So I mentioned previously that I was reading “Change” by Jeffrey Kottler (Jeffrey Kottler’s “Change” – Chapter 1), and the book is pretty dang good. Every chapter has these elements where I just go “wow”. While Chapter 1 dealt with defining change, and the general process to cement change, Chapter 2 talked about some of the challenges and obstacles that prevent change, compromising our efforts.
For Kottler, he believes that there is often one or more catalysts for change — natural life transitions (age, events), something is broken and needs fixing (but more importantly, that people recognize that it is broken and needs fixing — kind of like personal buy-in to the process), simple boredom trying to get out of a rut, achieving some specific reward, or more often when studying change, a personal crisis. Others he mentions later in the chapter include narratives (like a book or a story that inspires you), brush with mortality, facing a self-deceiving lie, changes in lifestyle, or simply solitude and the time to reflect. But even with those catalysts, Kottler argues that you may not move into the process of change:
Not being excited about change;
Willingness without knowledge of how;
Willingness but negativity (too much work);
Action highs (it feels good to change);
Backsliding;
Maintenance / embedding; and,
Completion (it’s part of you now).
So why don’t people change? Kottler argues that there are hidden benefits to the existing situation that stop you from changing. The “aggressive” personality who destroys relationships with their anger management issues but also likes being able to draw upon the strength and to hide behind it. Or they are just feeling too overwhelmed with the basics to try for anything better. But those benefits come at a cost, and in Kottler’s view, you only get those catalysts when you’re aware that the “hidden benefits” that resist change are less than the obvious costs of staying as you are now.
For me, the aggression example is pretty apt. I know I have a really bad temper, and it destroys everything around it. I used to kind of like giving it free rein, as it made me strong. Stone-cold if I needed to be. But when I went through my five years of “tadpole” status to figure out who I wanted to be, one of the things I chose to half-jettison was my temper. Technically, you can’t jettison it, which is why I said “half-jettison”. It’s still there, it’s still part of me, but I never let it out of its box. Not around people I care about, and generally never at all. Because I know what my triggers look like. I know that I can’t be having drama with loved ones, not like when I was growing up. If people are into drama, they are no longer part of my life. I just don’t allow it into my zone. And if a situation starts heading that way, I exit. I walk away. I know what buttons are part of me, and I know what triggers them. But mostly I know what happens if I let them get pushed too much to the point where my response is no longer a choice. My temper is a fight or flight mechanism, and when I can’t take flight, I will fight. And for me, that’s a scorched earth approach. I want the fight over quick, and the enemy destroyed with no chance of recovery. I will pick, instantly, the most hateful thing I can say, stick the knife in and twist it. Powerful words. Downright deadly, truth be told. But not who I want to be. I don’t want to say those things. Not now, not ever. I don’t want to say them, I don’t want to be responsible for them being said, I don’t want the devastation that they may cause. That’s not an exaggeration.
One time I was involved with someone, it was a confusing situation, and I needed to end it. I was hurt, I was confused, and I was angry. And she was wondering why I wasn’t more upset as we ended things. Looking back, I know that to handle the confusion, I had slipped past my point of no return and was in stone cold mode. And in that moment, I knew what I would / could say, but shouldn’t, and I said it anyway. Simply to hurt her. “Because you don’t mean that much to me.”
Not said in anger, not shouted, not in your face. That’s not how I roll when I’m in cold mode. I just deliver it like a matter-of-fact, totally believable, truth bomb designed to obliterate the person’s soul. It didn’t in this case, thankfully, perhaps because she didn’t really believe me, nor want to, but with the right person, it could have been devastating.
You are likely not convinced, and I don’t like to give too many personal examples that involve other people, not my place to tell their story. So let me give you a different example. Let’s assume I was outside myself, and I was targeting me. The easy target for me is my weight, but that would be too simplistic. A level up from that might be targeting my ego, but again, not really a heavy blow. Professionalism, abilities, whatever — none of those are going to be devastating. No, to be truly devastating, you have to target a vulnerability, an existing weakness that they are already worried about. For me, like most parents, I worry that I’m not a good enough father. That I don’t do enough with him, that I am not engaged enough. So if I was angry with me, that would be my target. A carefully delivered jab to suggest that Jacob would be better off with a better father. An insidious worm that feeds on existing doubt. Not delivered as an attack, but as if it was a nagging worry of mine about me. Attacks are defended, worries and cautions are hard to deflect. And so it would slip by the defenses and land heavily on my psyche. That’s what my temper gives me. A ruthless power that does not discriminate once launched.
I love the strength that came with that power, but all power corrupts, and you can’t wield that power without corruption. I love knowing I have it if needed, I hate knowing I have it at all. So I make sure I never wield it. Ever. I run every time now. It’s who I was before I was a tadpole, and it is who I used to be. Not who I choose to be now. But it was a bitch to defeat and control.
Because as I jettisoned the controls, I had to focus on new techniques to resolve things. I had to also accept that I could choose to leave and lose something — an argument, a fight — even though I knew I could stay and win. And I even choose to leave EARLY, long before the triggers happen, just to be safe. So I lose even more. In other cases, I simply had to cut certain people out of my life, because I couldn’t allow myself to continue to lose in those situations to them — they would just keep coming and sucking the life out of me, destroying what I’m trying to create. The only way to win that game is not to play.
But there were a wealth of things that were stopping me from changing, and it took me almost four years of psyche-bashing and rebuilding to get myself back together, to see a different path forward.
For Kottler, he argues heavily that much of the unwillingness to change is supported by rationalization — I’ll do it later, I can’t stick with it, maybe I don’t need to change it all — and it can be mitigated with greater awareness. He points out though that this won’t work for everyone, particularly those with personality types or even disorders that make them self-sabotaging or non-reflective emotionally. Hard to use self-awareness to help yourself if you’re not self-aware or the message you get isn’t accurate. Obviously, too, severe trauma will mess up your abilities to process, just as it affects all aspects of your life. Coping skills, and improvements to those skills, can help make you “more prepared” to accept the process of change, and Kottler has a long sub-section (pages 34-36) listing ways to help with coping. Things like:
Clearly identifying your values and goals;
Taking care of unfinished business first, so it doesn’t intrude;
Practicing and rehearsing, perhaps in smaller steps or trial runs;
Monitoring internal conditions that might trigger relapse (hunger, stress, etc.)
