Recovering a sense of wonder

For the last few years I've started the year with a post about how January is bad and I want to reboot the year. This year is going to be different. While I could certainly be having a better time (as could many) I'm facing 2020 round 3 with a sense of cautious optimism.

I spent a lot of time over the Christmas period reflecting on what has changed for me over the last few years and one thing that I think I've lost is my sense of wonder. That childlike sense of feeling the magic in the world, revelling in something small but infinitely complex, and enjoying the feeling that I can explore something and there will always be more to learn.

I say lost - I think I prefer to think "misplaced".

This isn't the kind of thing that I can analyse and come up with a formula for change. It is not something that will come from deliberate action. That said, while there isn't a "solution" here, some deliberate steps can lead in the right direction.

On reflection, what I'm really missing is what comes before - that level of contentment and general feeling of peace when I'm open to the world and new experiences. There are several active things I can work towards, but at the heart of it for me really is personal space. Odd to reflect on after nearly two years of being pretty much entirely alone. That space is better called "free time" - those moments when I don't have some pressure on me to do something. Pressure from real work, volunteer work, paperwork, need to write a blog post, put up pictures, etc. In those free moments I can pick something up (literally or metaphorically), look at it, turn it over and actually experience it. I can engage with something in more than a facile way before rushing off to the next thing, and I can take the opportunity to see the beauty and wonder in it.

So this year, I'm going to invest time carefully. I'm going to try to only do things I actually want to do, minimise the things I have to do and avoid being pushed into doing things I don't want to do. I want to keep my time precious, so I can put more space around the things I enjoy - and by that I mean take the time to enjoy things properly. I'd also like to actually finish some things. While I don't want to be ruled by todo lists, I do actually get something from completing a task and putting a line through it. There are some things on my "want to do" list that have been there waaaay too long and it would be nice to make some progress in the areas I've identified as things I actually want to do.

More than anything, I need to relearn how to Enjoy the Thing. Through that I think I'll start the see the beauty in the world again and that is the route back to wonder I feel.

I am bad at resting

So it turns out I'm really bad at resting. It has been about a month and a half since I left the Civil Service and went out into the cold, unforgiving world with nary a plan to my name except to relax, calm down and find out who I am when I am not consumed by work. Except, of course, I did have a plan and a long list of contacts to talk with along the way.

My standard day is to get up (much earlier these days - a very positive sign!) and spend the morning on calls with friends in the industry and recruiters. Many of these are advice-and-discussion calls, which fulfil most criteria for being called Work, other than being paid. Then I make some lunch and spend the afternoon drinking coffee while reading something edifying (a book on depression here, a white paper on approaches to building a digital organisation there...) or writing some code before some cooking and the evening. It's actually very pleasant but is rather reminiscent of a gentle working day rather than a total break. While I am doing some LEGO and other minor crafts, I haven't dived into a totally new life or anything.

So to fix this, I did something different. I set up a company. To enable working. Sigh.

I often write posts for this blog by pondering my own behaviour from an external perspective and sometimes I end up wondering what on earth I am doing. On this occasion, and joking aside, I am finding this all raises an important question. What does "relaxed" actually mean for me? See, I can rationalise looking at work again so soon by writing about arising opportunity (and especially when they tie in neatly with my plans) but the fact is that I know my sense of self is overly defined by my work and I genuinely am not good at relaxing or unplugging. This is a bit of a problem since the answer to the question "who am I if I'm not working" appears to be "someone who is trying to work". Not healthy, and not a good idea.

I can, of course, make excuses. Some of the things I want to try are hard during COVID / while I live on the top floor / don't have a car / etc etc. While these may well be genuine excuses (it's hard to run a lathe in a 1 bed flat) they feel a bit tactical, which means I'm asking myself the wrong question - or rather dodging the right question. It's not about who am I without work - I always knew the answer to that would be a bit empty - it's about who do I WANT to be. 

The problem with questions like this (similarly "where do I want to be in five years, and if I do nothing will I be happy with how I've spent five years?") is that they are about making decisions then deploying effort to effect change. Coming into this period I had very little energy. I needed a rest, and that meant retreating to my comfort zone not trying to become some new enlightened being. However my comfort zone turns out to be rather like working and thus the problem cycle continues.

And I am still dodging the most important question - who do I want to be? And the answer is ... I don't know.

There are some components. When I close my eyes and imagine, I see someone who looks different. Someone who is secure in themselves. Someone will skills. Oddly, not the ones I already have - I don't know if this means I take myself for granted, or if (more likely I think) I don't really value my own skills. I do have a deep-rooted assumption that if I can do it, it can't be that hard (ideal attitude for consulting...) which may explain this picture.

