Profit in Peace 5: Day One

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:

1. Practice acceptance of where I am. Give myself permission to be bad
2. Reprogram the idea that I will be rejected if I am not perfect
3. Look for ways to make my job extremely easy
4. 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
    • What the style is
  • 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.