Figuring out ways to mentally bounce back when (not if!) a relapse happens along the journey; and,
Asking for help when you need it.
My favourite idea from the chapter though talks about false hopes and resolutions that fail (p 37). Basically that you are going to fail. It will happen. You will slip, you will backslide, you will relapse. And you’ll need to restart. With the corollary that not only is it difficult to “start” change, but also equally hard to maintain momentum. Think of all the people who start fitness goals on January 1st and the goal is dead before the month is out. One truth bomb that jumped out at me was:
People tend to overestimate their abilities and underestimate the amount of time and energy it takes to complete a task, especially one that is complex, intractable, and long-standing…It turns out that a number of myths are perpetuated by the self-help industry, that all it takes to change your life is good intentions, positive thinking, self-affirmations, grandiose expectations, and force of will. But as it turns out, it is precisely these illusions and myths that lead people to overestimate what is realistic and possible, dooming them to disappointment and discouragement.
“Just do it” is a nice slogan for Nike, but if you could “just do it”, you would have already done it. In my view, smaller, more attainable goals to start and a strong focus on restarting after a relapse are keys to remaining resilient in the face of the momentum challenge. I’ll close with another truth bomb.
There is no sense going after goals or making changes if, once you reach them, they don’t make much of a difference in the way you feel about yourself, your life, and where you are headed.
I love the quote but I think there is a missing nuance. I have some “goals” on my list, but they won’t do that change…they are more maintenance items to prevent backsliding on previous changes that I want to keep embedded in my life now. Not a big nuance, but one that is important for me to keep mindful of in my goal-setting.
Earlier today, I had a strange experience. I was catching up on people’s posts on Facebook, and I saw a post from a friend who said that she had set aside the weekend for reflection, planning and goal-setting for an upcoming change in her work life. She then asked everyone, “What are your top techniques for setting and effectively reaching your goals?”
My immediate thought was, “Which post on my blog will I send her?” 🙂
That isn’t as arrogant as it might sound, because I’m kind of passionate about goals. I’ve been doing a version of yearly goal- and priority-setting since back in the late ’90s, about the time I turned 30. So I have almost 20 years of decent experience and success in trying different things and figuring out what works for me. Plus over the last 5-10 years, I’ve blogged about my goals and progress regularly. Checking my site, I have 107 posts about goals. But here’s the strange thing. I don’t have hardly any about “how to set goals”.
Sure, I’ve done some informal coaching of others. I’ve had many conversations with a coworker about things like “Getting Things Done”, the “Seinfeld Method”, Harvard studies, etc. And I’ve worked in planning and performance measurement for work for the last 9 years, plus a fair amount of professional exposure to the topic and related fields in the last 20 years, plus formal training here and there. I just had a conversation with a former colleague who is now heading up a unit at another department, and she wanted to pick my brain about the planning world and how to move forward. I’ve even entertained the thought of writing a book about some of it at some point, because most of what I read is, well, crap.
Okay, that’s a little harsh. I really mean that it’s either too prescriptive or theoretical with no real world testing and application, or it’s way too general to be of much use. I also find that it often confuses goal-setting, objectives, indicators, measurement, and time management. Those are all VERY different things. So I thought it was a great topic for a post. And here we are.
Understanding goal-setting
Almost anyone starting on a new goal-setting exercise is going to trip over advice to set “SMART” goals. The pop advice is to make sure all your goals are:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Timebound
While almost NONE of the books draws the advice back to the king of examples, most having been written by people who weren’t alive when the example took place, everyone knows one of the most infamous “SMART” goals of all time.
I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961
A specific goal (to go to the moon and back), clearly measurable (yes or no, moon or not, safely or not), attainable (welllll, that wasn’t quite true at the time of the speech, now was it?), relevant (set by a new president early in his term), and timely (before the decade is out).
Some more historical experts in the field LOVE that goal. And trot it out as evidence of a perfect goal that was realized.
Except the idea that goals should be SMART is, in my view, one of the worst things you can do, at least when you are SETTING goals. Does anyone really think the goal was moon + safe + 10 years?
Of course it wasn’t. The goal was to go to the moon. That’s all they talked about. That’s also how the idea would have started. “Go to the moon.” Everyone at NASA, everyone in the labs, everyone involved knew the goal — to go to the moon. If they “expanded” on that in their vocabulary, it was simply to go to the moon AND get back.
Goals are not meant to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, or timebound — they’re meant to inspire you. They should even scare you. They should make you want to get out of bed in the morning and you should be able to say on a second’s notice, “What’s my goal? My goal is X”, whatever X is.
What’s the most common goal people set? Weight-loss. What do they do? They say, “I want to lose weight” or if they use the SMART approach, they say, “I want to lose 15 pounds by Easter.” SMART says the second way is better. Specific, measurable, probably attainable although past success says otherwise, relevant, and timebound. Perfect. And they’ll miss the goal. Because losing 15 pounds by Easter isn’t a goal that will inspire most people. For some people, it’s great, but they’re also the ones that don’t have any trouble setting and achieving goals. Which is often because they aimed too low. And SMART encourages you to do that, again and again.
What’s my approach? It actually draws from time-management, which is surprising, I know, after I said most people confuse the various topics, and here I am seeming to do it intentionally.
What are your rocks?
There’s a story about a Harvard business professor teaching his students about time management. He came to class with a glass vase and started filling it full of large rocks. He then asked the class if it was full. They said yes, and then he started filling up the extra space with medium-sized rocks. Then he asked again if it was full, and the class said yes. So he used smaller rocks, and the class said this time tentatively no, it wasn’t full. He then added sand, and finally water. At which point, the vase was truly full. So he asked what this taught them about time management. They said, “No matter how full your schedule is, you can always fit more in?”.
He replied, “No, it teaches you that if you don’t put the big rocks in first, they don’t go in at all.”