So, this suggests a few courses of action. First, I need to recognise and respect my own abilities. When I close my eyes and see this person I want to be, I need to make sure I see the bits I've already done in that picture. I need to recognise that while I always want to learn new things and be a bit different, there is an awful lot I do not want to just discard. Next up, I need to look at the differences and decide where to act. As I wrote above, I do not have boundless energy at the moment so I need to be careful and precise about what I try and what I don't and along the way, I need to rediscover my love of learning and trying (there is another post in that, but that's another day).

So in the short term it's back to the gym for me. Then, I think what I really need is to rediscover a middle gear. A mode where I can be energetic and inquisitive, but without being full "on" so I can learn new things without it feeling like a chore, and practice new skills without a ongoing fear of failure. The "how" is something to ponder, but keeping flexible time has got to be a part of it.

Of course, with Christmas coming I've got something else to help me continue hiding from all this...

After nine weeks

Nine weeks down, and I skipped eight for Reasons.

After nine weeks of very heavy work, I am now facing a whole week off. Much of the time is going to be spent resting and recovering as I am definitely exhausted and need some proper recuperation. However I don’t intend to be asleep all week, so I need a few things in mind to fill the time and this brings me to one of the favoured topics from the early days of lockdown - self-improvement. Back in the beginning, a very common way for people to face the lockdown was with the idea of learning something new - languages were a very common suggestion - and I remember looking on these suggestions with envy as I completed my tenth 12 hour working day on the trot. However, now I have some time so it is worth having a bit of a think about what it means to me these days. Then I can ignore my thinking and spend the time being kind to myself.

In the before time, I used the act of leaving my home as a trigger for shifting my mental state. I wanted to write something, so I went out to sit in a coffee shop and put digital pen to paper. It gave me a good separation between rest and doing things and in the current climate of no coffee shops and staying indoors, it’s something I’ve noticed. I need to build a new way to get going mentally - ideally without relying on caffeine.

There are three things I think I need to look at in the world of self-improvement and I hope to be able to kickstart all three this week. The first is programming. This has taken a significant backseat over the last year or so, and doubly-so since lockdown started. The division between work and life has always been thin for me, and lockdown has hit that very hard so avoiding even vaguely work-related things has been a must for the last few months. However programming is something I enjoy and I’ve got a few things I want to get done, so I need to figure this out.

Next up is exercise. I’ve been far too physically idle since lockdown began and I need to fix this. No great insights here. I’ve got a skipping rope and a nearby park. I’ll start there.

Finally, I think I will pick up on my reading. I used to read extensively on the train and the tube, back when I travelled around on those things. But now I don’t and I haven’t really found a good gap to get back to books. I also need to pick up something edifying - too much of my time at the moment is spent pondering pointless or unhelpful things so something something meaning of life would be a far better use of my brain cycles as well as enhancing my pretentious nerd credibility.

So this week is: do some programming, do some exercise and do some reading. Today I slept most of the day after a night’s insomnia. Great start!

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This post is from a series of shorter posts, written roughly once a week while the country is on lockdown to capture my feelings and reactions as we go. They are all tagged with coronavirus.

Reflecting on NaBloPoMo

Well, today is the last day of November and the last day of NaBloPoMo. That's five posts in five weeks (including this one). How did it go?

Firstly, it's worth acknowledging that this has been the worst month for this kind of thing. I've been on leave for one week, and away for a few weekends so my normal writing topics and opportunities have been thrown to the winds. Couple this with some extremely difficult weeks in the office giving me no desire whatsoever to write in the evenings and let's just say that it hasn't been easy.

On the positive side, it has been nice to see my blog grow more quickly, I don't think the less thought out posts have been much worse, and I have enjoyed experiencing this with the small community that has attempted NaBloPoMo. I'm also pleased that I have managed to set myself a goal and achieve it (posting on each weekend) even if I did cheat a bit with one of the posts.

On other hand, the pressure to write when I haven't felt like writing has been a bit of a problem. This is the motivation I use throughout the year, however committing to a monthly post means I have weekends free in between so this cadence is less intrusive. I've definitely made decisions to write over doing something else (such as coding) over this period purely because of the challenge and even as I write this I know I'd rather be cooking and playing on a MUD - I'm putting off fun and relaxation in order to write this reflection. When I'm at low energy and low ebb (such as now) this can be dangerous so I'm glad it's only a few weeks - and even more so that I didn't even attempt a daily post. I think that would require a radically different approach to blogging from me.

