2 months ago
Overload today? Not a bad problem; tomorrow you might not be. What is your “too much,” and someone else’s “too much” might be completely different, and as a result, we have different levels of what being overloaded is. It’s not good to have “Too Much To Do” all the time; that’s a sign you need help, and the team needs to grow. But in the short term, it’s a sign people trust your opinion and thoughts and want to see more from you. Don’t let that opportunity slip away.
2 months ago
There are some days when my role is to fill in gaps. We don’t have “X,” and no one knows “X”? Looks like I’m spending some time learning “X” today. I have zero complaints about filling gaps, because I think it’s where you can get the best opportunity to learn a new thing and figure out how it connects to everything else you do. It can seem stressful; it’s akin to someone dropping a stack of files on your desk – “Here, figure it out”. That’s okay, we need more of “Here, figure it out”.
3 months ago
Don’t let your Never Shipped get too big; it will swallow you whole. It doesn’t matter who uses it or who gets it, just that you shipped. I once built a product, put it out there, and for months no one wanted it. On the day I shut it down, a university called asking for a demo to use it. You never know until you ship. This is more than dipping your toe in the water; this is putting your whole foot in, this is wading into your waist. And the water’s cold. So most leave it to their toe.
3 months ago
The most passive sentence ever uttered when someone says “they don’t have it”. What this really means… I probably haven’t, but I didn’t read it. I’m overloaded and have no time to read it. I saw it, but chose to ignore it for other priorities. I don’t use that medium, so there is no value in it going there. Take your pick, ask the receiver which category they fall into, and then figure out your next step from there in how to work with them. “I Sent it to you” isn’t a path to making things better.
3 months ago
Presentation and design have never, and will never, be my strong suit. I very much like doing all my research, gathering my notes and content, and handing it off to AI to “prettify”. Make some great infographics. Make that slide deck sing. Take my markerboard diagrams and point out the flaws. Use a consistent colour palette. All of it, yes, please. But the most annoying part is all the adjectives that get thrown around my work and other points that skew a decision, simply because I was asking a lot of questions on that one topic. Objective Analysis still holds