So, while the metaphor was about time management, for goal-setting, the question is clear — what are YOUR big rocks? What are the big things that YOU want to accomplish but are afraid you won’t do if you don’t set your sights high?
If I take the weight-loss example above, you can ask the person “Why lose 15 pounds?”. They’ll immediately say because they’ll be (generally) healthier. Really? Cuz they could starve themselves and lose the weight, it wouldn’t make them healthier. Oh, they’ll say that they mean by working out. So ask them why 15 and not 10 or 20? is it a failure if they lose the 15 but don’t feel healthier? or if they only lose 14? or they just turn their fat into muscle? Keep asking them why they want to do it, and eventually they’ll say because they want to be more fit, able to do things, live longer, etc.
I’ll digress for a minute. I love the TV show American Ninja Warrior. I love watching the “average Joe or Jane” take on these obstacles and hit a buzzer. But what I love most about the show? The fact that people of incredibly different body shapes and types can do it. Kacy Catanzaro is 5 feet tall, a little more than a hundred pounds. There are guys on the course that are 18 inches taller than her, and almost double her weight. They’re all incredibly healthy. So it’s not about the exact weight, that’s not the goal. The short-term goal is to hit the buzzer, but the real goal is to be physically fit so they can individually run the course with the body they can create.
Let’s take another health goal instead, where someone says they want to run a 2-hour marathon by the end of the year. SMART, right? Except, well, why? If they hit 2:01, will that be a failure? 2:00:01, a single second off…is that a failure? Again, a great specific goal but if you poke them hard enough, they’ll really say they want to be in better shape, to run faster, to have more stamina at higher speeds, and then they’ll break it down to the nuts and bolts — the 2 hour mark is just a way of measuring it.
Hallelujah! Yes, they have seen the light.
The 2-hour number was a way of measuring success on a goal, as was the 15 pound weight loss. It was a way of measuring a goal, not the goal itself.
With my work in government, the goal might be a healthy population, or a skilled workforce, or combat-ready troops. The GOAL isn’t to have a population with an average BMI of x or longevity of y, or # of troops ready by October. The goal is BIG. It is ASPIRATIONAL. It is possibly UNATTAINABLE.
But BAU doesn’t sell books. SMART does, but it won’t get you closer to your goals. Don’t get me wrong, SMART has its place, but not in goal-setting.
Figuring out your rocks
If you are setting a small set of goals for something specific, you probably already know what they are. Kennedy knew, NASA knew, everyone knew — it was to go to the moon. Heck, even the janitors at NASA knew (a classic story for another time). Or at least you know the “category” they’re in. Work. Health. Relationships. Finances. Whatever your heart can dream, you can set goals for it.
However, for me, that isn’t what I do each year. Instead, I have a long history of setting a LOT of goals and I’ve done a lot of thinking about how to group them so that they inspire me. Or simply so that I can remember and remain committed to them instead of them being simply shelfware that doesn’t help me achieve anything.
That’s often the problem with people’s bucket lists, in a way. The only common thread for them is “things to do before I die”. But would “bungee-jumping” ever be in the same category as “weigh 200 pounds” or “go hunting” or “see the Taj Mahal” or “drive a dogsled”? How would you compare them? Rank them? Choose which one is next? It’s why most people’s bucket lists are theoretical, not actionable.
And for me, the laundry list of priorities is often at the wrong level, often closer to SMART goals than true goals. At one point in my career, I spent a bunch of time trying to harmonize Amartya Sen’s and Mahbub ul Haq’s human development model with Robert Putnam’s approach to social capital, along with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with just a touch of learning approaches and preferences thrown in. I didn’t succeed to my boss’ level of satisfaction at the time, perhaps the goal of doing it was unattainable at the time, but it did start me thinking about various aspects of a person’s life. I may not have succeeded at the work project, but I did come away with thoughts on how to merge a bunch of it with Carl Jung’s approach to archetypes, and the various parts of a person’s personality.
While that sounds very scholarly, what it really means is that I came up with a model that resonates with me. Your mileage may vary, but here’s the model:
I can tell you that there is a LOT going on in that model, and if I ever do write a book about goal-setting, it will be the basis for the first third of the book. Suffice to say for these purposes, I have it grouped around four main aspects of my life:
Blue — the intellectual and cerebral part of my life, including analytical / rational things like being organized, understanding myself, etc.;
Green — this is the emotional side of my life, around things like relationships with family and friends, a sense of belonging, connectedness;
Yellow — this is the more “social side” of things, going beyond the intimacies shared with friends, but also expanding out to things like creativity, etc; and,
Red — the action-oriented, take-charge side of life, for work, health, etc.
It was just a way to let me keep track of all areas of my life and make sure I wasn’t “neglecting” an area simply because I didn’t want to spend time on it. Take health for example. I’m mostly a slug. I’ve love to be the type to do the American Ninja Warrior course, but it hasn’t motivated me enough to take concrete action. Partly as I’m more naturally drawn to “blue” intellectual goals. I’ll talk a bit more below about resistance to change, but suffice it to say that I look at all four areas for one specific reason.
Balance.
Everybody uses the generic phrase about work/life balance, but do they have any idea what that means? In its purest form, you would spend 12 hours at work and 12 hours doing “life” things. Sooo, you’re saying work isn’t part of your life? You get no satisfaction from work, it’s just a prison that you do to pay for the rest? I think I have a new priority for you — it’s called get a better job you don’t hate. What people really mean in that sense is something like making time for family and making sure they aren’t either always at work, or too tired when they come home that they can’t “unplug”. That’s not what I mean by balance. Another way people interpret it is to say “Family comes first”. Well, okay, you’ve got your priority. Perfect. So, you’re going to quit your job and stay home with the family, right? Cuz family comes first. And the phrases are so vague that they might as well be as useless as “Lean In” as a piece of advice (just the slogan, not the sub-parts, some of which are decent).
The real goal that everyone can probably get behind is a bit more Zen. It is to be in the moment whether you are at work or at home or working out. To commit to what you are doing RIGHT THEN, and not always thinking of work or worrying about your finances or whatever else that pulls you out of the moment. What often pulls people out is thinking, “Oh, I’m not doing X, which is really important, and I’m not making progress on it, so I should be doing that instead.”
