Category Archives: Personal Growth

Delegation And You

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I once again loved this episode of the Art of Network Engineering featuring Mike Bushong. He is a very astute judge of character as well as how to apply social skills to your tech role. Definitely listen to the above episode if you’re interested in countering cognitive biases.

In the episode, he told a great story of how he had a pivotal career moment with one of his managers that led to some important introspection. I won’t tell his story but the summary is that he had taken on way too much work and way too many roles and he blew up at his manager because of the stress. She leveled him with a quote that rang true for me:

“No one knows everything you’re working on. They just see that the thing that’s important to them is late.”

That’s not the verbatim quote but that’s how I remember it. It’s definitely something that I’ve been thinking about since the previous episode when he mentioned it the first time.

Load Bearing and Busting

The odds are good that we’re all doing way too many things right now. Whether it’s doing more work in our role or taking on way too many projects in our free time. The human mind seems to crave stimulation and we provide it by keeping our brain so busy that it never has a moment to rest. Sometimes that happens because we’re too focused on saying “yes” to everything and pleasing people. For others it comes because we want to be the focal point for everything that happens in our team or organization.

Taking on too much work is manageable in the short term. We can rearrange deadlines and burn the candle at both ends to make it all work for a few weeks or months. However, when the amount of work that we have to do or the number of projects we have started eventually collapse under their own weight we feel exposed and angry. We’re mad because we’re overworked, yet we are the ones that caused the situation. We’re frustrated that so much relies on us without realizing that we could have said “no” at any time and had less to do. We’re upset that we have too much to do AND that we are the architect of our own struggle.

I feel this in so many different ways because I’ve lived it. I have a hard time saying no. I don’t even take my own advice. I delude myself into believing this time will be different and that I won’t get overwhelmed. Somehow I’m always proven wrong when too many things are going on all at once that require me to do them because I’m the one that made it that way.

No matter how talented we are at project management or learning or any skill you can think of there is only so much we can dedicate ourself to doing. Once we hit our limit everything suffers. If you’re familiar with Quality of Service policies it’s why adding one more packet to a congested link doesn’t just hurt the performance of that single packet but of the entire link overall. Going past your limits makes everything worse.

Finding Your Focus

Just today I heard a wonderful quote from Krazy Ken of Computer Clan fame:

“Focus is about saying ‘no’.”

Declining to do something because you know you’re hit your limit isn’t negative. In fact, it’s the smartest thing you can do to help those around you. If you’re always agreeing to do something when it is brought to you then what exactly are you focused on? If anyone can give you a task and you just preempt everything else are you even focused at all?

I’ve felt this over the past year in a very specific area. I’m the course director for my local Scouting America’s Wood Badge course. If you think I’m busy in my work life I can promise you that my volunteer work in Scouting is even busier. I do way too many things. That was brought into sharp focus for me last year when my time to step forward as the course director was apparent. I had to assemble my team and get everyone working toward the goal of putting on this wonderful course. But I couldn’t do it entirely by myself. I had to rely on my team to get it done. The amount of focus that it takes to make this happen meant that I also needed to step back from some of my other roles.

It was hard to do this! I’d spent years leading a pack and volunteering to be on every training course that I could think of. There were even other opportunities that I wanted to explore that I knew would take just as much time as the thing that I had committed to doing. I had to decide what was most important for me. And I had to realize that while I was delegating things to my team I was also responsible for something even more important. My job was to not take on any new responsibilities until we finished this course. Letting go is hard. Not picking up things to replace them is even harder. My brain craved the stimulation of having something to think about. I didn’t want to just go over the same list again and again to make sure things were headed in the right direction.

When you take on too much you do your entire team a disservice. If you’re not available to help because you’ve agreed to do something that someone else could or should be handling you’re holding everyone back. The modern interpretation of this comes from the excellent Phoenix Project book by Gene Kim. Everyone knows about Brent by this point. The single point of failure in the organization. But how many of us recognize that Brent is a problem because of his necessity to the organization and still do what we do either out of a desire to be more helpful or out of a need to control everything?

Delegation is about focus. It’s about saying “no” to things that you know someone else not only can do but should do. It’s about eliminating distractions and poring your energy into something that needs it. It’s easy to say that someone who has too much to do is unfocused. But when you frame it as a problem of choice it becomes easier to see where the changes need to be made. Some things are absolutely going to require your attention. You’ll know what those are because they are so intrinsically linked to you that they’ll fail without you. But don’t think that everything needs your attention. That’s how you find yourself in the trap and lose focus.

Tom’s Take

As of this writing, I’m two weeks away from the start of my Wood Badge course. I have a great team that has done so much over the past year to be ready to put on a wonderful leadership seminar. But they could only do that because I trusted them to make it happen. I’ve done this a number of times already and it would have been easy for me to jump in and offer way too much advice or even take on the tasks myself. For the first time in a very long time I knew the answer was to sit back and do the least amount possible. Not because I was lazy or malicious. Because I knew they needed to feel like they had an impact. I needed to focus on the important things. I needed to be available to those that needed my help, not doing their job for them. If you find yourself in a similar situation ask one very important question: “What would Mike Bushong do?”

Time Is Not On Your Side

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It’s been almost five years since I wrote about the challenges of project management and timing your work as an engineer. While most of that information is still very true even today I’ve recently had my own challenges with my son’s Eagle Scout project. He is of a mind that you can throw together a plan and just do a whole week of work in just a couple of days. I, having worked in the IT industry for years, have assured him that it absolutely doesn’t work like that. Why is there a disconnect between us? And how does that disconnect look to the rest of the world?

Time Taking You

The first problem that I often see when working with people that aren’t familiar with projects is that they vastly underestimate the amount of time it takes to get something done. You may recall from my last post that my project managers at my old VAR job had built in something they called Tom Time to every quote. That provided a way for my estimate to reflect reality once I arrived on site and found the things didn’t go according to plan.

