It’s that time of year again. The holidays? Well, yeah, that too, I guess. I’m talking about Year-End Reviews. You know: those few weeks where you get to explain to your boss about what a wonderful job you did and how he can’t live without you. I usually take ‘em pretty seriously: anything generating paperwork that lands in your permanent HR file has got to be important, right?
But, taking reviews seriously means it comes with an additional cost: focused concentration. The kind that only comes when you have a full 90 minutes of uninterrupted Me time. Cubicleland offers precious few moments to take five-minute personal phone call, let alone a full hour to think straight. Usually, with these kinds of things, I duck out to a coffeeshop with a laptop or notepad so I don’t get prodded every so often for my TPS reports.
Today found me holed up in a pizzaria in Warren (home to arguably the best meatball parm in New Jersey) flipping through binders of material. One holds my weekly status reports of all the stuff I did over the past 8 months and the other holds corporate material on how reviews are supposed to go and what sort of career path opportunities are available to me and yada, yada, yada. Naturally, the iPod earbuds are stuffed in my ears, in part to drown out the blaring CNN on the overhead TV, and in part to try to motivate me to get this stuff done during my lunch break. With not a little irony, the Fountains come on and remind me about stuff that reallly matters, and that justifying my existence doesn’t have to mean 16 bulletpoint accomplishments.
Hours on the phone making pointless calls
I got a desk full of papers that means nothing at all
Sometimes I catch myself staring into space
Counting down the hours ’til I get to see your face
— Hey Julie, Fountains of Wayne
“Outsource the design”:http://www.binarymoon.co.uk/regulus/, focus on the writing.
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Things with the job have been okay lately — sometimes really good — and people are telling you how happy they are that you’re there. Admittedly, though, this is one of those low moments of the job that you don’t want the people you meet at Christmas parties to know you do. You’ve constructed a 26 page report for some high-level people (think three levels above your manager) and sent it to the copy room to make 15 copies. Only, you get there to discover that you’ve inexplicably inserted a blank page in the document that’s not supposed to be there, following just after Page One.
You consider editing it and reprinting, but reject that in favor of ever-so-carefully pulling the offending page out of each of the 15 packets, thus messing up the pagination, which you don’t think anybody really reads at 6pt type anyway. You spend the next half-hour pulling the pages out, wondering if anybody saw the mistake in the email you sent last night and whether it would have been just as easy have had the document reprinted. You get to the end of the pile and notice the little shards of paper littering your desk, left over from the corner of the ripped-out pages. You wonder about the rest of those shards still tucked away up underneath the staples of those packets and how they might look on the expensive conference room table at this afternoon’s meeting.
Remembering the snub nose pliers on the Leatherman in your pocket, you let out a sigh and begin to carefully pry apart the quarter-inch of paper above and to the left of the staple. You’re not sure if it’s low blood-sugar, caffeine jitters, or just plain nerves that causes your hands to vibrate at the Concert A frequency of 440 Hz, but another 15 minutes go by before you’re finished and you can look for some other, more meaningful task to justify your employ.
Read Getting Things Done by the prolific ??David Allen?? and, for all the productivity enhancements, you begin to think of your life as a series of queues. The pile of papers on your desk, the line of voicemails you’ve been receiving, the number of emails in your Inbox. Like the email from your dear pastor with even more praise about the church website. Or the one from your old friend Caryn, whose friendship you want so much to maintain, but just can’t seem to make the time. Or the neverending get rich quick schemes, which your spam filter astonishingly still thinks are legitimate. Each of these, says Allen, must be periodically reviewed, purged, and reshuffled into another series of queues: the garbage can, a filing cabinet, or a calendar.
This reminds me of “BullFighter”:http://www.fightthebull.com/bullfighter.asp, a product designed by the folks at Deloitte & Touche to combat the rising tide of BS words in business documentation. They had a “screensaver”:http://web.archive.org/web/20040109230106/www.deloitte.com/dtt/section_node/0,2332,sid=27378,00.html, which acted as a running commentary on the latest consulting clichés. One of my favorite commentaries was on the word “bandwidth,” which is still often used to describe one’s limited amount of time in a given day, as in “I’d love to do that task for you, but I haven’t had the bandwidth lately, given my other projects.” The commentary was something to the effect of, “Is this what our lives have come to? We have become nothing more than a passive conduit for the transmission of data.”
Yes, sometimes, it is very much like that.
Yeah, so the blog really sucks lately. Honda totally did not deserve that free, what?, month of advertising. The Of Interest linky thing is getting a little tired. You know, perpetuating that whole “echo chamber”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/23/echo effect of blogging.
“Michael”:http://oblivio.com/archives/05091601.html decided back in September that he would write 100 stories in 100 days. Doubtless a masochistic undertaking, but admirable nonetheless. Some of what he produced during that time was often revised, though — in some cases he’d revisit a blog 2 or 3 times with major changes to the content.
That, I think, is where I go wrong. Not content to put something out there that might include a typo or an unfinished idea, I’ve avoided saying anything for fear of setting aside a 2 to 3 hour block of time — which I almost never have. But, taking 15 minutes to slap an unfinished idea online, that might be worth it. I can always go back and edit, or let you all use the comments section to help me write it better.
I told “Alissa”:http://alissaclark.com/ recently that I’d really like to work on my writing and editorial cred. Tom “notes the only real thing”:http://canaanbound.blogspot.com/2005/09/long-preparing.html that defines a writer is whether he or she has written anything today.