It’s a popular feeling, particularly for those who are new to setting goals. It makes them think it is all or nothing. If they are working out, they’re going to do it EVERY SINGLE DAY FOR A YEAR! YEAH! With typical and expected results of quitting the first time they miss a day.
However, if you use the “balanced” approach that I use, you might have the same feeling I get…which is that I have blue goals, green goals, yellow goals, and red goals (I try to keep the overall GOAL-SETTING somewhat balanced at least in the sense that I have some of each). So if I happen to be doing something “yellow” at that moment, I don’t suddenly panic that I’m not doing a blue, green or red goal. You have all four in your personality, and if you have goals in all four, you get to embrace all four at different times. And just as you can have too much of a good thing, having too much of one colour isn’t great either (hence the person who looks like a workaholic because they put all their “goals” in the red column around employment and work, and didn’t give themselves permission or support to do some blue, green or yellow things too).
I posted the links above, but the basic “sub-headings” that will likely work for most people are:
Blue / Rational
Learning
Self-confidence, calm
Organizing
Green / Emotional
Family and friend (intimacy)
Emotional intelligence
Spiritualism
Social connections
Yellow / Social
Creativity
Social friendships (light)
Red / Action-oriented
Employment/career
Health
Finances
Housing
What does goal-setting look like?
Initial stages of goal-setting should look a lot like simple brain-storming. No ideas are off the table. Take for example those 13 “sub-headings” above and ask yourself, “What could I consider as a goal for myself for _____?”
Maybe for creativity you have always wanted to write an opera. Great, put it down. Are you going to do it? Maybe, maybe not. But the act of goal-setting isn’t about being rational, it’s about dreaming big. Scare yourself if you can. Don’t say too many vague things, dream big. Don’t say you want to travel, say you want to visit every continent in the same year. An around-the-world tour. Heck, if you want, say you want to go to the moon. At least for now, there are no obstacles. You’re just dreaming.
So let’s say you’ve done that, what’s next? Well, believe it or not, you just wrote down a list of possible rocks. Some are big, some are small, some are just right for Goldilocks. Now group them in their categories and look at them again. At this stage, I want you to come up with three blue goals, three green, three yellow, and three red. But not just any three, or even the three most important.
I want:
One that you think you can do in a year;
One that you think you can do in three years; and,
One that you think is scary as heck, but if you could achieve THAT, well, dang, that would be something;
I have to digress for a minute and talk about terminology semantics. For most people, these are truly goals. Maybe not worded the best, but the list was “goals” — things you wanted to achieve. For me, that’s not entirely true. I think your goal was do more “blue” things or more “green” things or more “yellow” things or more “red” because you felt that area of your life was in some sort of deficit or at least stagnating.
But “Be more blue” doesn’t really have the same ring as “Going to the moon”, now does it?
Yet technically those were your goals, more red / blue / green / yellow or all of the above, and they can stay that way for a bit longer (big and generic colour commitments). Which then makes the “sub-goals” really something else — objectives. This is why I asked you to think of one you can do in a year, 3 years, or a lifetime. And so I’m telling you that I’m going to talk about them as “objectives” from here on out instead of “goals”, as I can almost guarantee the terminology is a bit off from normal usage.
Almost time to be SMART
Now for each of those, I want you to try rewording them slightly, not quite “SMART” so much as SAR. Forget measurable and timebound for the moment.
If you did true brain-storming, your three objectives per colour are likely to be of different levels of prevision i.e. not all three are equally “SPECIFIC”. They might be either way though — too narrow (lose 15 pounds) or too general (sing more). Try and be a bit more specific, but generally avoid any numbers (I’ll explain why shortly).
At this point, you should have 12 “objectives” (formerly goals or sub-goals), and they are likely specific. Now, ask yourself a really difficult question…are they relevant to you?
This is perhaps the most difficult of all, and there is no room here to explain why. That would take up a whole psychology textbook. So I’ll give you an example. Lots of people are culturally/socially indoctrinated to think that their life will be “right” if they have a spouse, house, picket fence, 2.2 children, and a dog.
For me, the biggest question mark I had for a long time was about children. I was single when I started making my goals, and kind of messed up for knowing what I wanted or not. And I was ambivalent about having a child. Kind of, “Well, if it happens, it happens, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t”. At least, that’s what I told myself. Because I was single. And male. So having a kid on my own was a bit of a complicated world. I kind of needed a partner, and not just because I didn’t think I would make a good single parent, but just pure logistics. It wasn’t like adoption agencies were lining up to give kids to single males. Hell, to be blunt, I didn’t even think it was really possible at the time. So since I couldn’t do it on my own, I just said, “Well, that’s off the table, no need to figure anything out.” Except it wasn’t true. I actually knew that I DID want kids. Not alone, but if I was with someone and they were willing, then I wanted them. Wholeheartedly.
But the house, fence, and a dog were kind of just scripts that I was following. Parts of the normal stereotypical life. I like dogs, but I don’t want to own one, or more accurately, I don’t want to look after one. There is a very long list of things I looked at over the course of five years before I started to really understand not only who I was but what I wanted out of life.
So, relevance is a huge weedwhacker for goals. Are they truly YOUR goals, manifestations that resonate deep within your soul, or are they just things you think you should do? Or things your spouse or children or parents or friends think you should do? Do you really want to attend more parties even though you generally hate them? Or do you just think it would be cool to be the type of person who went to a lot of parties?
The goals have to be yours, and yours alone. Or they aren’t worth writing down because you’ll never commit to them.
Last but not least, it’s time for a reality check. You did a basic one when you applied the 1, 3 and lifetime criteria to them, but now it is time to be harsh with yourself.
You do not have infinite time nor infinite resources. Can you REALLY do it? The harsh reality is we have lives already in progress. We’re also not newborn babies with our whole lives in front of us. We’ve made choices, we’re living with the outcomes now. I love space, but deciding to become an astronaut at age 50 is a bit outside of reality. However, nothing stops me from getting into astronomy. Or if I really wanted to, I could try saving up money for a SpaceX voyage when I’m old and grey.
