Making Work, Work

More summary notes on a book that's about to go back to the library -- Making work, work.

Although written for Highly Sensitive People in particular, I feel this book has a lot of good advice to offer anyone who has a job.  The author categorizes work into Drudgery, Craft and Calling and basically says that if you are stuck in Drudgery, you will never be happy -- so get out fast.
 
Drudgery is when you hate your job.  You feel like a slave.  Common elements:
1. environment:  noisy, odors, bad lighting, tight or cluttered space, long communte
2. task:  no control (e.g. restrictions on how and when work is carried out), repetitive, boring, not challenging, no sense of accomplishment
3. people:  negative attitude toward you (from boss, co-workers, clients), bullying

Prolonged work in Drudgery will ruin your health and destroy your self-confidence.  You can't be self-actualized if you are here.  Get out asap.

Calling is meca.  It's that place where work doesn't even feel like work.  You can lose yourself in it.  It's enjoyable.  It's a part of your identify.  Just typing this brings a smile to my face.  Here are some other attributes worth mentioning:

• sense of purpose
• feeling nourished by the work
• self-confidence:  an ability to relate to everyone as an equal
• able to adapt to change
• nonthreatened
• waking up with lots of ideas
• sense of rightness and harmony
• desire to do your best and eager for challenges

While I can't say that my current job is my Calling, I certainly feel strong elements of it.  Which brings me to Craft. Craft is that in-between state, not quite bliss, but not hell either -- kind of like purgatory.  Most people are probably here.

Labelling work like this helps me look at my career more objectively.  I can see where a promising job turned into Drudgery all because of a hellish boss.  I can also see where my strong commitment and tendency to please others kept me stuck rather than getting out for the sake of my health.  This is my nature though.  It's not uncommon for people in Drudgery to have a difficult time saying no.  This is essential in order to preserve your sanity.  Too often we take on more than we can handle or accept being treated without respect because we'd loathe to hurt someone else, or we avoid conflict, don't trust our own feelings or ruminate worst-case scenarios. The author provides some great advice on setting personal boundaries such as these:

• I value myself enough to trust my feelings
• I am capable of solving my problems
• I have the right to have hope
• I respect my body, feelings and thoughts
• I have the right to say that something bothers me, right away

The best advice was simply "listen to your intuition".  I know when something is not right -- when something goes against my values.  Learning to respectfully speak up can be difficult, but it's a must.

Some other advice for bosses is worth noting for myself:

• don't try to manipulate people with kindness (yikes)
• listen to other's ideas -- don't dismiss them right away
• give people the freedom to be as creative as they possibly can in doing their jobs

Learning how to recognize when your current job is Drudgery and forcing yourself to get out is critical to your happiness.  There's really no way to turn it around if all elements (environment, task, people (people is the biggest influencer) are bad.  I'm grateful to have this new perspective and also grateful that I have such a great job.

Be careful what you wish for ...

The day has finally come, my manager is moving on and I will likely be moving up ... or at least sideways. Change that I've been praying for is here. So why am I not relieved? I feel like shit. I feel anxious. There are no more excuses. I have to make this work -- my neck is on the line. It was so convenient to have a scape goat before. It's awful, but true. I'm scared shitless and just want to hide under my desk.
K, I know I can do this. There's no other way to move then up, which is great. It would be even more challenging to have to fill big shoes. I know I can motivate the team to achieve great things. It's just so fucking daunting. Bleh.
Good lesson here to be careful what you wish for!

Getting a Job

I attended a workshop on landing the perfect job the other day and although the material was not earth-shattering, I realized that I spend way more time whinging about not having a great job instead of just preparing for the job I want. For example, I've never sat down and asked myself "What is the most interesting and unique thing about me that will allow the assessor to see how I will contribute?" I know what my strengths are, but I haven't practiced my zinger response.

Here's another thing I learned --going into an interview, I'll know that I'll be asked to answer a 'tell me about a time' question. And yet it always takes me by surprise. I should have a list of stories to pull from that can apply to many typical situations -- difficult client, changing requirements, competing priorities, etc. And from what I recall, my answer rarely covers how you're supposed to tackle those questions: 1. explain the situation 2. describe your role 3. state your actions 4. provide the result. Makes sense. I should really think about having a few of these ready, the next time that I interview (which has been over a year now sadly). I love practicing -- sports, hobbies, even work scenarios. I may not have my dream job just yet, but I can have fun practicing for it.

