(no subject)
Nov. 1st, 2020 08:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jakebe
It's finally getting colder here in the Bay Area, so I get to wear socks all the time and dip into my hoodie and comfy sweater collection. This is the season I'm really into! I think R. hasn't quite gotten cold enough in the evenings to start closing windows and all, which I get. You never know if we're going to have to pull out the air conditioner again because the temps shoot up to 100 degrees all of a sudden. It IS 2020, after all.
This month will be...a trying one for a number of reasons. I'm going to break out of my writer's block by doing it every day, though I'm not sure if I can commit to actually pulling off NaNoWriMo's 1600+/day word count. I like the idea of doing something that forces you to be consistent, constantly in the moment. You don't necessarily have time to rest on your laurels with NaNoWriMo; you just have to keep moving towards this really ambitious goal.
I'm not sure I could make the sacrifices needed to get there, especially all at once, on a whim. More importantly I feel like I've already cashed all of those checks; R. knows I wouldn't have the stamina to stick to that goal, and I think he'd be more annoyed at the beginning of the month if I tried to be hardass about it, knowing I couldn't keep it up. That's...frustrating, but it also forces me to take a look at my behavior historically and see things from his point of view. I mean, he's right. There's no reason to think I would actually stick the landing this time.
Part of me wonders if it's because I don't set these boundaries and commit to defending them that this happens. I'm sure that's part of it; putting your butt in the chair and putting in the work is hard enough, but when it feels like your support network isn't taking the project seriously it gets a lot harder. I think it feeds all those voices in my head that tells me I'm wasting my time, that I'm making myself miserable for nothing, that no one wants to read what I write and I don't have anything interesting or important to say anyway. I can fight these voices for a time, but it doesn't take long for me to get tapped out and complacent. And when that happens, I don't respond to encouragement all that well. There's just something within me that can't take pressure, that always feels the urge to lash out and be contrary when I try to be firm about something. But I also have no idea how else to become more motivated.
We're also getting into the middle third of the quarter at the day job. D., my lead and friend, has been out on medical leave for most of Q3 and I inherited his quarterly projects. I've completed one and am right on the verge of completing the other, though I'm not sure how "set" things will be once we've made the presentation to management about how things are set up. It could be over as early as next week with a big feather in my cap, or I could be sent back for another round of negotiations with folks who were pretty nervous about committing to the project in the first place. THAT would be a nightmare scenario for me, especially this month.
I'm in charge of basically getting all the departments Support collaborated with to commit to responding to us within 24 hours so we can close the ticket as quickly as possible. Like Support, these other departments feel short-staffed and unable to keep up with their current workload, so asking them to do this is a bit fraught. On one hand, it needs to happen if we're to "grow up" and start building an organization closer to industry standard. On the other hand, you've essentially been given a whip by management and told to get your colleagues to work faster.
For the most part, I've been able to build the framework so that very little has changed in our working relationship. Most colleagues are fairly responsive, and when they're not we understand it's usually because they're crunched somewhere else. It's definitely frustrating when that happens, but we've all been there. So by getting my colleagues to agree to fairly lax time frames upfront (12 hours after first contact for a response, 16 hours for an escalation) it gives them time to get used to the process. After a quarter or two, when we have data to back up how time to collaboration affects our solve rate, we can come to them again and say "See? This wasn't so scary. You typically respond to us within X hours of first contact. Let's say we lower the times to X+1. Would that be fair?" The idea is to give them a pretty big enclosure, then start to work with them more directly once they've become comfortable.
Management might want me to skip the wide enclosure and put colleagues right in the stalls of a tight timeframe, though. While I get the desire to get us to "industry standard" right up front, I also think it's the wrong move. So many of our collaborating departments work in different time zones, so being aggressive about timeframes isn't really fair to them and gives them a new pain point from us when...there's no reason it has to go down like that. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that folk will see it my way, but I have to be prepared to defend my process when we present it.
We're doing a very limited get-together for Thanksgiving. In order to create our social bubble, we've all committed to taking a COVID test within the next ten days, then going into a hard lockdown where we cut off most contact with the outside world for two weeks. Our hosts will be having their groceries delivered and suggests we do the same. I'm...not sure we'll swing for that, but we'll find a way to make it work. I'm excited and nervous at the same time. This will be like going back to March/April after we've already endured eight months of various levels of self-quarantine. I know that R. will likely start to go stir-crazy a little bit, and we both might fall into a mild depression. That affects everything else -- writing, work, and the genuine desire to be consistent when working towards my goals. I'm hoping it won't be that bad and we can use the time to keep pushing to make our place more comfortable, cleaner, and neater. But...that's another project on top of everything else. All it takes is a bad work week to sap our reserves of energy so that all we can do is be bothered by our cluttered, messy space but too tired to do anything about it.
I have no idea what will happen with this, and I'm already planning to make good use of the hermitage time. But it's another thing to worry about.