Part of the reason why my estimates didn’t reflect reality was because there are a lot of things that go into a project that can’t quite be explained or calculated into the final estimate. For example, how long does it take for a switch to reboot? Some of them can be ready to pass traffic in a couple of minutes. Larger devices that need to test modules may take up to ten minutes to be ready to go. If you have to reboot that switch multiple times during your project how do you account for that time? Is there a line item for a hour’s worth of switch reboots? What about the project closeout meetings a paperwork? How do you build that into a project timeline?

People that underestimate the timeline of a project are almost always only focused on the work. They see that it should take them about five minutes to copy the config the switch and ten minutes to put it in the rack. Did they think about the time to unbox it? Cable it? Do a final test to ensure all configuration is correct and saved to the startup config? Each of these things sound trivial but they add time. Maybe you don’t do the final config test and hope for the best. But you can’t shave time on unboxing unless you have someone helping you do that. Which, of course, just adds time to the project in a different way.

The Price of Time

Does this mean that you just need to increase the amount of time that you put on a project? No, it doesn’t. One of the connectivity providers I worked with in the past had what they called a “foolproof method” of getting the right time estimate for a circuit. They doubled the number and increased to the next time unit. So two hours became four days. Three days became six weeks. And I became infuriated when I realized how much time something like this would take.

Part of the reasoning behind that thinking was that the project management overhead always took longer than expected. But the other thinking was that quoting much longer timelines gave them more room to cram in too much work for a single team. They could juggle deployments because they had enough hours in the quote that they could be more interrupt driven. Work on something until someone complains then move to that project and work on it until the complaining stops. You can see why providers like that quickly get a reputation for padding their projects.

Time costs money. Either someone is paying you to do the job or you’re paying for that resource to be unavailable for doing the job. You have to learn how to allocate your resources effectively. If you need to help your teams or your contractors understand the additional time that it takes to do a project you need to either package that time as a line item or educate them about what additional tasks you see. Accounting for that extra time is a better way to show value than just adding lots of extra wiggle room to a project so you don’t go over budget. The education aspect is especially important for talent that isn’t familiar with things from the outset. Teaching them how to look for those time sinks and making sure they’re tracked means their estimates will be much more accurate in the future.

Tom’s Take

My son is going to complete his project but he’s going to learn a lot about the way the world works in the process. Paint doesn’t dry overnight. It takes time to load and unload lumber. People need more than 24 hours notice to show up to work on something. These are all lessons I’ve learned over the years that I’m happy to teach. Time is important to us all because we don’t get any more of it. Every minute that goes by is a minute we can’t get back. Make the most of your time by tracking it appropriately and building those hidden things into your project estimates. That’s how you get time to be on your side for once.

The Power of Complaining Properly

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Recently I’ve started listening to a new podcast all about the brain and behaviors called Hidden Brain. It’s got a lot great content and you should totally check it out. One of the latest episodes deals with complaining and how it can make us less productive and more likely to repeat patterns or shut people out.

Complaining is as old as language. I’m sure as soon as the first person to create communications around spoken words was able to teach another person one of the first things they did was complain about the weather or something they hated. Our mind is built to express itself about things we don’t like, such as bad drivers or silly behaviors at work.

The episode explores the ways that our brain can trap us in cycles of complaining simply for the sake of complaining. It also discusses how we should try to spend more time trying to be productive in how we address complaints. I’ve experienced this a lot in IT as well as in my career after being directly involved in IT and there’s a lot of merit in changing the way we complain about things.

Airing Grievances

Complaining without a suggested solution is just whining.

I’ve always found complaining just for the sake of complaining to be counterproductive. Sure, it might feel awesome to just let it all out and pick apart someone’s decision making process or their personality but that’s not sustainable long term. As in the episode above when you spend your time complaining just for the sake of complaints you eventually fall into a pattern and you can’t break out of it. We all have that one friend or coworker that comes to us and complains about stuff no matter what, right?

In part this happens because we create an agreeable environment for it. That’s not always a bad thing. People sometimes just want to complain. If you’ve ever had to deal with someone getting upset because you didn’t just agree with their complaints you know how that can go. There are those in society that would rather just let it all out without disagreement or challenge.

The opposite side of that situation is when someone is challenging our assumptions or forcing us to see things in a different light. I’m sure that everyone reading this can think of someone they know that will show them another side of the argument or help them understand the path to solving issues instead of just whining about them. This person is someone you may not go to all the time because you realize they’re going to make you confront what’s going on instead of just agreeing with it.

We cultivate both of these kinds of people in our circles. We have those we will commiserate with and those we will seek out for help. So how do we manage to spend more time on fixing issues instead of just falling into the patterns of whining and regressive behavior?

Outcomes Over Opining

The first key to figuring out how to break out of the cycle and focus on making this better is a trick I use with others that only want to complain about things in my presence. They want to tell me everything that’s wrong, or more accurately what I’ve done wrong. So I ask a simple question:

How would you like this situation resolved?

It sounds almost too simple. However, if you think about the above examples you realize there are those that simply want to complain. They may not have a solution in mind. Think of those on social media that just want to air their grievances about a company or a person on a perpetual basis. Are they looking to change the situation? Or would they just prefer to complain? Once you ask the person, or ask yourself, how they want the situation resolved then you’ve moved past complaining to a solution.

Once you’re able to break out of the complaining loop you need to keep the conversation focused on the outcome. It’s easy to slip back into complaining and whining mode when you lose sight of the goal. If the solution is to recognize that things need to improve work on the plan of improvement. Have a goal in mind. Is the solution to have better service in a restaurant? Or to not have something cost so much if it is of inferior quality? By making the outcome the focus you channel the negativity into something that can be positive. One other side effect of the focus on the outcome is that continued complaining will fall on deaf ears and usually shorten the conversation. Even if the person has a solid outcome in mind they’ll lose interest if the sole purpose of the conversation is venting instead of productive work.