The MIM

I never thought I'd say this about academics, but I'm thinking of doing my Masters (in information management). So many thoughts running through my head -- first up, why do I want this? What will it really give me that I don't already have? It will give me credentials and the confidence to do not only my job, but practically any job in my field. That is, if the program is as good as others claim. An MBA seemed like a natural progression from my B.Comm, but I just couldn't see myself doing more boring case studies and spewing mgmt theory bullshit. Plus it's a saturated market and everyone knows how annoying know-it-all MBAs are. The MIM is a new program at Dalhousie -- it's the right combination of librarianship, IT, records management and business analysis. I think it will fill in my knowledge gaps nicely and give me the edge I need to stay on top of my game.

So what's holding me back? The commitment: part time studies will put a strain on my family. My partner will resent having to do more, the kids will see their mother less, I'll have to give up socializing, exercise and downtime spent reading, surfing and watching TV. Our lives will suck for three years. Is the pay off really worth it?

Assuming my partner agrees to let me do this (big IF), how can I minimize the pain? Some ideas: look for small windows of study time (e.g. in the early morning, at work during lunch, while I'm waiting for the kids at their activities). Take a pay cut to work fewer hours. Make more efficient use of my time doing chores. Get a maid. Buy prepared meals or order take out once in a while. Ask my parents or in laws for help with the kids -- taking them to their activities, picking them up after school, etc. Make it up to my partner (he already gets enough sex, but I could try a bit harder to please him, oh brother).

I feel like my mind is already made up and that I will do this. I'm not worried about failing because I'm a good student and I have a pretty sound knowledge base in IM. K, sign me up. Halifax here I come!

Keeping it under wraps

I'm way too expressive with my emotions and I can see how it often hurts my career. Like right now, I'm working on an impossible task and I feel completely over-whelmed. My manager wants to see confidence --that he's assigned this to the right person. And all I can do is procrastinate and complain. There's no getting out of this either. It HAS to get done by an internal resource. I am the fucking schmuck! This classification structure and retention schedule (yes, I am still working on it) is so daunting. Here's what I'm up against.

I've never done this before. No one at my company has ever done this before. It hasn't been done since 1962. Many have tried, but no one has succeeded. I'm not even sure it's the right thing to do. We tell our end users that we are at risk for keeping information longer than we need it. We're not compliant, we're spending too much money storing info that has no value, the crap pollutes our search results, takes up valuable office space and needs to be dealt with. Really? Paper needed to be dealt with otherwise you would run out of physical space. But why not just buy more storage? Figure out what needs to be kept in 'active' storage, give users a way to mark "the thing" and move the rest to some other area where it can still be accessed, but it won't cloud your view of the world. The 'thing' is basically the FINAL document -- the one that provides the best evidence of what you've done. It's not even the stuff I write. It's the document that gets approved by someone important. The rest is 2nd rate and should be deleted whenever, or not!

K, I digress. My trepidation: nothing I come up with will ever be complete. How can I account for every single shit scrap of information that is produced? I'd need to consult with everyone and no one will agree because it's too late -- everyone describes information differently. There is no perfect classification scheme in the sky.

I've got to figure out a way out of this somehow. Who likes working on loser projects? I need a winner. Maybe I just wrap it up and say look -- I did this much on my own using research. It's a starting point. You want to make it better, then give me a team and we'll take it on the road. Give me a technology we can put it into and then we can be done with it. I've got to stop feeling like it's all my responsibility. Perfectionism is stifling me.

K, I know what I have to do.

The Ideal Job

Before I return "Take Time for Your Life", I want to jot down a few take-aways. When my friends and I whinge about work, we often end up asking ourselves -- "k, what is it you want then?" Huh? There's a lot of pressure to find your calling -- to be doing the job you are most ideally suited to --the one that will allow you to give more than you get, and make you enjoy it so much that it won't even feel like work. With so much of our lives spent working, it's only normal to keep questioning how we're spending our time. So when I read this list of job criteria, it helped me realize that the ideal job is more than working in a hot field for lots of money.

• Work must never cause me to compromise my integrity. Check!
• The required hours must allow me to have a life outside of work. Check!
• My contribution must be acknowledged and appreciated.
• The work must be challenging and fulfilling. (what is fulfilling exactly?)
• I must have an opportunity to use my best talents and gifts fully.
• I must be able to provide my input for important decisions. Check!
• My work must serve a greater purpose. Check!
• I must be paid fairly for the work I perform. Check!