Let’s be clear though…I’m not saying to jettison the goal, I’m asking if you can tweak it to make it slightly more attainable. Realistic.
Putting the M and T back in SMART
I asked you above not to worry about measurement or time because those aren’t about goals or objectives. They are about indicators.
Now we take those specific, attainable and relevant goals and ask ourselves, “How will I measure them? How will I know if/when I’ve achieved it?”.
Kennedy knew what the real goal was — to dominate space. And the objective was to go to the moon and return safely. But the measurement and time was to do it (yes/no) and to do it in a specific timeframe (within the decade). Those aren’t the goal itself, it’s measuring how we’ll know if we achieved the objective or not.
You might even have several indicators. Maybe the marathoner wants to have improved stamina and speed as their goal (a little low, but workable), their objective is a fast marathon time, and their indicators are more than one marathon, improved times, and perhaps even to break the 2 hour mark. The weight loss person wants improved fitness, their objectives are healthier food choices and working out, and their indicators are signs of weight-loss and/or BMI. Not perfect examples, but you get the idea.
Working backwards
Most people stop at this point. They have goals, they have objectives, and they have their indicators. All done, right? Not necessarily. You *can* stop here, but it increases the likelihood of failure.
There’s actually four other things to consider.
First, your goals might still be the equivalent of “more red” or “more blue”. Not very inspiring. But you know what your three blue goals are now, you have them narrowed down, with smart objectives and indicators. Which should help you to work backwards to think again about the overall “goal” level. If for blue, for example, you had learn a new language, take a course, and set your goals (i.e. the exercise you’re doing), maybe your “goal” could be something like “Challenge your mind”. It’s a little soft, but you get the idea. What does each of your objectives have in common that you could explain to someone else, “Yes my blue goal is X, my objectives are Y1, Y2, Y3, and my indicators are Z1A, Z1B, Z2A, Z2B, Z3A, Z3B” and it would make sense to them. Why is that important?
Because if you can explain it to someone else in a coherent fashion, you can explain it to yourself. It’s obvious how X, Y, and Z fit together. It’s (almost) a full plan.
Second, time for the kicker. You have 4 or 5 goals now, with 9-12 objectives. Which ones are your priorities?
That’s right. You may have a nice rockpile of 12 objectives (or old sub-goals), but it’s time to know, “What are your rocks that are going into the vase?” Because you likely can’t fit them all in. You essentially have two choices now:
Cut the number down to a smaller set of priorities for this year; or,
Implement tiered progress.
There’s a popular saying that life is about the journey, not the destination, and most of the time, we forget that idea when we talk about goals. The act of planning for your goals is really important, but when you’re done, the plan isn’t as important as the process you went through to get there. Tiered progress lets you keep all of your goals, but recognizes that you cannot meet all of them simultaneously. And, so, you go back to your indicators and say, for example, your marathon time is 2h15 right now. Tier 1 progress would be if you get it below 2h12. Tier 2 is to get it to say 2h07. And tier 3 would be 2h00. I started this approach this year, but I did it because I set a LOT of goals, and often then feel like I’m really slacking because I’ll miss most of them. Of course I do, there’s 50-odd goals some years. I was bound to miss most. But by implementing “tiers”, I give myself permission to celebrate progress towards a goal, even if I can’t reach full attainment this year for every goal, for whatever reason. I can aim for tier 1 on all of them (progress), rather than full for all.
I have just finished reading Jeffrey Kottler’s “Change” and I love his chapters that talk about resisting change. Someone may want to lose 15 pounds, but they don’t because their psyche has stopgaps in the way that resist change. Like for example being heavy has given them an excuse not to go running with their neighbour, or perhaps reinforces a belief that they’re single because they’re fat, and if they lose the weight, and they still don’t go running or find a date, then their excuse is gone and they have to accept that they’re too lazy to run or hate their neighbour, or that they’re single because of a fear of intimacy or being vulnerable. Often our goals tell us things that we want to change but haven’t been able to do without a conscious concerted effort, which means full attainment is not necessarily likely in the first attempt. Which is okay. Progress lies in the attempt, not only in the full achievement, grasshopper.
Your third step, and probably just as important as your “relevance” test above, is to ask yourself, “Why might I not try as hard as I think I should?”. If you want, think of it as cataloging your likely factors for failure. It’s one of the reasons why some addiction programs suggest going through it while single i.e. avoiding relationships because one of the biggest resistors of change are anchors to the past, including those in your previous life who saw you in a certain way. In some ways, their continued presence can be a reminder of past failures, and it isn’t uncommon for addicts to use them as an excuse to relapse…”Oh, my family / parents / wife / brother / sister / friends think I am just an addict, so I might as well just prove them right.” It’s not real, it’s just rationalization, but resistors exist in a lot of rationalizations. They allow you to avoid doing the hard work to change, which is often the trigger for setting goals — wanting to rationally commit to a new course of action to achieve something you wouldn’t achieve otherwise. And hopefully will identify some mitigation factors for the factors that might stop you from progressing.
Last but not least, you can think about some time management aspects. You know how big your vase is, how are you going to arrange your rocks each day? For some people, they want to write, and they do it on the bus or train on the way to work. Or at break. Or they get up an hour before their kids. Or they have their spouse or friend look after the kids two nights a week, while they have “writing time”. Lots of specialized texts will turn this into habits, i.e. write everyday at lunch for a month and it will become a habit. I prefer the Seinfeld method, which really is doubtful that it had anything to do with Seinfeld (he disputes it himself), but the idea is that you try to do things every day and you just track whether or not you do them. Keeping a “streak” alive. But if you miss a day, that’s okay. It happens. You start the next streak. Your goal is the longest chain / streak you can do. For those who are treating it like creating a habit (like working out every day), as soon as they miss a day, they bust. The Seinfeld method says, “You know you’re going to bust eventually, so don’t use that as an excuse to quit. Start again.” Not unlike sobriety for alcoholics. Day by day, count the days. If you relapse, you’re not done. You just start over.