I haven't even gotten into my Election Day fears, which might just be the thing I freak out about here tomorrow. I'm hopeful for a Biden landslide victory, because anything else is going to make the rest of November pretty stressful. At the same time, the result and its consequences are so far out of my hands at this point the only thing I can do is prepare for the worst and hope for the best. The trouble is that the worst is so hard to think about without being paralyzed with fear by the possibilities. Ugh. Fear sucks.
This month will be...a trying one for a number of reasons. I'm going to break out of my writer's block by doing it every day, though I'm not sure if I can commit to actually pulling off NaNoWriMo's 1600+/day word count. I like the idea of doing something that forces you to be consistent, constantly in the moment. You don't necessarily have time to rest on your laurels with NaNoWriMo; you just have to keep moving towards this really ambitious goal.
I'm not sure I could make the sacrifices needed to get there, especially all at once, on a whim. More importantly I feel like I've already cashed all of those checks; R. knows I wouldn't have the stamina to stick to that goal, and I think he'd be more annoyed at the beginning of the month if I tried to be hardass about it, knowing I couldn't keep it up. That's...frustrating, but it also forces me to take a look at my behavior historically and see things from his point of view. I mean, he's right. There's no reason to think I would actually stick the landing this time.
Part of me wonders if it's because I don't set these boundaries and commit to defending them that this happens. I'm sure that's part of it; putting your butt in the chair and putting in the work is hard enough, but when it feels like your support network isn't taking the project seriously it gets a lot harder. I think it feeds all those voices in my head that tells me I'm wasting my time, that I'm making myself miserable for nothing, that no one wants to read what I write and I don't have anything interesting or important to say anyway. I can fight these voices for a time, but it doesn't take long for me to get tapped out and complacent. And when that happens, I don't respond to encouragement all that well. There's just something within me that can't take pressure, that always feels the urge to lash out and be contrary when I try to be firm about something. But I also have no idea how else to become more motivated.
We're also getting into the middle third of the quarter at the day job. D., my lead and friend, has been out on medical leave for most of Q3 and I inherited his quarterly projects. I've completed one and am right on the verge of completing the other, though I'm not sure how "set" things will be once we've made the presentation to management about how things are set up. It could be over as early as next week with a big feather in my cap, or I could be sent back for another round of negotiations with folks who were pretty nervous about committing to the project in the first place. THAT would be a nightmare scenario for me, especially this month.
I'm in charge of basically getting all the departments Support collaborated with to commit to responding to us within 24 hours so we can close the ticket as quickly as possible. Like Support, these other departments feel short-staffed and unable to keep up with their current workload, so asking them to do this is a bit fraught. On one hand, it needs to happen if we're to "grow up" and start building an organization closer to industry standard. On the other hand, you've essentially been given a whip by management and told to get your colleagues to work faster.
For the most part, I've been able to build the framework so that very little has changed in our working relationship. Most colleagues are fairly responsive, and when they're not we understand it's usually because they're crunched somewhere else. It's definitely frustrating when that happens, but we've all been there. So by getting my colleagues to agree to fairly lax time frames upfront (12 hours after first contact for a response, 16 hours for an escalation) it gives them time to get used to the process. After a quarter or two, when we have data to back up how time to collaboration affects our solve rate, we can come to them again and say "See? This wasn't so scary. You typically respond to us within X hours of first contact. Let's say we lower the times to X+1. Would that be fair?" The idea is to give them a pretty big enclosure, then start to work with them more directly once they've become comfortable.
Management might want me to skip the wide enclosure and put colleagues right in the stalls of a tight timeframe, though. While I get the desire to get us to "industry standard" right up front, I also think it's the wrong move. So many of our collaborating departments work in different time zones, so being aggressive about timeframes isn't really fair to them and gives them a new pain point from us when...there's no reason it has to go down like that. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that folk will see it my way, but I have to be prepared to defend my process when we present it.
We're doing a very limited get-together for Thanksgiving. In order to create our social bubble, we've all committed to taking a COVID test within the next ten days, then going into a hard lockdown where we cut off most contact with the outside world for two weeks. Our hosts will be having their groceries delivered and suggests we do the same. I'm...not sure we'll swing for that, but we'll find a way to make it work. I'm excited and nervous at the same time. This will be like going back to March/April after we've already endured eight months of various levels of self-quarantine. I know that R. will likely start to go stir-crazy a little bit, and we both might fall into a mild depression. That affects everything else -- writing, work, and the genuine desire to be consistent when working towards my goals. I'm hoping it won't be that bad and we can use the time to keep pushing to make our place more comfortable, cleaner, and neater. But...that's another project on top of everything else. All it takes is a bad work week to sap our reserves of energy so that all we can do is be bothered by our cluttered, messy space but too tired to do anything about it.
I have no idea what will happen with this, and I'm already planning to make good use of the hermitage time. But it's another thing to worry about.
I haven't even gotten into my Election Day fears, which might just be the thing I freak out about here tomorrow. I'm hopeful for a Biden landslide victory, because anything else is going to make the rest of November pretty stressful. At the same time, the result and its consequences are so far out of my hands at this point the only thing I can do is prepare for the worst and hope for the best. The trouble is that the worst is so hard to think about without being paralyzed with fear by the possibilities. Ugh. Fear sucks.