Lastly, understand that this is really focused on complaining on a non-personal level. Personal discussions are often not going to have an outcome in mind. Maybe the goal is to just vent. That’s why I usually ask now if I’m serving as emotional support or problem solving. However, in a business environment the goal should be the outcome. Especially if it’s a conflict or a complaint from a team member. The goal should be reducing friction and not just being a sounding board for those that would rather expend energy on the problem and not the solution.

Tom’s Take

I complain, just like any other normal person does. Sometimes my complaints are just ways to get my emotional weight off my shoulders. However I have always subscribed to the idea that I need to have an outcome in mind to fix what is causing my issues. Sometimes that outcome is far outside of my control, such as fixing someone’s personality. Other times it is very much in my control but will require work on my part to make it happen. That’s where I always ask myself how much I want this issue resolved. I make sure I’m ready to invest the energy to make it better before I even start.Odds are good that if I’m complaining I’m talking myself into making it better. To me, that’s the power of a proper complaint.

Authority and Responsibility

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Congratulations on your promotion! You’re now a manager or leader for your team. You now have to make sure everyone is getting their things done. That also means lots of reports and meetings with your manager about what’s happening and all the new rules that have to be followed in the future. Doesn’t this all sound nice?

In truth we all want to be able to help out as much as possible. Sometimes that means putting in extra work. For many it also means being promoted to a position of responsibility in a company leading a team or group of teams. That means you will have some new responsibilities and also some new authority. But what’s the difference? And why is one more foundational than the other?

Respect My Authority

Authority is “power to influence or command thought, opinion, or behavior”. It means you have the ability to tell people what to do. You give orders and they are followed. You tell your team the direction that you want things to go and it happens. If it doesn’t there are consequences. When you tell someone they are the boss this is what they usually picture.

Responsibility is “the quality of being responsible,” where responsible means “liable to be called on to answer”. Responsibility is being the one to discuss what happens with the people under your charge. You talk about successes and failures and ultimately serve as the face of the group. When your boss starts looking for someone to tell them what’s going on you’re the one that needs to provide the answers.

As mentioned, many people think leadership and management is about the first thing and less about the second. I’d argue that you’ve worked for them before and it hasn’t been enjoyable. Having orders barked at you or threats of disciplinary action if goals aren’t accomplished are hallmarks of someone that’s focused on authority or on a “power trip”. It’s usually a very unpleasant experience, especially if that person later gets more power or is promoted to a higher level.

Responsibility is what the rest of the population thinks of when you discuss leadership. It’s being accountable for the people you lead. It’s more about celebrating their successes with others when appropriate as well as explaining what happened when there wasn’t the success you’d hoped for. These leaders are often much easier to work for because they empower those they work with and shield you from bad managers and bosses that only want someone other than themselves to accept the responsibility for failure.

A good leader will exhibit qualities of both of these traits to a degree. However, I would argue that the biggest difference between good leaders and bad bosses is how they handle responsibility. Responsibility is the more important of the two qualities to have. That’s because you can delegate authority but you can never delegate responsibility.

Read that last part again. Slowly.

In a formal leadership role, such as a military command, you delegate authority to accomplish things. Officers delegate authority to non-commissioned officers who then may delegate to a lower level like a team leader. At no point is there only one single person issuing all the orders from on high with the expectation that they will be followed by everyone beneath them. Leaders like CEOs may have a vision for how things need to be done but they leave the authority to accomplish those goals up to the leaders closer to the task at hand.

Delegating authority ensures that things are accomplished with efficiency. Could you imagine how difficult it would be for a military command to rely on a single general to give them every single order that was necessary for them to function? That might have worked in antiquity with smaller armies but in a modern force you have to delegate authority to junior officers or enlisted soldiers in order to keep things running smoothly. You also have to trust that the people you’ve placed in that role will get things accomplished. It doesn’t always work out the way you’d like but that’s part of the role of developing good leaders.

Responsibility Bites

What about the other, more important thing? Responsibility can’t be delegated. If the captain of a ship puts a junior officer in charge and something happens? In the example of the USS Fitzgerald colliding with a merchant ship the sailors in charge of the bridge were relieved of command and the ship’s commander faced disciplinary action. Someone had to answer for the collision. The person that caused it faced disciplinary actions but so too did the people in charge. In a different situation removed from the military it might have been easy for the commander to claim they weren’t on duty or they had told someone else to do it but the legal tradition of the US Navy is that the commander of the ship is always responsible for the actions of their crew. They must answer for problems, including colliding with another ship.

Responsibility can’t be delegated. If you are the leader for your team you must answer for their actions. If their actions create success that’s an easy conversation to have. If their actions lead to problems or liability then you also must answer for those as well. You can’t just take credit for the good things. You must also provide the interface when your manager or boss needs to discuss the bad things too. Responsibility for your team fosters the connections that reinforce teamwork. It’s easy to claim it wasn’t your fault that something happened if you weren’t around for it. The best leaders accept that whatever happened must have been because of a lack of training or some other deficiency and answer for it while working to correct the issue. They take the heat to allow for time to fix the issue, either through training or through personnel replacement.

If you’re now staring to see the value of working for an organization where leaders delegate authority to a good team and accept responsibility for their actions, both good and bad, then you know how valuable that can be. Morale will go up, productivity will increase, and most importantly you’ll be training the next generation of leaders in that mold so they become effective.

However, if you’re wondering what it feels like to work in an environment that is the exact opposite, imagine a role where your boss tells you that you must be the one to answer for your actions and that they aren’t responsible for what happens. When someone complains your boss is the first to point out that it’s not their fault. When there is success they claim it was all due to their leadership. When you complain that the rules don’t allow you to be effective your boss tells you that’s just the way it is and you can’t change anything so you need to get used to it.

If that sounds familiar you’re not alone. If that sounds like the role you’re currently in perhaps it’s time to work for a better leader.