A more positive image is likely that of “Number of days without a workplace accident”. They know accidents happen eventually, but the goal is to see how long they can go without one and build awareness. If it happens, or more accurately, when it happens, that doesn’t mean they say “Screw it, let them happen all the time now.” It just means that streak ended, and you start a new one.
I am going to end on another quote from Kennedy as I think it shows the true “breadth” of goal-setting, as it starts to show the degree of planning that goes into one of the most famous goals ever publicly announced:
For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding…
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too…
But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun–almost as hot as it is here today–and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out–then we must be bold.
John F. Kennedy, speech to Rice University, September 12, 1962
Computers are a major part of my life. I don’t mean this in the way that normal popular media overviews talk about technology infiltrating our lives, I mean computers themselves as a choice. I have been active with computers since grade 10 (1983/84) and particularly so once I bought my first PC back in ’87. I use it for entertainment, I learn with it, I keep myself organized with it. It’s an active tool in my life. And recently, I realized that when it doesn’t work, it affects me more than it would most people because of that degree of integration.
I’ll start first with the integration. Looking back at my 2017 goals, I had eleven blue ones. The first three were reading goals, which at first glance might seem non-computer related, but it is actually doubly so. I not only read on a digital e-reader so I stop filling up my house with paper books, but I also then like to blog about them. Could I do the first with just paper? Yes, but that’s not the question. The question is if I use computers to do them the way I do, and yes I do. No computer, and my two reading goals are much harder (no ebooks to read, have to go to the library or bookstores, extra “friction” in the transaction to use the economic vernacular) and the posting of reviews is impossible. I also have goals around posting TV reviews, digital photography, and an online learning course. Call it six out of eleven that require the computer. For my goals around organizing and regular backups, that’s another two that are truly “digitally enabled”, if not “digitally required”. Leaving three — astronomy, finance organization, and my honey-do list — that are not tied to computers directly, although I do use a computer to help with all three. Call it seven overall that are computer dependent, and another four that are enabled.
For my green goals, one of the three is computer-dependent, one is enabled, and one is not. For the yellow goals, eight require the computer (four are writing, so could theoretically be done on a typewriter I suppose), and while the other two do not (cooking, baking), they are enabled with web-based recipes and blogging about it. For my five red goals, none of them are computer-dependent, but I do use a computer for keeping track of my progress (weak attribution).
In summary then, I have a total of 16 goals out of 29 that require a computer. No computer, and those goals are almost impossible to achieve. Could I do them a different way? Sure, for some, but likely not. It isn’t so much that they are technically “dependent” so much as that they are so entwined with computers that doing them any other way drastically alters the approach to one that I wouldn’t likely do. Of the remaining 13 goals that are not computer dependent, 8-10 are still definitely enabled.
What does that mean? It means when I have a computer problem, it’s major. It’s not “oops, my computer died, time to get on with my life”, it’s close to causing a mental health breakdown.
If you read that as “he’s too dependent on computers, blah blah blah”, you might as well stop reading now as you’re never going to understand what I’m talking about. I’m serious. That’s not what I said, and so if it’s what you got out of the first few paragraphs, that’s just your own bias and ignorance showing through. Go look at cat pictures, you’ll be happier.
Do I spend time doing other things? Of course, I do have a life outside computers. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about my goals. The “big” goals I’ve been setting for myself since the late ’90s, almost 20 years now. Each year, I spend a bit of time at the end of the calendar year reviewing my progress in the last year and setting my goals for the new year. It is a huge part of how I define myself, my self-identity. I don’t care if others set goals, it’s not a normative thing, but for me, not setting goals would be like asking me to stop being me. I don’t know who I am without my annual “check-in”, it keeps me, well, me.
In some ways it is the belief that an unexamined life isn’t worth living, taken to a bit of an extreme, and hardly original. In other ways it is about my stopping myself from drifting too far from my core beliefs, my sense of self, my values, my commitment to some form of self-actualization to keep improving.
For some people, that’s a physical goal like running a marathon. For others it might be a social goal, like performing stand-up or public speaking. Others might be about trips, parenting, a new job, a new skill, etc.
For me, most of my goals are cerebral, and as I said above, digitally enabled if not outright digitally entwined. If I don’t have my computer working, all of my goals STOP. A crashing, screeching, stomach-heaving stop.
I had never thought of it quite this way before, until my most recent crash. I have a pretty good setup for what I need / want to do, but I am regularly pushing my hardware to the limits in certain ways. And so when one drive crashed, I have backups and things in place to deal with that issue. Or at least I thought I did. More on that in a minute.
First let’s talk about the crash.
I have two hard drives in my system, both Western Digital, one black and one red (it’s a series of drives put out by WD), both with 1 TB sizes. C drive is my Windows operating system, M is my data drive. The nice part of these different series is that they are designed to run 24/7, something a lot of drives can’t do. And I have no patience for reboots, startups, etc., so my system is in some form of “on” pretty much continuously. 24/7, 7 days a week, close to 52 weeks a year. Sure, if I’m out of town, I’ll power down, but most of the time I don’t when it’s just through the week.
Awhile back I accepted the upgrade to Windows 10, and because I do a few things outside the norm, that’s presented a few problems. Things like the way in which it migrated Homegroups, or that I had an old parallel printer attached that I wanted to keep using. The printer is 20 years old, not surprising that it didn’t handle the upgrade well, but it’s a shame — that HP LaserJet 4L was a workhorse that did everything I needed it to do, just not super fast. I’ve had it repaired twice over the years, shame to have to jettison it. But Win10 doesn’t play nice with old hardware.
And two Tuesdays ago, my system ran the weekly update and installed the dreaded Creators Update. I am generally okay with Windows approach to upgrades, a cost of doing business, and I’m not one of the ones who gets too fussed about the fact that sometimes it totally fraks my Homegroup settings. I have two machines running Win 10 (mine and my wife’s), plus a laptop running Win8, and most of the time I can get them to work. Then a major update comes in, looks at the setup and goes batshit crazy resetting things to defaults. Whatever. Annoying, but it was a free upgrade, so there’s some pain that comes with it. (I’ll talk about alternatives later, but suffice it to say, there isn’t a viable one, so you dance with the one that brought ‘ya).