That's pretty decent! And a few of those are almost there. I feel much better about my job, having looked at it with a different perspective. Once again, things are never as bad as they seem.

How to be convincing

I finally have the ear of my Bosses Boss and I'm struggling to get him to see things my way. He's a super busy exec and doesn't have much time or patience for the IM problem which has traditionally been our defense for getting funding for IM -- the loss of corporate memory, legal risk or disposing of the wrong information, the invasion of privacy of disclosing personal info, etc. So I've got to figure out what he wants and show him that my suggestions are the only viable solution. So much fucking pressure!
The other part of me doesn't want to care. Put myself out there, only to be slammed. He's an IT guy, IM is a thorn in his side that I'm sure he'd love to be done with it. How did we go from a budget of 1 million to less than 20% of that? How did we go from a team of 7 to 4? It's pointless. I'm horrible with rejection too. When I really care about something and put myself out there, I can't help but take it personally when my ideas go no where. But then again, I should take a risk. If I don't make a case for change that I really believe in then I have no right to complain. I got up early this morning to outline the business case that was swimming around in my head last night. I'm going to do this.

Re-thinking a career change

In my quest for happiness ... or change? I decided a few weeks ago that I should seriously look into event planning as a career option. It appeals to my need to get things done, stay organized and execute a well thought out plan. Events happen on time and then they're over whereas my projects drag on for years and never quite finish. I don't have any experience or credentials but I can feel it in my bones that I would be really good at planning events -- galas, races, conventions, ... the Olympics! I'm almost ready to commit to pursuing this. Except for days like today that remind me I am a complete bitch when I am 'planning' for an event like this camping trip. I run around like a mad woman, barking orders, pulling out my hair, screaming in exasperation. My partner and the kids finally left the house, thank goodness. My loved ones who know me best know that when I am in pre-event mode (be it a party, vacation, important meeting) there is no getting in my way. My stress level is through the roof and no one likes me. Is this the career I really want? Hmmmmm.

Doing what you love

I'm always blown away by people who really know their trade -- who know it, love it and love talking about it. Like tonight, I attended a wine tasting fund-raiser for our community association. Local wine writer Peter Ward was the star of the show. The way he spoke so fondly of his career and love of wines was infectuous. Hearing all his wonderful stories of the wineries he's been to, ineteresting people he's met and wines he's savoured was more enjoyable then the wines themselves. How sweet it was too to see him banter with his lovely wife -- they were such a cute couple, obviously still in love and so happy! Wow. I can only hope that someday I'll feel the same way about my own career and that I'll have a shared history with someone I still love and who still loves me.

The fire under my ass

So today I finally did it -- I created a master work plan for all the work I've been procrastinating about for months. Granted, I was kicking and yelling all the way, but if felt good to finally have 'a plan'. No more pissin' in the wind. We now have a plan to measure our lack of progress against. Even with the generous estimates I basically pulled out of my ass, we will start being behind three weeks from now. I can hardly wait to be shamed by my very own plan (thank you for the cynicism (you know who you are)).

Interesting how this also relates to my conversation about nagging. I was not motivated to do this -- it took my manager and her colleague coming down hard on me to force me into action and sadly the embarrassment worked. But I love planning. I'm good at it. However, I think that I procrastinated so long because I know we have no focus on our team. When the plans are long range, the priorities change daily, and there's no mgmt support, there's just no point planning anything. Better to just arrive at the office and see what lands on your desk. Seek satisfaction in putting out little fires, conjuring up some recycled IM advice and being your client's hero. Throw in a fabulous lunch, a few power breaks and call it a day. That's what I expect out of my career. And what's wrong with that?

I guess now that the plan is done, I can be a little more organized about my work. Next time I get asked to do something last minute that is beyond my responsibilities, I can just hold up the plan and say "sorry, we need to stay on target here". Gawd, I'm a bitch (again, I know who to thank for encouraging me to let it shine). xx

I Can't Go Back There

More about how freakin' phenomenal work has been this past month. Give people autonomy, show sincere appreciation for their efforts and trust them to get the job done. That's it baby -- that's it. This simple formula would not have moved me this much were it not for the fact that I've been micro-managed for four long years. Imagine never being allowed to make a decision or work with your colleagues. Think of what if feels like to write a million drafts that go no where. For someone so action-oriented I especially could not tolerate the indecision and perfectionism. Everything was a priority and nothing ever got done because it was not perfect enough. Ugh. When you are trained to seek approval on every insignificant detail, you forget what if feels like to think for yourself. You start to question your own abilities and become paralyzed with fear of making a mistake. All it took was autonomy, trust and gratitude for us to soar. I am not going back there EVER.