Tom’s Take

Good leaders know when to help and when to get out of the way. They don’t take charge. They take responsibility. They highlight success as a team effort and answer when success isn’t there so it can be fixed. It doesn’t have to be as strict as a military command. By delegating authority and being responsible you can set an example for everyone you work with and everyone you work for. If the culture of your organization is the exact opposite it’s time to go somewhere you are valued because bad leaders will soon have no one to take responsibility for them and they won’t be able to boss anyone around they way they really want to.

Make Sure You Juggle The Right Way in IT

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When my eldest son was just a baby, he had toys that looked like little baseballs. Long story short, I decided to teach myself to juggle with them. I’d always wanted to learn and thought to myself “How hard can it be?” Well, the answer was harder than I thought and it took me more time that I realized to finally get the hang of it.

One of the things that I needed to learn is that adding in one more ball to track while I’m trying to manage the ones that I had wasn’t as simple as it sounded. You would think that adding in a fourth ball should only be about 25% harder than the three you had been working with before. Or, you might even believe the statistical fallacy that you’re only going to fail about a quarter of the time and be successful the rest. The truth is that adding in one more object makes your entire performance subpar until you learn to adjust for it.

Clogging Up the Pipe

I mention this example because the most obvious application for the juggling metaphor is in Quality of Service (QoS). If you’ve ever read any of the training material related to QoS over the years, you’ll know that an oversubscribed link doesn’t perform poorly for the packets that are added in at the end. When a link hits the point of saturation all of the data flowing down the pipe is impacted in some way, whether it’s delays or or dropped packets or even application timeouts.

We teach that you need to manage congestion on the link as a whole and not just the data that is added that takes you over the stated rate. This is why we have queuing methods that are specifically tuned for latency sensitive traffic like voice or video. You can’t assume that traffic that gets stuffed in at the start will be properly handled. You can’t assume that all data is just going to line up in an orderly fashion and wait its turn. Yes, the transmission queue on the device is going to process the packets in a serial manner, but you can’t know for sure what packets are going to be shoved in the queue without some form of management.

It’s important to understand that QoS is about the quality of the experience for all consumers of the link and not just a select group. That’s why texts will teach you about priority queuing methods and why they’re so inefficient. If the priority queues are the only ones getting served then the regular queues will fail to send traffic. If users get creative and try to mark their packets as priority then the priority queue becomes no better than the regular queue.

QoS for Your Brain

All of these lessons for juggling packets and prioritizing them within reason don’t just resonate with technology. The same principles apply to the work you do and the projects and tasks that you take on. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve thought to myself “I can just handle this one little extra thing and it won’t make a big difference.” Except it does make a big difference in the long run. Because adding one more task to my list is just like adding one more ball to the juggling list. It’s not additive. It adds a whole new dimension to what you’re working on.

Just like with the bandwidth example, the one extra piece added to the end makes the whole experience worse overall. Now you’re juggling more than you can handle. Instead of processing what you have efficiently and getting things done on time you’re flipping back and forth trying to make sure that all the parts are getting worked on properly and, in the end, using too much time inefficiently. Add in the likelihood that this new task is “important” and gets placed near the top of the list and you can quickly see how the priority queue example above is fitting. When every task is critical, there are no critical tasks.

Prioritize Before The Piles Happen

As luck would have it, the best way to deal with these issues of juggling too many tasks is the same as dealing with oversubscription on a link. You need to understand what your ability to deal with tasks looks like. Maybe you can handle eight things a day. Are those eight complex things? Eight easy things? Four of each? You need to know what it takes to maximize your productivity. If you don’t know what you can handle then you’ll only find out you’re oversubscribed when you take on one thing too many. And it’s too late to turn back after that.

Next, you need to manage the tasks you have in some way. Maybe it’s a simple list. But it’s way easier if the list has a way to arrange priority and deal with complicated or less critical tasks after the important stuff is done first. Remember that something being complex and critical is going to be a challenge. Easy tasks can be knocked out and crossed off your list sooner. You can also make sure that tasks that need to happen in a certain order are arranged in that way.

Lastly, you need to model the QoS drop method. Which means saying “no” to things that are going to oversubscribe you. It seems inelegant and will lead to others getting frustrated that you can’t get the work done. However, they also need to understand that if you can’t get the work done because you’re tasked with too much you’re going to do a poor job anyway. It’s better to get things done in a timely manner and tell people to come back later than take on more than you can do and disappoint everyone. And if someone tried to get creative and tell you their task is too important to put off, remind them that every task is critical to someone and you decide how important things are.

Tom’s Take

This is absolutely a case of “do as I say, not as I do”. I’m the world’s worst for taking on more than I can handle to avoid making other people feel disappointed. No matter how many times I remind myself that I can’t take on too much I have been known to find myself in a situation where I’m oversubscribed and my performance is suffering because of it. Use this as an opportunity to get a better handle on juggling things on your side. I never got good enough to juggle more than four at once and I’m okay with that. Don’t feel like you have to take on more than you can or else you’ll end up working in a circus.

Follow My Leader

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I spent the past two weeks enjoying the scenic views at the Philmont Scout Ranch with my son and some of his fellow Scouts BSA troop mates. It was very much the kind of vacation that involved a lot of hiking, mountain climbing, and even some inclement weather. We all completely enjoyed ourselves and I learned a lot about hanging bear bags and taking care of blisters. I also learned a lot about leadership by watching the boys in the crew interact with each other.

Storm Warnings

Leadership styles are nothing new to the people that read my blog. I’ve talked about them at length in the past. One thing I noticed when I was on the trek was how different leadership styles can clash and create friction among teenagers. As adults we tend to gloss over delivery and just accept that people are the way they are. When you’re fourteen or fifteen you haven’t quite taken that lesson to heart yet. That means more pushing against styles that don’t work for you.

We have all worked for or with someone that has a very authoritarian style in the past. The kind of people that say, “Do this right now” frequently. It’s a style that works well for things like military units or other places where decisions need to be quick and final. The crew leader exhibited that kind of leadership style to our crew. I sat back and watched how the other boys in the unit handled it.