So will I do it again? Probably. I'm not likely to push it too hard if I'm on my own, but if a group is keen to give it a go again next year I'll be on board. I guess what I'm saying is that the true spirit of NaBloPoMo is the friends made along the way.

And I still hate the name.

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This post is the fifth of five written in NaBloPoMo - the National Blogpost Month which, yes, is a thing. My plan is to write one post a weekend for the month of November. Due to some amazing planning, that means I have to write five posts rather than the four you might immediately expect. These posts will be a bit shorter than normal most likely and all of the posts will be tagged with (sigh) NaBloPoMo2019.

Failing to relax

This is going to be a brain dump and may not have an actual point. You have been warned.

I've just had a week off work. Time to relax, recharge and reset. Only ... it hasn't worked. My normal pattern for time off is a few days doing very little, then I'm ready to re-engage with the world around me and I get a few days doing some kind of chunky project. This time, it took until Thursday before I managed to think about dragging myself back into the real world and I found myself wishing my week off was starting at the end of the week.

At the same time, the various activities I use to enthuse myself haven't worked either. I can't write, as the two main outputs for my writing are this blog and RPGs. This blog is increasingly (and deliberately) distilling my thinking and learning from the office which is very useful in general, but not something I want to be writing when I'm supposed to be disconnected from work.

My life in roleplaying games at the moment is largely dead, thanks to weird work / life patterns so there isn't much scope for writing there. Even when I do get into a game, I find myself wanting to hide at the back more than I used to. I don't fancy playing a character making significant decisions that can affect large groups of people when that is literally my day job these days.

I can turn to coding. Unfortunately, I'm between projects at the moment and starting a new one is much less fun than writing some code to fix specific problems. Anyway, writing code is hardly the best way to avoid thinking of work - last time I picked anything up, I spent my time looking at testing infrastructure and different ways of populating test data.

This leaves me in a difficult position. There is a hard question about what I actually do to relax. But more importantly, I think I need to ask some very pointed questions about why it is so hard in the first place. Why does it take a whole week away from work before I feel like I've actually left? Am I really saying that I should only take holiday in two week blocks? That doesn't seem healthy - if true, it feels like work is taking far too much out of me on an ongoing basis. So what do I do about that? What CAN I do about that? Wouldn't it be great if I had an answer to that question?

Still, I got a blog post out of it...

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This post is the fourth of five written in NaBloPoMo - the National Blogpost Month which, yes, is a thing. My plan is to write one post a weekend for the month of November. Due to some amazing planning, that means I have to write five posts rather than the four you might immediately expect. These posts will be a bit shorter than normal most likely and all of the posts will be tagged with (sigh) NaBloPoMo2019.

Tilting at windmills

The other day I was accused of having a quixotic attitude to issues of workplace culture. Aside from having never been accused of being an idealist in my life, this has irritated me enough to stick with me, so I'm going to write something about it.

First of all, in British English, "quixotic" means:

"preoccupied with an unrealistically optimistic or chivalrous approach to life; impractically idealistic"

This is by the Collins dictionary definition.

For me, the emotional component of the word comes from its origins in the novel Don Quixote where it refers to the protagonist. Depending on your reading, he's on a noble quest to bring back the better ideals of times gone by, or he's hopelessly deluded. Either way, he repeatedly fails to achieve anything - usually while being mocked (and beaten) by those around him.

So it is in this context that I can't say I was thrilled by the comment. I've written many times about my overriding feeling that I'm not really achieving anything in an attempt to show myself that it's not actually true. To have this combined with the suggestion that the reason I do what I do is deluded definitely hurt.

Passed through my emotional filter, the rough translation of all the above is "what you talk about is insane, you don't know what you're doing and you're failing at it".

We were talking about toxic culture in the tech industry and whether it can be "fixed". My position is that, even if all we're doing is only creating bright spots in an otherwise toxic swamp, things can change. Since I'm now in a position of senior leadership in this industry it's partially up to me to do something where I can.

Example the first: I know many technologists who invest heavily of themselves in their work and work excessively long hours. Often this behaviour is encouraged, despite the cost to the individual and these people are treated as disposable by the organisations they have enriched when they do reach the point of burnout. Economically sound, but not right.

Example the second: I have a friend who is looking for a new job. She's a talented developer who should have her choice of places to work, but because she doesn't want to work in a toxic bro-culture she's struggling to find places to even apply.

This is the reality of the tech industry and I reject the idea that we can't do better. Idealistic? Yes, of course. But if I think it's utterly impractical to change the culture around me then I need to get out of this industry. More than that, the whole thing needs burning down and the earth salting to prevent re-growth.

