet, please’ or something along that line.

I know that I cannot expect others to love words as I do. But this example usually helps to gain understanding. In English, we have many options to say something, to get our point across – all valid – which makes choosing the right option for the circumstance an important step. What do we intend to convey? Who is our audience? What is important within the message that is also important to the audience?

There is so much that should go into word choice, too much for one blog post. I need a reminder now and then that words have alternate meanings, even regional meanings sometimes, and that the point of combining sounds into words and words into sentences and paragraphs is to communicate. Communicating isn’t just about what I want to say, but about how the person or group who will receive the message will perceive it. The right word has great power, and the wrong word – well, there is usually a long list of trending social media topics about the famous folks who chose the wrong word at the wrong time.

The Business and IT Convergence

Work Life November 1, 2013 Comments: 4

The differences between the way that business sees an issue, a system and the way that IT (or IS) sees the same issue or system is usually termed a divide. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We are seeing two sides of the same coin, and the coin needs both sides.

I have to admit, I never much thought about this intersect; I am a user of the systems that IT finds, builds and supports. Sometimes those systems drive me mad because they don’t do what I expect them to do. IT should fix them, fix them now because I can’t complete my tasks. But then, as I was waiting for a diagnosis, I started to ask why and how and other questions. I changed from being irritated to curious. And then I was the business owner for the order process in an SAP conversion.

photo credit: Wikipedia, Makati intersection

Like most intersections, we don’t much think about them – they just are and we drive through noting only what we think pertains to us. Time after time. We tsk, tsk at the dysfunction that we see exists there, but it isn’t our place to repair it because we don’t own it. The thing with an intersect is that there is shared ownership, though.

For any user to be successful with a system there is a how and a why within the procedure. The ‘how’ is the way that the system works and owned by IT. The ‘why’ is the business need for the system and owned by business. A successful intersection require collaboration and communication between business and IT from the moment that a system solution is identified.

Looked at a different way, IT owns the system itself and business owns the content, the data. If the data isn’t clean, the system won’t work as intended. The system will be termed as broken.

Creating powerful collaboration and communication between IT and business means a smoother intersection. Defining ownership at the start is the key; it doesn’t prevent the system from acting up, but it sure cuts down on the acrimony.

How do IT and business get along in your office?

Too Much on my Mind to be Nice Too

Personal Growth, Work Life October 30, 2013 Leave a comment

I was scrambling about the other day trying to find something that I knew I had and just couldn’t remember where it was at (I no longer remember what it was at all) when I came across an article about the hazard of an overfull brain to the pleasantries of life. Eureka a small part of my brain said! Stick to the task at hand the rest of my brain said.

Anyway, let’s assume that I completed the original task because it isn’t really important to the story anymore. What is important is that I was brought up to be polite, always, everywhere, no exceptions. (It turns out that there are valid exceptions, but we’ll address that some other time.) You who are over a certain age know what I am talking about. My mom went to great lengths to teach us manners.

photo credit: Wikipedia, Emily Post – the mother of American Etiquette

So much so that one Thanksgiving she invented an elaborate system of signals to my brother and I to point out any indiscretions on our parts but then proceeded to tell the whole table about the system thereby negating the system itself. (It was a pain to learn it all too…) I think that she got embarrassed making all the signals, and then we got confused. Well, everyone thought it was amusing at the time.

I digress again. The article gave me absolution, of a sort, when I forget the niceties when I am laser focused on some issue or solution. This is something that I am constantly on myself about to improve. I know people who never fail to be accommodating and spot on polite and I am impressed and slightly shamed at the same time.

I don’t mean to say that I am rude when I am in this focused mode, I just forget my pleases and thank yous. Until later, sometimes much later. I might forget to wait my turn, too if it is really urgent.

Unfortunately, I don’t remember anything else about the article – where I saw it, the title, who wrote it. But it was based on scientific research. You’ll just have to take my word on it. I don’t mean to be impolite, my thoughts are just too focused on the task at hand. Let’s just say the solution part of the brain isn’t paying any attention to the polite part at that moment.

Please tell me that I am not alone in this – you know what I am talking about here. If you are a person who never fails to be polite, regardless of what is on your mind, do tell how you do it.

The Clutter in my Mind

Personal Growth, Work Life October 28, 2013 Leave a comment

Do you have those days when you have meeting after meeting – and the ‘action items’ that always seem to come after – and then you get back to your desk to find you have more voicemails than time to get back to the people plus a line of team members who have been lurking in hopes to see you between meetings to get an answer or follow up on previous action items? And then you go home and don’t have time to make dinner plus eat it before there are other activities to do/attend/lead/prepare for? And then fall into bed and your brain laughs at you – sleep, I’d love to, but you haven’t given me a moment to myself today so I have a lot to mull over here and this is the first moment that you’ve given me so we are definitely not sleeping yet.

photo credit: Wikimedia Commons, Interior of a storeroom

Whew, hope you followed me through that long, run-on paragraph. Most of us would rather be busy than idle, particularly at work. Idle time at home is often bliss, but at work it is frustrating. Crazy busy is a completely different level – the one that leads to stress diseases and burn out if it is sustained. I’ve been bouncing up into the level between good busy and crazy busy. (Glad I haven’t been crazy busy since an SAP implementation project a few years ago now.)

I don’t have a name for this level but I find that it leaves a lot of clutter in my mind – the half formed idea to resolve an open question from a meeting two days ago that died because I didn’t get back to it in time, indeed I piled other half formed ideas on top of it from other meetings. Now the desiccated idea is just taking up space in my mind. Alongside a hyperactive to-do list that changes every other minute. And barely formed thoughts on future tasks that are strewn about like Legos waiting for an unsuspecting barefoot walk through the room. (For those of you who have never lived with a Legomaniac, this is like stubbing your toe only it is the bottom of your foot.)

In Toastmasters contests, there is a minute of silence while the judges think about the just completed speech and write their notes before the next speech is introduced. Imagine how nice it would be in the office to have fifteen minutes to a half hour to at least start to flesh out thoughts and ideas that come out of meetings before your load in something completely new with the next meeting? It would be refreshing, yes?

I finally get the point of study hall in high school – I thought it was supposed to be social time (and I never was lucky enough to have any of my friends in the same study hall hour), sometimes doing a bit of work but mostly just pulling out a book and reading. Now I get that it was time for students to make a bit of sense, organized our thoughts around what we had learned that day. Make it our own, connect the dots. Prevent this clutter in our minds.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we got study hall time at work in between meetings? As for home, we are each on our own to manage that clutter in our minds. Share if you have a good method.