If you’ve never gotten to watch the Stages of Team Development form in real time you’re missing out on a treat. I won’t go into too much depth here but the important stage happens after we get past the formation and into the Storming phase. This is where motivation and skill sets are low and the interaction between the members is primarily antagonistic. Arguments and defensiveness are more prevalent during storming. It happens every time and frequently occurs again and again as team members interact. It’s important to recognize the barriers that Storming creates and move past them to a place where the team puts the mission before their egos.

Easier said that done when you’re with a group of teenagers. I swear our group never really got past the storming phase for long. The end of the trek saw some friction still among the members. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why that was. After all, we grown ups can put things aside to focus on the mission, right? We can check our egos at the door and hope that we can just get past this next part to make things easier overall.

Style Points

That’s when our lead Crew Advisor pointed out a key piece of the puzzle I’d missed, even after all my time dealing with team development. He said to the crew on the last day, “There are a lot of leaders in this group. That’s why there was so much friction between you all.” It was like a lightbulb going off in my mind. The friction wasn’t the result of leadership styles inasmuch as it was the clash between styles that kids aren’t so good at hiding.

I’m not an authoritarian. I don’t demand people do things. I ask people to do things. Maybe when I want isn’t a request but it is almost always phrased that way. “Please walk the dog” or “Can you get me the hammer from the garage?” are common ways for me to direct my family or my unit. I was raised not to be a demanding person. However, in my house growing up those statements were never questions. I’ve continued that method of leadership as my own family has grown. Dad asks you to do something but it’s not optional.

Where my leadership style clashes is with people who tell you to do something right now. “Get this done” or “You go do this thing over here” wrankle me. Moreover, I get frustrated when I don’t understand the why behind it. I’m happy to help if you just help me understand why it needs to be done. Bear bags need to be hung right away to keep animals from devouring the human food. The dining fly needs to be put up to put things underneath in case of inclement weather. There’s an order to things that makes sense. You need to explain why instead of just giving orders.

As I watched the teenagers in the crew interact with each other I couldn’t understand the defensive nature of the interactions. Some of the crew mates flat out refused to do things because they didn’t get it. They took their time getting necessary tasks done because they felt like they were doing all the work. Until the end of the trip I didn’t understand that the reason for their lack of motivation wasn’t inspired by laziness, but instead by a clash in style.

My son is like me in that he asks people to do things. So when he was ordered to do something he felt the need to push back or express displeasure with the leadership style. It looked defiant because he was trying to communicate that politeness and explanation go a long way toward helping people feel more motivated to pitch in. 

For example, asking someone to help hang the bear bags because there is a storm coming in and they are the most efficient at it is a better explanation than telling them to just do it. Explaining that you want someone to train another person in a job because you excel at it helps the person understand this is more about education than making them do the job over and over again. I’ve mentioned it before when it comes to leaders leaning on the people that get the job done all the time without expressing why. It’s important to help people understand that they have special unique skills that are critical to helping out.

Promoting From Within

Leaders chafe at the styles that don’t match their own. One of the ways to help this process is through delegation. Instead of punishing those that talk back to you make them responsible for leading the group. Let them show off their leadership style to see how it is received. You’re essentially giving that person the power to express themselves to see if their way is better. Depending on your leadership style this may be difficult to do. Authoritarians don’t like letting go of their power. People with no patience are more likely to just do the job themselves instead of letting others learn. However, you need to do it.

Leaders will excel in the right environment. Give someone responsibility and let them accomplish things. Instead of simply giving out tasks let the leaders figure out how to accomplish the goals. I ran a small experiment where I told our crew leader to just take care of his one responsibility and then leave the crew to their own devices. By this point in the trek they knew what needed to be done. If they couldn’t find the motivation to get it done then it was on them and not the leader. Weather forced my hand before I could get the experiment done but when a leader is having issues with those under then chafing at their leadership style they need to empower their group to lead their way to see how effective it can be instead of just falling back on “I’m in charge so you do what I say”.

Tom’s Take

My leadership experience and training has been all about creating artificial situations where people are required to step up to lead. Seeing it happen organically was a new experience for me. Leaders emerge naturally but they don’t all grow at the same rate or in the same way. The insight gained at the end of the trip helped me understand the source of friction over the twelve days were were in the backcountry. I think I’d do things a little differently next time given the opportunity to allow those that needed a different style to come forward and provide their own way of doing things. I’ll be interested to see how those leaders develop as well as how I approach these situations in the future.

Putting the FUN Back in Productivity

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It’s not a secret that it’s hard to get stuff done. Procrastination is practically a super power for me. I’ve tried so many methods and systems to keep myself on track over the years that I should probably start a review site. Sadly, the battle of my executive function being on constant vacation and the inability to get organized saps a lot of my ability to execute. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve finally realized that I need to start tricking my brain into getting things done.

Any reputable researcher will tell you that dealing with neurodivergent behaviors like ADHD is all about understanding the reasons why you do the things you do. I know what needs to be done. I just don’t want to do it. Worse yet, anything that I can do to avoid working on something is going to capture my attention because I’d rather be doing something unproductive as opposed to something I don’t like. This can manifest itself in strange ways like preferring to do the dishes instead of writing a blog post or mowing the yard instead of practicing a presentation.

Not DisFUNctional

It’s taken me a while but I’ve finally come up with a system that makes it easier to get me into a rhythm to get things done. And because you wouldn’t remember it unless I made it spell out some memorable word, we’re going to call it the FUN System. Because more than three points would likely have gotten lost anyway.

F – Fake It! – It’s going to sound silly but the first step in convincing yourself to do something is often to lie to yourself about how much better it will be when you get it done. Your brain has convinced itself that this is bad and you shouldn’t be doing it. So in order to get it done you’re going to have to convince it otherwise.

We do this all the time to others. Telling kids that veggies taste good. Telling our friends that they should do something for us so they feel better. Selling pretty much anything to anyone. It’s all about convincing someone skeptical to do something they don’t want to do. Your brain is no different. You need to convince yourself to get the thing done. Maybe you promise yourself a reward or some extra downtime or something that just gets you moving. You don’t even have to keep the promise. The key is to use it to overcome the objections your brain has already but up. Fake it however you need to in order to make something happen.

