James Pearl Thinks Blogging is Dead

Patrick said:
Is the day defined by some sort of average? Area under the partial day curve can get rather thin at times

Or is the day defined by the best thing that happened? That mountain of a moment where it takes a bit to return to normal.
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There needs to be a time element to the good thing. The Aaron Burr moment was very short-lived. Far less than eating chicken wings. Both too short to qualify I think.

Skiing Lake Louise is more like 5-6 hours and is well above the time requirement.

I imagine there’s an hourly score. Like 10/10 for an hour is 10. Across 6 hours is 60. That’s gonna cover the day. The other 18 hours can be staring at the wall and it was still an awesome day.

Make today great.
 
February 5: Six

Last week, Simon and I were talking at dinner and I said something along the lines that every day I try to do something out of the ordinary. When he asked what I had done that day, I said nothing. I had such a busy week, I told him, that it was ok to have some days where you don't do anything abnormal. I think he was generally impressed with the idea that you should make every day count. Unlike Friday, when we had that conversation, today we did something out of the ordinary. Again.

We went to the city to see Six.

This had sort of been on the periphery of things and D said she wanted to see it. So we went to see it. It was good, we both liked it. It probably wasn't as good as Hamilton but that show is hard to beat. It was a solid show and I would recommend it. We especially like these weekday ventures into the city as it breaks up an otherwise boring Monday where we would work too long then Zwift and watch TV later in the day. Tonight we got a good Thai meal then saw a good show.

Make every day count in some way.

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February 6: Cromwell

And we're back.

I don't have a hell of a lot of time to spare right now, and being honest, the weather isn't exactly playing nice these days. But we did get out this morning to lay out some additional machine build work we want to get done before the season gets going in the spring. We've extended the hump line a considerable amount with this, and we're hoping to get a machine in there next week. Hopefully the weather does nice things for us. We'll need to line up some dates in a month or 2 and find some time to properly finish this. Surprisingly, there was just 1 tire track through the new stuff. It's nice that people are (mostly) staying off it.

I find it's good to have stepped away from this for a solid 6 weeks. It's not the right time to go all-in again, at least not yet. But taking a break allows you to recharge. That said, I'm looking forward to being able to finish this, as well as riding it. As I was saying to Kirt this morning, the skiing makes me look forward to the bike season, funny enough.

While it is the dead of winter, it'll be spring soon enough.

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Norm said:
February 6: Cromwell

And we're back.

I don't have a hell of a lot of time to spare right now, and being honest, the weather isn't exactly playing nice these days. But we did get out this morning to lay out some additional machine build work we want to get done before the season gets going in the spring. We've extended the hump line a considerable amount with this, and we're hoping to get a machine in there next week. Hopefully the weather does nice things for us. We'll need to line up some dates in a month or 2 and find some time to properly finish this. Surprisingly, there was just 1 tire track through the new stuff. It's nice that people are (mostly) staying off it.

I find it's good to have stepped away from this for a solid 6 weeks. It's not the right time to go all-in again, at least not yet. But taking a break allows you to recharge. That said, I'm looking forward to being able to finish this, as well as riding it. As I was saying to Kirt this morning, the skiing makes me look forward to the bike season, funny enough.

While it is the dead of winter, it'll be spring soon enough.

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I’d be curious of your schedule each day. You have always been a time bender but seemingly manage to work 12 hours, do an activity for 4, have hot breakfast and home made meal with the fam, a quick 2 hour show in nyc and read for 2 hours.
 
stb222 said:
I’d be curious of your schedule each day. You have always been a time bender but seemingly manage to work 12 hours, do an activity for 4, have hot breakfast and home made meal with the fam, a quick 2 hour show in nyc and read for 2 hours.
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I can attest that he does indeed do this every day (except for the show in NYC)! Unfortunately, I still haven't learned his time-bending abilities!
 
stb222 said:
I’d be curious of your schedule each day. You have always been a time bender but seemingly manage to work 12 hours, do an activity for 4, have hot breakfast and home made meal with the fam, a quick 2 hour show in nyc and read for 2 hours.
Click to expand...
^^ this
 
February 7: Time Bending

The anatomy of a general day goes like this...

By 8:00 I've had my cup of coffee which I drink while reading a chapter of whatever Kindle book I'm on. Sometimes the dog hangs out with me, other times not. Currently it's Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. Also by 8:00 I've emptied the dishwasher, cleaned the kitchen from the day before, and made breakfast. Around then it's time to start the day. While I clean up, I often listen to an audiobook. Currently, I do not have one since I finished it yesterday. So I listened to music today.

From 8-4 I work. This isn't always set in stone but it's a general guide. Also, it's important to remember I am a billable hours guy. I am also the BPC/SA for every project I'm on, with a lot of experience. Basically, if you want my time, you pay for it. Any 30 minute call is an hour billable. As of right now, I've had 22 meetings this week and I have 8 more tomorrow. There alone is easily 40 hours billable. It breaks down very simply. You bill hours, the client pays for your time. You don't bill, you bring in no money. In the 3 years and 8 months I've been here, I'm almost always the most billable resource in the company each week. This gives my time bending a lot of leeway. That said, I tallied up 9 billable in those 8 hours today, so it was actually a pretty mild day even though I had 7 meetings.