The other part of my summary is that I don't know what I'm doing and I'm failing. This is something I take very personally as, for better or worse, I always try to have a clear plan. I know what I'm doing and why, and I feel working without a plan is failing. In my time in technical leadership I've had ideas, created strategies and seen positive change on the back of it. Of course, I don't know everything but I am very aware of that - I'm not deluded. I have good people to talk to, and I'm adding to that list all the time. What I do have - and this is more important than any of my own input - is enough influence to enable and empower others and create an environment for real cultural change. It is only in my area, of course, but people in my area have a habit of going elsewhere and taking our culture with them...

Now, the title of this post is a deliberate nod towards my writing a whole post aimed at an offhand comment I'm quite sure was not intended as I've written here. In American English, the Cambridge dictionary definition of "quixotic" is:

"having intentions or ideas that are admirable but not practical"

While this is not where my brain goes, for various reasons I suspect this (and without the additional layers of meaning drawn from linking the word back to the novel) was more the intended definition and to be honest I mostly agree. If my goal is to "fix" the technology industry then I'm clearly going to fail - it is not a practical goal.

However. To roughly paraphrase something I remember from a film (or TV show?) "striving for the impossible does not mean toiling in vain". The point (aside from my amazing citation ability) being that pushing for unreachable goals is not ridiculous as it brings you closer to where you want to be, even if you never reach it - asymptotic behaviour for those of a mathematical persuasion.

While failing to source that, I found this relevant quote from Mikhail Bakunin:

"By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward."

I'm not sure what it means that I'm now quoting a revolutionary anarchist.

The Newsroom uses the story of Don Quixote as a major theme for the show. It links it to the Greater Fool theory.

"The greater fool is actually an economic term. It’s a patsy. For the rest of us to profit, we need a greater fool - someone who will buy long and sell short. Most people spend their life trying not to be the greater fool; we toss him the hot potato, we dive for his seat when the music stops. The greater fool is someone with the perfect blend of self-delusion and ego to think that he can succeed where others have failed. This whole country [America] was made by greater fools."

Sloan Sabbith, The Newsroom

Do I think I know better than those who came before me? No. But I do know I can make a difference and I intend to do so. It's why I do what I do and I have the original commenter to thank for getting under my skin enough to analyse my thinking and reaffirm that important point. That is mostly why I write this blog.

We should always be seeking to improve, whether it is through evolution or revolution. We should always be seeking to build that rose-tinted version of the world that could exist (quote paraphrased from some wonderful folk at work). Personally, I hate the idea of stagnation. I need to be moving towards a better future - and by that I mean actually improving things and not simply maintaining or (in many ways worse) just fighting a rearguard action. Anything less does feel like failure.

Oh my goodness. Have I become an idealist?!

Why am I feeling bad?

This is a reflection on where I feel I am right now. It's helpful to me to write this down.

A while ago I wrote about being proactive in work. I looked at the balance between reacting to what is going on around me and taking the time to look ahead. At the moment I'm not getting that balance right.

I really hate not having the time to think around problems and last week I had to cancel some 1-1s to reduce my own cognitive load. I've written before about making time for people and this is a big deal (in a bad way) for me.

So I feel like I'm failing right now. The question is - what can I do about it?

First of all, I should put "right now" into context for myself. The nature of my job has changed. I've taken on a new role, with a whole world of new things to learn. Now I need to be clever and insightful in conversations that feel like they've been happening for months when I have maybe a week's worth of context. To catch up, I'm basically constantly cramming for the next big test. There is a constant feeling of my brain being an over-saturated sponge and I'm looking at half a bucket of water left to absorb. It's overwhelming at times, despite my colleagues being very supportive.

This is a particularly busy time. There is a lot to do, and a lot of decisions to be made and it all needs addressing immediately. Both of these will definitely pass.

Secondly, I need to recognise what I'm doing right. As I cram information and react to the current situations, I'm putting in place the building blocks for the future. I'm taking the opportunity to restructure the software engineering community so it will be in a better place as we go forwards. I'm pushing some of my colleagues outside of their comfort zone, and I'm already seeing them really growing which is good for them as individuals and us as a department. We are using the current challenges as an opportunity to bring some important work to the fore and ask the right questions to take us in the right direction.

I may be thinking on the back foot, but that doesn't mean this is short-term thinking. I'm still managing to work in support of my longer-term goals and, while I'm not necessarily delivering in exactly the way I want to, I should recognise that I'm keeping myself more or less on track despite the new pressures.

As I write this down, I realise that I'm juggling an awful lot at the moment and not dropping too many balls. Overall, I should stop kicking myself.