U -Understand It – This one is especially powerful for me. I love learning. Like a lot. Enough that I can often convince myself to get a bigger task accomplished more quickly by learning about it. Understanding the details or the process or figuring out how to make it all work. I binge watch documentaries on Youtube and enjoy reading up on random things to learn more about how they work or why they are the way they are.

This extends to things beyond emails and simple tasks for me. Cooking was something that was easier to accomplish and do more often when I learned how it all works together. Why 350 degrees is the magic baking temperature, for example. Or how different spices can create different styles of flavors. It’s all about learning the ins-and-outs of what you’re trying to do.

The key here is not to fall down the hole of learning more about what you’re trying to do than actually doing it. It’s very easy to get paralyzed by over learning and just sitting there going over the details again and again instead of putting them into practice. Using the above example you may have to tell yourself you can come back to the investigation after you’ve tried it once or twice. Ensure that you use the desire to learn as the driver for getting something accomplished before you procrastinate your day away.

N – Next On The List – The third way I tell myself to get things done is to move them down on the list behind an easy task. It’s a cruel trick that relies on momentum. I tell myself that I got the little easy thing done so I might as well tackle the bigger thing. And it works more often than you might think.

The brain only needs a little dopamine from a sense of accomplishment to keep going. It’s the idea that you’re being productive. So if you need to write something long then put it after a short response email. If you’re dreading a phone call then do it after you’ve tidied your desk or taken out the trash. Doing something small will help you get prepared for the big task and ensure that you can carry forward that little extra push to get through it. As a bonus, the sense of accomplishment from that extra big task will carry forward to a couple others! It’s a like a productivity feedback loop.

Tom’s Take

The usual disclaimers apply here. This is my method and it may not work for you. You have to learn how your brain works and find ways to keep it moving and working. There are other things that help create the sense of accomplishment, like routine or the enjoyment of results. But in the long run the key is finding a way to get your brain out of the funk of not wanting to do stuff. My FUN System helps me and maybe it will help you too. Try it out if you’re struggling and use it as a basis to make your own fun.

Don’t OutSMART Your Goals

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I read a piece on LifeHacker yesterday that made me shake my head a bit. I’m sure the title SMART Goals Are Overrated was designed to get people to click on it, so from that perspective it succeeded. Wading into the discourse there was an outline of how SMART goals were originally designed for managers to give tasks to employees and how SMART doesn’t fit every goal you might want to set, especially personal aspirational ones. Since I have a lot of experience with using SMART goals both for myself and for others I wanted to give some perspective on why SMART may not be the best way to go for everything but you’re a fool if you don’t at least use it as a measuring tool.

SMRT, Eh?

As a recap, SMART is an acronym for the five key things you need to apply to your goal:

  • S – Specific (what are you going to do)
  • M – Measurable (how will you know when you’ve succeeded)
  • A – Attainable or Assignable (can you or the person you’ve selected do this thing)
  • R – Relevant or Relatable (is this goal appropriate for me or for the person doing it)
  • T – Timely or Time-Based (when are you going to accomplish this goal)

Aside from the obvious reason that the originators really wanted their system to spell “smart”, what does all this mean? Well, when we teach SMART goals at Wood Badge, we ask people to envision something they want to do in the next year. Maybe it’s taking a vacation. Or perhaps it’s another project they want to get done around the house. Once they’ve picked it out, we ask them to think about how they’re going to accomplish it. This second exercise is where the application of the ideas behind SMART goals comes into play.

In an enterprise IT sense we don’t do projects with no planning. At least, I really hope we don’t. We need to understand what we’re doing and why and how we’re going to get it done and when. We already have those constraints put in place when we begin the process. SMART just formalizes them into something memorable. Take an IDC switch upgrade for example:

  • Specific – We are going to upgrade the switches in the gym IDF
  • Measurable – We’re done when the switches are installed, cabled, and configured properly
  • Attainable – This is easy to accomplish and the team has done many before
  • Relevant – The networking team is doing the work, not the storage team or the accounting department. Relevant to our needs because we have more bandwidth in the gym during basketball games and we need to increase the amount of concurrent users and devices
  • Timely – We’re doing the upgrade next Friday when everyone is out of school, which is two weeks before basketball season starts to make sure we have everything ready to go with minimal disruptions. The switches are scheduled to arrive tomorrow.

See? SMART helps us plan the whole thing. Specific keeps us from setting goals like “make things faster” and forces us to be very specific. That goes hand-in-hand with Measurable, which also prevents scope creep. We’re done when we’ve met the measurable case. Setting more measurable things will help your projects work much better.

Attainable just means we’re not setting goals we can’t reach. Switching out one IDC at a time is better than trying to reconfigure the whole network in a weekend. Having been roped into unattainable projects before I really wish more of them had this condition figured out up front. Relevant helps answer why we need it or who is relates to. The accounting department may want the fastest access to the data center or the cloud but if they want us to pay thousands of dollars a month for a circuit only they can use it’s going to be hard to meet the Relevant section of the goal. Timely gives you a date to shoot for for completion. That keeps your project from sitting on the “in process” part of your kanban board until the end of time itself.

Don’t Dumb It Down

LifeHacker’s writer, Beth Skwarecki, says that SMART is deceptive because it creates a bait-and-switch mentality of setting pass-fail goals with a deadline. There’s no inherent motivation to get things done and no reason to set goals that require you to stretch your limits because you don’t want to fail. Looking at goal setting in a vacuum would validate her reasoning. However, looking at SMART as the only source of input into the goal setting process is also setting yourself up for failure.

It’s true that SMART encourages you to set deadlines and spell out what you’re doing. That’s because many people struggle with the process of actually defining goals. Like vacation planning they have the big picture of sitting on the beach clearly in mind. They stumble when it comes to booking hotels and rental cars and when to buy the airline tickets and how they’re going to get to the beach and what they need to bring when they get there and so many other things not even on their radar. SMART gives them a framework for figuring out how to make it all work.