The Power of Staying Positive

What am amazing stint this acting job has been. I haven't felt this alive in years -- things are moving, work is flying off our things to do list, everyone is smiling, my colleagues are even telling me that I'm doing a great job and wish that it would never end. It feels really good to be a part of something so positive.

This is yet another example of how toxic negative energy can be. Blame, criticism, defensiveness -- these behaviours do more than make you look bad. They fester and spread, they cloud your perception and creep into your psyche. I know that it's true in my relationship. When I carry hurt in my heart, I am miserable. And now I see that it's true at work too. Once we stopped making excuses for our lack of focus and just put our heads down and did the work as best we could, we produced quality work and loads of it! What did I do? Nothing -- I simply let people do their jobs. They are competent and I showed my faith in them and they soared. Hell, I look good because they worked their asses off. It can't be this easy?

And now sadly, it will come to an end in a few days. But now that I know how great it is living with positive vibes, I can't go back to living in that storm cloud. The team and I, we've changed. It's not going to be the same again.

I'm the boss

Finally, a chance at the job I am perfectly suited to. Hurray, my dreams have come true!! So why am I miserable? It's over-whelming and I don't know where to start. Part of me wants to start from the start. What is our mandate and our objectives. This will set our priorities. K, but then I can see too few staff aimlessly working on big loosely defined projects. But what about those urgent tasks that hijack our projects.  Maybe I need to track these to stay on top of the work that's actually getting done. Sadly, this inability to focus has become a way of life for us, including myself who used to be the productivity master. How can I help us achieve? My day has finally arrived and I haven't a fucking clue to lead us to victory. Part of me wants to have daily scrums with the team -- name two things that you will accomplish today. That's it, just two things. But then part of me feels we need a break from micro-managing. The team doesn't need more interruptions from me nor do they need to keep providing status updates. Frig! I have to trust that they know what they are doing and empower them to make their own decisions instead of making them ask for permission all the time. It's been years since any of us have had a normal work life and I'm worried that it's too late. My worst fear is that nothing will get done and my dream of making a difference will be just that, a dream. I think I have to follow my gut on this one. We will complete three things this month. We will work together. We will measure our progress. We will succeed!

Change Management

This is one of my favourite management terms that we give lip service to. It's right up there with 'Risk Management' (e.g. Hold the phone, this scope document has got to address Change Management ... errrr, okay, so what do we say about it?) It's about being honest with the change. WHY ARE WE DOING THIS? What's in it for me? How will this affect me? No, how will this really affect me?

No one wants to really answer these burning questions. No one except me that is. I love being brutally honest, even when the message is not all that rosy. Problem is, I'm not much of a spin doctor and management does not want to draw attention to anything negative. Everyone knows that people naturally don't want change so it's best to just do it rather than spend time talking about it.

A colleague and I were talking about change the other day and came to some other interesting realizations:
People don't want to feel stupid. I now know why my projects were de-scoped to practically nothing. Even though I believed in my heart that once the end users understood how much better life would be in the new work environment, it was too far a leap from their everyday work habits. They would have been cursing our name for months, years even.  Start small.

Always let them change on their own time. Think of how you feel when you log into your fav Social Media app and it's completely turned on it's head and for no apparent reason. You should always give people an option to continue doing things the old way -- they will soon realize that they will be left behind if they don't change. A good example my friend gave me is that he refuses to text -- it's something he's just stubborn about, but knows that it will eventually happen because his kids will force him into it out of necessity.

Let others sell the change for you. This is often what we try to aim for by running small pilots. We secretly hope that the success will go viral and users will be bragging to their colleagues about how great the new systems is. Sadly, this is rarely the case. But I can always dream.

Be honest. If the change requires training, costs, minor inconveniences or more time then just be up-front about it. Too often we focus too much on the benefits of change without addressing the reality. People are already skeptical of change, so not being upfront just enforces the resistance.