Also of note, I generally make & eat lunch while on calls. I make coffee in the kitchen on calls. I walk around with my headphones on almost all day, every day. I use the bathroom between calls unless things are really in a bad way. Also of note on top of this note, almost none of our clients have cameras on anymore. That trend is pretty much dead.

Between 4-6 we head to Simon's basketball game and watch them win the league championship. That block wasn't 2 hours total so I also squeezed in a run to Acme to get a few things for dinner.

At 6 we sit down for a family meal, all 5 of us. Truth be told, this happens usually once a week, even when we have the kids all weekend. Today and tomorrow may be a very rare scenario where we have dinner together on back-to-back nights.

7-8 I hammer out an hour on Zwift. I think I burned almost 700 calories according to the power borg calculator. I watched the season 5 finale of the Sopranos tonight.

At the end of the ride, the org in Minnesota had an emergency and I got a text about it. I sat down and fixed it right in their prod instance, because I refuse to admit I can make mistakes fixing things in prod. I know I've said this before and I admit that I'm saying this for effect. It was a simple field removal from a form that was allowing people the see the last 4 digits of the SSN in a user portal. Not good. This didn't take long, but I easily could have charged 2 hours for this. It had gone up to the SecOps team so it had a lot of visibility. That I fixed it inside the hour is a huge win for the client we work with, and they were super appreciative of it. I won't charge 2, but my point it that I could. Still, that's +1 for a total of 10 billable today.

Note - our target billable is 25-26 per week.

With the rest of the day I will shower, spend about 30 minutes stretching while I watch What We Do In the Shadows, which is a show that has not lost a damn thing in 5 seasons. It's so damn good. Then I will read 1 of my physical books I have, or surf Instagram, or MTBNJ. Truth be told, I'm not spending a lot of time here these days as the content always sags in the winter.

So there's reading (1), work (10), bike (1), family (1), and event (2) in there. The 10 work allows me to blow off other days. As an example, by the end of tomorrow I'll have 40 logged, which will allow me to blow off Friday and drive somewhere that is not NJ and get in a few hours of skiing before we start the weekend properly.

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February 8: Happiness

I think happiness is a choice. I try to choose to be happy. This is not one of those pie-in-the-sky adages that I repeat to myself every day. It really popped into my head this week, and specifically today, because some people I work with are especially unhappy. I think most reasonable people know there are several ways to look at a thing, and often times those different perspectives can be taken in opposite directions. Some people choose to interpret things negatively. Others choose to interpret them positively. Some don't bother interpreting them at all. They're just there. For the most part, I fall into 1 of the last 2 categories. Either it's good, or whatever. Life is easier that way.

I'm struggling with some people at work that always choose option 1. I talk to everyone on the team every day. While I'm not their boss, I'm the lead of the team. So I communicate with people and it's hard to hear the negative angle on things, all day every day. There's only so many times you can shine the flashlight on the proverbial turd and say that it'll be great fertilizer one day. And being fair, it's not always a turd. But if someone is insistent that it's shit, nothing you can do will change their mind.

Someone asked me today how I can be so positive and not let the low performers bother me. I told them it's not my job to be worried about them. Frankly, I don't give a shit about them and their poor work ethic. I try to do a good job because it's what I want to do for myself, for the good people I work with, and the customers I work for. I know it sounds a bit like bullshit, but I actually care about doing good work for the clients. Truth be told, I don't care about the orgs too much. We all know "orgs" are like evil empires that will toss you out with the trash if it benefits them. But the people are still people. And they trust me and I want to help them. If I look at things from the other side, and lowball my own effort because of underperforming coworkers, I do both myself and the people I enjoy working with, a disservice.

This post is a bit of a therapy-vent of the shit I've had to deal with this week. The job itself? Shit man, it's not really that hard. The people, well that's a different story. Just gotta do my best to keep looking at the bright side.

No pics from today. So I go to the Wayback machine of Facebook and find a meal I had 8 years ago. I think this might have been in Toronto.

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MissJR said:
What about "negative" people who are just unhappy because they're burned out? Good workers who are just plain tired with work.
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JDurk said:
That be me.
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isn't that on a good manager ?
Find a way to get them recharged, and change things up? Find a challenge, and reward the good.
Be able to have an honest conversation about performance, where the lack is coming from.
ie motivation vs training vs work culture (was it ok to complain?)
Remind them it is about the customer, or the customer's customer.
In a public facing app, there could be 1,000s. or 1,000 times that, impressions.

In John's case, lives are on the line with the equipment he produced.
If a manager wasn't recognizing exceptional work every day, what was their job?
On the flip side, if work is rejected, it should be handled professionally, vs
Yelling that they weren't keeping to schedule? wtf does that do? why weren't they on schedule?
Rejected work? How about the schedule was wrong? not enough slack? Critical path issues?
Workers not showing up, cause it sucked every day, the crew doesn't even get together for a cup of coffee in the morning
to set up expectations for the day?