SMART isn’t a motivator. It doesn’t make you want to do something. Instead, it gives you a way to measure progress or force yourself to understand when things need to happen. In the article, Beth says that it’s bad if you set a time goal for yourself and then you procrastinate until the week before because there is no inherent drive to work on things in a timely manner. I’d argue that has nothing to do with the SMART framework. Sure, you set yourself a goal to be finished. But we do that all the time.

We want to be able to run a 5k race by the time of the race in the fall. We want to go to Disneyland on our vacation in July. We want to buy a house before we turn 30. All of these goals have a Timely component. Maybe you don’t have a Gantt chart breaking down every minute of the planning process yet. That doesn’t mean putting a time on it doesn’t help you do things better. When I was working on my SMART goal project back in 2017 I had a whiteboard on my desk with deadlines and checkpoints to make sure I was getting things done. The motivation to finish on time came from me setting smaller, attainable goals and not big red circles on the calendar looming on the horizon.

The last thing I’ll say about the article is that SMART goals aren’t supposed to push you to challenge yourself. Beth says that SMART encourages you to do things that are attainable so you don’t fail. I’d argue that the purpose of SMART is to help you set attainable goals and then help you reflect on what you could be doing better or more often. Yes, everyone wants to succeed as often as possible. Constant failure is discouraging. You also need to make sure you aren’t just setting targets to knock down for the sake of knocking them over.

Goals that are set without a check-in aren’t really helping you. Projects with SMART goals should be living documents that get updated frequently. Are you sailing through your running goals? Time to reset your yardstick and stretch yourself a bit. Run a faster time or go for a longer distance. Are you having struggles with your project because things aren’t coming together? Sit down and be honest with yourself and figure out how to make the most out of what you have. Maybe it’s not replacing every AP in the office but just the ones in the employee areas in the main building. If you’re not adjusting your goals along the way based on the feedback you get from the process then you’re going to fall into the trap of making things too easy to fail or too hard to succeed.

Tom’s Take

I’m a big fan of using the right tools for the job. Don’t use screwdrivers as chisels. Don’t use a flamethrower to light cigars. And don’t forget that you can find other ways to make things work for you. SMART isn’t the superior system for every situation out there. There are times when it’s maddening and doesn’t properly fit. However, running your projects and goals through the SMART filter will usually help you identify where you need to tighten up language or timelines. It certainly can’t hurt. And if it’s not working at all then try to find a better way to make it work for you. Use a tool or framework instead of just thinking you’ll do it your own way. That’s the kind of thinking that leads smart people into making dumb decisions.

Racing On the Edge of Burnout

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It’s been a year and more and I think a lot of us are on the ragged edge of burning out completely. Those that think they are superhuman and can just keep grinding away at things without acknowledging what’s going on are kidding themselves. I know I’m feeling it too even though I have a pretty decent handle on what’s going on. Let’s explore some of the ways it’s impacting us and what should be done, if anything can even be done.

Creativity Black Hole

I don’t feel like doing anything remotely creative right now. The cooking will get finished. The dishes will be done. The things in my floor will be picked up and put away. But beyond that? Good. Luck. I’m not feeling any kind of drive to do anything beyond that.

Remember when everyone was picking up quarantine skills? Baking, cooking, knitting, crocheting, home improvement, or even an instrument? Those were fun days filled with massive uncertainty and a need to distract ourselves from what might be coming next. However, those skill pickups are things that need time to work on and refine and continue to master. And now that the world is back in full swing we don’t have any more time than we did before. In fact, we have a lot less.

Now we face a choice of doing what we’ve always done before, albeit in a more restricted fashion, but now with the added pressure of an additional time sink staring us in the face. You can’t improve your cooking skills if you don’t cook. But when you don’t have a mountain of free time to devote to researching recipes or putting together the best shopping list or exploring new places to source ingredients you’re going to feel like it’s back to being a chore and end up churning out chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese.

That’s what burnout looks like. When something you previously enjoyed becomes a chore like any other because you have no time to devote to it and get enjoyment from it. Whether you want to admit it or not all your creative pursuits feel like this right now. I know I find myself zoning out more often than not when it comes to free time. I don’t want to write or cook or learn to play the harmonica. I just want to spend a few moments not thinking about anything. And that’s what it feels like to be burned out.

How about doing things even remotely adjacent to work? Writing a coverage post from a presentation or recording a new podcast episode or a video? If it feels like actual work you’re probably going to avoid it just as much as you avoid the things you actually like to do. That means the rest of your creative output is going to suffer too.

Escape Velocity

Now that we know we’re burned out and don’t want to admit it, how do we fix it? The short answer is that we can’t. We’re still in the uncertain period of balancing work and creativity and other stuff going on. Our current battle is watching those two things fighting for supremacy. Work commands our attention to get the stuff done that pays the bills. Creative pursuits are clamoring for air because remember that cool time last year when we made all the sourdough bread? How do we make them both work?

Another quote that has been resounding with me recently is “If you prioritize your distractions over your responsibilities then your distractions are your responsibilities.”

We want to get away from the stuff that grinds on us. But when the things we use to get away become a grind then they just fall into the same place. We need to keep those distractions separate and use them when we need to as opposed to just taking a 30-minute break twice a day and working on our harmonica scales. When you associate your distraction with your responsibilities you stop liking it as much.

I use Scouting as one of my distractions. It’s basically my hobby at this point when you consider how much time I’ve invested into it. Yet, I find myself starting to get burned out on it as well. Part of that is my inability to say “no” to doing things. And that lack of time is wearing thin because I can’t be everywhere at once. I need to pull back from all the things that I’m doing because otherwise my hobby will become just another job that gets in the way of me relaxing and letting go.