This blog post isn't particularly enlightening but I'm learning a few things along the way and I like writing about them with the hopes that they'll stick.

Our mission

A colleague asked me this the other day. And I had to stop and think about it for a minute. What is my Team's purpose, really? Who do we serve? What are we trying to accomplish? Those are simple questions that should direct our every move. But somewhere along the way we've lost our purpose. And now we have a new big boss who sees our role quite differently than we see it. He's helping me realize that we exist to serve our clients -- in the FIELD. We're a small team and there's always been a lot going on at headquarters or even within my branch to keep us busy. We've never really supported the field, other than socially (they're a great bunch of people). And since it's only a functional relationship (they don't report to HQ), it's really not much of a relationship at all.

I used to always mock those corporate mission exercises. Talk about a waste or consulting dollars. The statement is never more than its fancy plaque. How do you actually implement a new mission -- how can you change the culture without changing the players? But maybe we need to take a closer look at this. Right now, we are falling way short of everyone's expectations and that is not a good feeling.

 

I've been thinking about it all weekend. None of the old priorities -- the EDRMS, Classification Structure or Retention Schedule -- the pillars of our existence up until now, seem to mean anything to our new boss. Good god, he wants us to pitch in and start boxing up legacy records! I know some of our team (myself included to some extent) think we are beyond clerical work. We're stuck in the theory and would rather leave the minions to figure out how to implement it. Well those days are over. I've gotta get all cosy with paper files again and start showing my new value or else we will no longer exist as a Team -- yikes!

Information Management is Dead

I'm starting to read more and more about the death of my profession as an IM Specialist and rather than refute it or bury my head in the sand, I couldn't agree more.

I often get stuck on explaining just what IM is.  So I revert to a tired slogan for lack of anything else more concise -- 'it's about being able to make sure that the right information is available at the right time in the right format and at the right cost'. In the old days of paper, you relied on Records Managers to describe, organize, search and retrieve your records. But once digitial information arrived, the RM became obsolete. End users managed their own files at their desktop and the rigor of classifying and culling information was thrown by the way side, which is why shared drives are basically dumping grounds of poorly described, duplicate, and obsolete information. Enter the IM Specialist -- someone with the same organizational and analytical skills as the Records Manager, but who is comfortable with technology and can advise on how to navigate your digital nightmare using best practices (which are so pathetically obvious, it's hard to believe that someone actually pays me to do this). You don't know what to name your file? -- How about just calling it what it is? You don't know what information to delete in your email? Try most of what's in your inbox for starters.

One of the big responsibilities of the IM Specialist is to develop a 'Retention Schedule' which is supposed to be a mission critical document that says -- "this is what we keep information on and this is how long we keep it for". So if the company gets sued and can't come up with the documents or emails, they simply point to their approved Retention Schedule and say "too bad so sad, the information was deleted and this here Retention Schedule covers our asses". I won't bore you with how we come up with this magical schedule. In fact all I've done in my six years in this field is talk about it. We have yet to actually DO IT.

Corporate risk doesn't really resonate with end users, so I usually sell it with Search. If you keep everything, including the crap, it'll be harder to find the good shit, right? (of course I attenuate at work, just not in my blog). This is usually sellable because we all know how shitty desktop searching is -- if I search for 'information management', I'll get everything with the words 'information', 'management' or even fucking 'ment' in it. But thanks to advances in technology, namely Google, why delete anything? There is no master Retention Schedule for the Internet, baby! If you have a kick-ass search tool, the good stuff will float to the top and the crap info will remain out of sight. The only time we need to actually delete anything is if there's legislation that stipulates that you have to get rid of something after a specific time period. And really, there's NOT a lot of these out there.

So here I am once again working on 'the Retention Schedule', only I don't believe in it anymore. It's a bloody waste of time to go around asking people what information has value to them. If someone asked you this, wouldn't you think "everything I write has value, you dolt!". And then I have to ask: "How long do you need to keep it for" ... To which they reply: "Why not forever, isn't storage cheap? I can pick up a 1 TB removable drive for $40 at Staples, so don't tell me it's costly for you to store my files. Go tinker with some server in a closet and stop wasting my time, you idiot. Jeesh. How much do they pay those CSes, again?"

So between this and my rant about the uselessness of organizing and classifying information, my profession is already dead. Time for a career change. What though?