CU ran, my system seemed okay initially, and then Wednesday night was acting a bit sluggish. Thursday it was downright piggish, but I didn’t really have time to figure it out. I eventually did a complete reboot late Thursday night, and all hell broke loose.
My system should complete the initial boot in about 60 seconds, max of about 2 minutes to desktop loading. This time? 8 minutes to complete the boot, and it ran a full DSKCHK on my C or M drive for some reason. 22 minutes to fully load my desktop. WTF?
Okay, it finally booted, let’s run some diagnostics. Nope.
Umm, okay, let’s surf the internet and see if this is a CU-related problem. Nope.
Any program? Nope.
The system would not run anything. It acted like it wanted to, it really did, but it just wouldn’t. Weird.
Now, just for fun, this was a REALLY bad time for it to happen. I had volunteered (aka been guilt-recruited) into being the coordinator for the RASC star party for that weekend. I needed a few files that were on my system, plus, you know, a working system to send out the announcements, track replies, check weather maps, etc. I have a laptop to cover off most of that, but I still needed some files off the drive that I had received that week, and not a lot of time to play without them.
I was too tired to figure it out Thursday night, so I went to bed and figured I’d work it out Friday morning. With the upgrade to Windows 10, they finally put in place one of the biggest software developments of the last twenty years. If your phone gets messed up, you can press a series of keys and reset it back to the default bios and settings, essentially wiping everything. Same for your tablet. Just about every phone or tablet now have a “reset” option built into the system…while some people think this was a feature given to users, it’s really a boon for tech support. If you screw things up so bad that they can’t undo it easily, they just reset it. Windows didn’t have that functionality. If Windows (or DOS before it) got screwed up, they basically had to wipe the disk and reinstall from external media. With the phones and tablets, this “reset” is built in, no external media required, and Windows 10 has the same capability. You actually have three options:
Wipe the disk entirely and reinstall from an external source (the old way — you lose everything);
Wipe the installation and data, and reinstall from the built-in version (like a tablet or phone, again losing everything); or,
Wipe just the installation, keep the data, and reinstall from the built-in version.
I have already done option 3 once in the past, and it works like a charm. It still has to install some updates, but that’s fine. It took about an hour last time, so I started first thing Friday morning, around 6:30 a.m. I figured I’d be done before I left for work.
Except it was giving me no end of trouble just to start the process. It was like I wasn’t “fully booted”. Eventually I tricked it into running, it started, and I thought it was good to go. I started getting ready for work, came back 10 minutes later, and now it had advanced to a second menu. It hadn’t been doing it, it was just taking that long to bring up the second option. Wow.
Okay, chose that, and waited. About another 7 or 8 minutes. Chose another option on that menu. Finally, it was good to go.
About two hours after starting, it was still only about 20% installed. I had a light schedule at work, I really wanted this fixed and running again, so I checked with my boss and she said no problem for staying home. Okay, my deck was cleared, even if it made a friend laugh that I was the only person he knew who would take a day off work to install a new operating system. More on that later, but it’s a harbinger of truth.
Finally, just after ten, it said, “Done!”, and I thought, “Finally!”. Except it wasn’t.
It was done the PREPARATION process, not the installation. Now it could start the install. WTF????
Okay, late afternoon, and the system is finally finished the re-install. Whew.
I reboot. It is EXACTLY the same as before the install. 8 minutes to finish initial boot, 22 for full desktop. And again, nothing wants to run.
Time for Level II intervention
At this point, I’ve exhausted my level I knowledge on how to fix it, and I’ve been actively searching online with my laptop and tablets to try and diagnose the problem. I’ve also started doing contingency planning for the star party, and managed to cobble together what I needed. Not everything I wanted or had planned, but enough to handle the announcement. That crisis was averted, although not without some brain cell casualities.
But the level II intervention is starting to look problematic. It isn’t a problem with my Windows, it isn’t the O/S upgrade, it is my hard drive. Likely just my C drive for operations, but I’m suspicious of my M drive. It doesn’t seem to be responding, and I can’t figure out why…my windows problem and the data drive problem shouldn’t be related. Stay calm, stay calm, stay calm.
Because while I’ve been going through all this, I realized a horrible truth. My backups are only partially intact. 1TB of data and I’m not as safe as I thought I was:
My “Documents” folder, which has some 17GB of data going back to 1993, is complete. I might be missing a small file or two, but nothing of consequence;
My “Music” folder is 176GB of files, and I initially think it is completely safe…except it isn’t, not exactly. I haven’t lost any files, that part is clear, everything is where it should be, or if it isn’t, it’s in iTunes and Google, and I can redownload it. Except then I have a small seizure and realize that I spent a good part of my spring completely re-organizing all my files. Stuff that was all over the place between iTunes and general Music folders had been completely resorted, and I cut the cord from Apple Music’s shady file management practices (Averting disaster with my music files). But is my backup before or after all that work? I can’t be sure, because I can’t SEE MY FILES! A potentially really annoying blow, but well, if I had to redo it, so be it…a first large blow from the original crash issue, but not crazy time yet;
My “Pictures” folder has three main sub-areas — “Current” pictures which has 9GB of data in it, and is mostly this year. I was worried that I had lost some stuff that had been uploaded to my drive from my phone and tablet, not yet sorted or processed, and not fully backed up yet from the previous time. It’s a gap, but well, that happens. A second blow, and a bit more painful — with actual loss of some stuff for Jacob including his birthday party and end of year at school. A few other things, but nothing life-shattering. For pictures that are “Done”, there’s another 355GB of data in there of photos and videos. Almost entirely backed up in more than one place, all good. Except then I realized that I just spent a lot of time reorganizing my astronomy photos. Which are now in the wrong directory, unsorted. Nothing huge lost, but a small loss, if I can’t access. Non-Current is another 165GB of files, but those are fully backed up. Haven’t changed in the last three backups, I’m good to go there.