Understanding each and every part of these battles is key to drawing the lines around what you need to keep burnout at bay. Our brains like to consume all the things around a hobby or topic and then walk away from it when it doesn’t produce the same kind of dopamine response. We have to teach our brains to enjoy a bit of what we like and not eat it all at once and get tired of it. That’s why scheduling time for things is so important. Otherwise you’ll grind yourself away to nothing. Make time for your responsibilities and your distractions and don’t mingle the two or you’re going to end up with some kind of unappetizing oatmeal of things.

Tom’s Take

I’m burned out. And I don’t want to admit it. Things keep slipping out of my head and I can’t seem to keep up like I want. Acknowledging it is the first step. Now that I know I’m burned out I can try and fix it by making those changes. Don’t soldier on and hope that you’re going to pull through it. Admit that you’re more burned out than you realize. You may not be completely gone yet but if you ignore it you soon will be. Instead, take the time to prioritize what you need to take care of and what you want to do to enjoy life. Schedule a hike. Make time to practice your instrument. But make sure you keep it segregated and keep your work life where it belongs. Don’t bake bread at 9am on a Monday and don’t send emails at 9pm on a Friday. And be kind to yourself. Your brain doesn’t like burnout any more than you do. Take a moment, take a breath, and take some time for you.

Tech Field Day Changed My Life

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It’s amazing to me that it’s been ten years since I attended by first Tech Field Day event. I remember being excited to be invited to Tech Field Day 5 and then having to rush out of town a day early to beat a blizzard to be able to attend. Given that we just went through another blizzard here I thought the timing was appropriate.

How did attending an industry event change my life? How could something with only a dozen people over a couple of days change the way I looked at my career? I know I’ve mentioned parts of this to people in the past but I feel like it’s important to talk about how each piece of the puzzle built on the rest to get me to where I am today.

Voices Carry

The first thing Tech Field Day did to change my life was to show me that I mattered. I grew up in a very small town and spent most of my formative school years being bored. The Internet didn’t exist in a usable form for me. I devoured information wherever I could find it. And I languished as I realized that I needed more to keep learning at the pace I wanted. When I finally got through college and started working in my career the same thing kept happening. I would learn about a subject and keep devouring that knowledge until I exhausted it. Yet I still wanted more.

Tech Field Day reinforced that my decision to start a blog to share what I was learning was the right one. It wasn’t as much about the learning as it was the explanation. Early on I thought a blog was just about finding some esoteric configuration stanza and writing about it. It wasn’t until later on that I figured out that my analysis and understanding and explanation was more important overall. Even my latest posts about more “soft skill” kinds of ideas are less about the ideas and how I apply them.

Blogging and podcasting are just tools to share the ideas that we have. We all have our own perspectives and people enjoy listening to those. They may not always agree. They may have their own opinions that they want to share. However, the part that is super critical is that everyone is able to share in a place where they can be discussed and analyzed and understood. As long as we all learn and grow from what we share then the process works. It’s when we stop learning and sharing and try to protest that our way is right and the only way that we stop growing.

Tech Field Day gave me the platform to see that my voice mattered and that people listened. Not just read. Not just shared. That they listened and that they wanted to hear more. People started asking me to comment on things outside of my comfort zone. Maybe it was wireless networking. It could have been storage or virtualization or even AI. It encouraged me to learn more and more because who I was and what I said was interesting. The young kid that could never find someone to listen when I wanted to talk about Star Wars or BattleTech or Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was suddenly the adult that everyone wanted to ask questions to. It changed the way I looked at how I shared with people for the better.

Not Just a Member, But the President

The second way Tech Field Day changed my life was when I’d finally had enough of what I was doing. Because of all the things that I had seen in my events from 2011 to 2013, I realized that working as an engineer and operations person for a reseller had a ceiling I was quickly going to hit. The challenges were less fun and more frustrating. I could see technology on the horizon and I didn’t have a path to get to a place to implement it. It felt like watching something cool happening outside in the yard while I was stuck inside washing the dishes.

Thankfully, Stephen Foskett knew what I needed to hear. When I expressed frustration he encouraged me to look around for what I wanted. When I tried to find a different line of work that didn’t understand why I blogged, it crystallized in me that I needed something very different from what I was doing. Changing who I was working for wasn’t enough. I needed something different.

Stephen recognized that and told me he wanted me to come on board without him. No joking that my job offer was “Do you want to be the Dread Pirate Roberts? I think you’d make an excellent Dread Pirate.”. He told me that it was hard work and unlike anything I’d ever done. No more CLI. No more router installations. In place of that would be event planning and video editing and taking briefings from companies all over the place about what they were building. I laughed and told him I was in.

And for the past eight years I’ve been a part of the thing that showed me that my voice mattered. As I learned the ropes to support the events and eventually started running them myself, I also grew as a person in a different way. I stopped by shy and reserved and came out of my shell. When you’re the face of the event you don’t have time to be hiding in the corner. I learned how to talk to people. I also learned how to listen and not just wait for my turn to talk. I figured out how to get people to talk about themselves when they didn’t want to.

Now the person I am is different from the nerdy kid that started a blog over ten years ago. It’s not just that I know more. Or that I’m willing to share it with people. It has now changed into getting info and sharing it. It’s about finding great people and building them up like I was built up. Every time I see someone come to the event for the first time I’m reminded of me all those years ago trying to figure out what I’d gotten myself into. Watching people learn the same things I’ve learned all over again warms my heart and shows me that we can change people for the better by showing them what they’re capable of and that they matter.

Tom’s Take

Tech Field Day isn’t an event of thousands. It’s personal and important to those that attend and participate. It’s not going to stop global warming or save the whales. Instead, it’s about the people that come. It’s about showing them they matter and that they have a voice and that people listen. It’s about helping people grow and become something they may not even realize they’re capable of. I know I sound biased because the pay the bills but even if I didn’t work there right now I would still be thankful for my time as a delegate and for the way that I was able to grow from those early days into a better member of the community. My life was changed when I got on that airplane ten years ago and I couldn’t be happier.