For the longest time, I’ve thought that my job was pretty much perfect. It wasn’t the highest paying job, or the one that I loved the most, but I think it has many many good elements such as:
- Good enough pay to never have to worry about money
- Good work/life balance, lots of work sometimes, little work others
- Lots of traveling
- Get to practice speaking and work on fun projects
Obviously, I could find a job even better in every area, but this is quite good already.
I realized recently why I still feel tired and think that it is too much work so often. THE WORK LIFE BALANCE IS HORRIBLE.
Ok, I understand I just contradicted myself there, but the reason why I think the work life balance is good is because on paper, there are lots of downtime where I can do whatever I want. However, because of the amount of emotional pressure that I put on myself, I’m actually always thinking about work which means that there is actually no worklife balance at all.
I worry if I kick back and ignore work for a while:
- I will not be able to focus when I really need to so I need to get all the work done that I can
- I will not be able to have enough time to get my work done when I really need to so I need to be working all the time
- Someone will ask me what I’ve been working on and I will be outed as someone who is not contributing anything
Some of the anxieties I have around actually working:
- I worry I will create ugly applications and I will come off as bad and incompetent
- I worry I will not build enough for my application and I will come off as lazy or incompetent
- I worry that when I go into meetings I will look unprepared and stupid
If I am able to deal with the emotional burden of this job and turn work into something soothing and relaxing for me, I will actually be so happy in this job. This will be the easiest money I will ever make and it will free me up to make money in other ways as well.
I’m going to do this in a couple of ways:
- Practice acceptance of where I am. Give myself permission to be bad
- Reprogram the idea that I will be rejected if I am not perfect
- Look for ways to make my job extremely easy
- Find ways to meet my needs through my jobs
So Step 1:
I am lazy, incompetent, unproductive and stupid. I accept myself for it. I give myself permission to be this way as much as I want to be.
Step 2:
The Bossy Man
In the meeting
Which I spent
Almost no time preparing for
He asked me to show
Something
I didn’t want to show
I said no
The meeting
Was under my
Control
The Finicky Architect
I created something
That I didn’t think
Was good enough
To stop him from asking question
Yet I showed up not to impress
But to help
And we were both happy
By the end
Step 3:
Where are the hardest parts of my job?
1 – Learning about new technology
- Takes a long time
- Hard to know what to focus on
- Hard to remember
Ideas on how to make it easier:
- Create materials for myself to make my life easier (cheat sheets, presentations)
- Look for a way to make my life easier
- Timebox an attempt to learn quickly
- Focus on one area that has impact
2 – Building mockups
- Takes time to understand the customer’s process
- Hard to formulate what I need
- Hard to understand how to design it
- Hard to work out the technical parts of building out a process
Ideas on how to make it easier:
- Clearly articulate what I need
- The interfaces
- The processes
- The data structures
- The priority
- Get help on the UI
- Get help on the build itself
3 – Presenting the product
- Never know what they will ask me to explain or click on
- Hard to boil down the flow to a few steps
- People may want to test you on areas that they don’t understand or may be hard to show
Ideas on how to make it easier:
- Get the clarity I need:
- Why they are asking the question?
- What are they testing me on? What is the thing I need to prove?
- What do they already know or understand?
- Pause
- Think about my gameplan
- Use metaphors to bridge understanding gaps
- Walk through what I’m about to do in my head before I do it on the screen
Step 4:
The most annoying things at work and how I will meet my needs through it:
- Building mockups
- Contribution: Who am I helping with this?
- Growth: What will I do better with this demo?
- Significance: What special signature will be mine?
- Uncertainty: What is it that interests me the most about this demo?
- Certainty: What do I want to copy? Who can make my life easier? How long do I need realistically?
- Filing expense reports, doing training and filing quarterly reviews
- Love and Connection: Who can I have a working/hangout session with?
- Uncertainty: What time challenge should I give myself?
- Boring meetings/trainings
- Certainty: Why am I joining? What questions do I need to ask? If none, make a note of what I need from the meeting and watch the recording.
- Love and Connection: Reach out to the presenter and tell them what you liked
- Giving demos and presentations
- Contribution: How can I be the most helpful?
- Significance: Why am I showing this?
- Uncertainty: Don’t prepare
- Certainty: What am I afraid of?
Ok, that’s it for now. I will say that writing this blog post has been tremendously helpful. I will be referencing this over and over again it is just so useful. Hopefully after using it many many times, it will be ingrained within me and I won’t need to look at it anymore.