We had performance metrics (KPIs!) that were posted - hey the group did better this month, woohoo!
mostly because the top performers kept dialing it up. Then "accidentally" leak the detail - without names,
cause everyone knows who they are. Then do the performance reviews. Can talk about bringing them up to average.
Most people don't want to be below average.

In a billable hours situation, there has to be some combination of rewards.
Money, is good - flexible work hours is better. Bonus gift certificate that is well thought out for the recipient.
Esp in an environment where customers are scattered across time zones.



It is really nice that the clients see Norm as a partner.
Do you have walk-up music for when you join a zoom? This should be a thing.

Everyone should think about their song when setting to a task - work, play, event....

Remember my recommended reading for all things good/bad/or just is, until we label it is good or bad....

Tao of Pooh.
 
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Norm said:
February 7: Time Bending

The anatomy of a general day goes like this...

By 8:00 I've had my cup of coffee which I drink while reading a chapter of whatever Kindle book I'm on. Sometimes the dog hangs out with me, other times not. Currently it's Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. Also by 8:00 I've emptied the dishwasher, cleaned the kitchen from the day before, and made breakfast. Around then it's time to start the day. While I clean up, I often listen to an audiobook. Currently, I do not have one since I finished it yesterday. So I listened to music today.

From 8-4 I work. This isn't always set in stone but it's a general guide. Also, it's important to remember I am a billable hours guy. I am also the BPC/SA for every project I'm on, with a lot of experience. Basically, if you want my time, you pay for it. Any 30 minute call is an hour billable. As of right now, I've had 22 meetings this week and I have 8 more tomorrow. There alone is easily 40 hours billable. It breaks down very simply. You bill hours, the client pays for your time. You don't bill, you bring in no money. In the 3 years and 8 months I've been here, I'm almost always the most billable resource in the company each week. This gives my time bending a lot of leeway. That said, I tallied up 9 billable in those 8 hours today, so it was actually a pretty mild day even though I had 7 meetings.

Also of note, I generally make & eat lunch while on calls. I make coffee in the kitchen on calls. I walk around with my headphones on almost all day, every day. I use the bathroom between calls unless things are really in a bad way. Also of note on top of this note, almost none of our clients have cameras on anymore. That trend is pretty much dead.

Between 4-6 we head to Simon's basketball game and watch them win the league championship. That block wasn't 2 hours total so I also squeezed in a run to Acme to get a few things for dinner.

At 6 we sit down for a family meal, all 5 of us. Truth be told, this happens usually once a week, even when we have the kids all weekend. Today and tomorrow may be a very rare scenario where we have dinner together on back-to-back nights.

7-8 I hammer out an hour on Zwift. I think I burned almost 700 calories according to the power borg calculator. I watched the season 5 finale of the Sopranos tonight.

At the end of the ride, the org in Minnesota had an emergency and I got a text about it. I sat down and fixed it right in their prod instance, because I refuse to admit I can make mistakes fixing things in prod. I know I've said this before and I admit that I'm saying this for effect. It was a simple field removal from a form that was allowing people the see the last 4 digits of the SSN in a user portal. Not good. This didn't take long, but I easily could have charged 2 hours for this. It had gone up to the SecOps team so it had a lot of visibility. That I fixed it inside the hour is a huge win for the client we work with, and they were super appreciative of it. I won't charge 2, but my point it that I could. Still, that's +1 for a total of 10 billable today.

Note - our target billable is 25-26 per week.

With the rest of the day I will shower, spend about 30 minutes stretching while I watch What We Do In the Shadows, which is a show that has not lost a damn thing in 5 seasons. It's so damn good. Then I will read 1 of my physical books I have, or surf Instagram, or MTBNJ. Truth be told, I'm not spending a lot of time here these days as the content always sags in the winter.

So there's reading (1), work (10), bike (1), family (1), and event (2) in there. The 10 work allows me to blow off other days. As an example, by the end of tomorrow I'll have 40 logged, which will allow me to blow off Friday and drive somewhere that is not NJ and get in a few hours of skiing before we start the weekend properly.

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So this seems like a relatively “normal” day. I appreciate the efficiencies and the "always connected" throughout the work day, which is an A+ efficiency move. I also like the working in the reading and audio books through the day. Regardless it is impressive and it would seem much of it comes down to just not wasting time, which is very easy to do.
I do wonder how you are emptying the dishwasher with teenagers in the house, but I also understand the challenge of teenagers not being able to empty the dishwasher before school without waking up the entire neighborhood.

I think you know where i fall on the tendency to point to the negative, however as a manager at work, it is fucking draining always hearing the negative side and it has changed my perspective a bit.
 
Norm said:
I try to do a good job because it's what I want to do for myself, for the good people I work with, and the customers I work for. I know it sounds a bit like bullshit, but I actually care about doing good work for the clients.
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Bingo! Have pride in the work you do, and have empathy for those you are serving. Those 2 things, along with timely and clear communication, go a LOOOOOONG way.
 
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