Applications is the e-downloads of all the programs I have installed, since most have moved away from “CD” installations, and that is not an insignificant set of files — 16.5 GB of files. But again, all backed up. I had them better sorted in another version that I don’t think made it into the backup yet, but again, mostly white noise.
Clipart is another directory of little concern — I have two or three clipart collections gleaned over the years when they were on sale or I needed a specific set of sub-files for something, but they’re fully backed up for the 10GB of data they represent.
So at this point, I’m feeling a bit antsy about my current install, but not terrified. I have almost everything, or at least so I think, and if I’m missing a few things, it will teach me to be more hyper vigilant with my backups. I don’t know that I’ve got two more blows coming.
Calling in the big techies
Saturday morning had me at the computer shop where I bought my PC, and I think that mostly what I have is a blown HD for Windows and I just need to fix that, but in the meantime, I’ll remove my data drive and be good to go. The tech pulls the first drive, and it doesn’t show up on their test machine. It just won’t read it. It doesn’t give an error, it just never completes. Weird, but no problem, that must be the Windows drive that is kaput.
Try the other drive, nope, THAT one is the Windows drive. The one that isn’t reading is my data drive. Somehow, they’re both fried. It’s not a malware issue, not a simple tech issue, the two drives are NOT working. And my simple plan to yank out the HD is dead in the water.
I decide to focus on the hardware, get myself going with an external drive bay with the data drive so I can work on it separately, close up the old box in anticipation of future repairs, and head on out. Over to another computer shop that sells last-generation tech. I can’t afford the premium machine that I now want and need, at least not new, but a fully refurbished PC with two HDs, decent graphics card (suitable for gaming if I need it, but I only need the video processor for photograph processing), and an i7 configuration that I’ve wanted for about four years and couldn’t justify. All boxed up by mid-afternoon, working by suppertime, and then I have to break to go to the star party.
A blow out of nowhere
I get back later that night, and of course, most of the time I’ve been out, my mind has been on the data drive. What’s missing? What’s missing? What’s missing? How bad am I screwed from the backups? I think it is just some photos, and even then, not all of them. I might have some other options. But I want to try the drive again.
I’m working on it late at night, and I suddenly realize that there is something missing. My book. My HR guide. While you might think I should have realized that first, I didn’t. Because most of it is online already, and versions exist in the cloud for other types of backup. But over the last week, I’ve spent a lot of time learning to format with a template that a super online friend gave me, and I’ve integrated my cover. I can recreate all of it, that’s not an issue. It’s that all the editing, rewriting, tweaking, and layout options that I’ve been doing for a week are gone.
I’m not expecting the blow that comes with it. So much of my personal identity is tied to my HR guide, I feel the loss like a punch to the gut. Yes, I can fix it. Yes, I can redo it. But it’s a second blow after the potentially lost music setup, and twice the size. Plus I feel really stupid.
Separate from the lost work, how can I not have backed it up immediately? How can I not have realized immediately? Rule #1 of any writer is to back up your work in progress (WiP). What kind of worthless piece of sh** doesn’t make a copy of their WiP?
Kind of going back to the early paragraphs above, I know that I’m digitally entwined for my goals. I know how to do proper backups. And here I am taking hits that are totally preventable. Stupid ones. Ones that cut to the core of my self-esteem.
I also know that it’s late at night, I’m exhausted from dealing with it for two days without a solution, and when that happens, I go into mental self-mutilation mode. I am never harsher than when I’m judging myself, and this is a perfect storm that has been brewing for two days.
I try to lock it down and keep working, when I should have stepped back, blew it off and relaxed. And then another blow hits.
I am checking backups, preparing for my reinstall to the new machine, and I realize the data on my Ebooks looks ominous. It’s fairly recent, should be fine, and up until now, I’ve not been worried about it. My ebook collection is rather static. A few files here or there might be missing, but nothing I can’t redownload from Amazon or the library. No issues, I thought.
But as I move from the music files potentially missing all the reorg work, I touch on the ebook directory and see a whole series of folders that SHOULD NOT BE THERE. I re-organized them all. And then deleted the old ones. There should be seven directories, and I’m seeing at least 30. Doesn’t sound like much, as I know the files are fine, but I’m staring at potentially hundreds of lost hours of reorganization. Gone. I didn’t do a new backup because, well, the files weren’t new. I had no new content, I just sorted them differently. I would have caught the backup in the next full mode, but I was another two weeks from that. And the differentials wouldn’t catch that type of change unless I triggered it manually. Which I hadn’t.
I crashed. Mentally. Physically. I felt like a complete and utter waste of skin. Lost photos of my son. Lost work on my music and ebook collections, potentially well over a hundred hours of work. And my work in progress, gone.
If I am supposedly a planner, I’m the stupidest one on the planet. I went to bed and glared at the ceiling for two hours. I was so frustrated, so empty, I wanted to scream. I slept, finally, but not well.
Starting the rebuild
I couldn’t change what “might” be the problem, I just had to triage the situation and assess the battle damage. I separated my mental energy into two halves — the first half started working on re-building from what I have backed up on two external hard drives plus my network-attached storage (yes, I have the tools, I just didn’t use them properly, f***ing idiot that I am).
So it might sound simple to just copy those back over, and each of them are indeed full copies — I don’t do proprietary format / encrypted / compressed backups. I do full copies of the files, fully browsable and active. Missing a file? Just copy it back. No muss, no fuss. Back when storage was expensive, those other formats were fine, but you also run the risk that a couple of corrupted bytes or so can ruin your whole backup. It’s slower, but copies are the only way to fly. But with the reorgs, different dates for backups, etc., it took a bit to figure out which versions to use.
The Documents folder was fine, as was Clipart. Applications is a bit disorganized, something I forgot I had already fixed one afternoon, but won’t kill me. My Pictures folder is a hit/miss proposition, mostly as I’ve lost a lot of organizing work on my astrophotos, but I have what I need in the cloud if I want to redownload at some point from SmugMug. And worst case scenario, I can redo the astro sort. I get a really pleasant surprise on my Music folders — the reorg has been backed up in April to the network. I thought I did some of the reorg in May, but apparently I was done before I triggered a backup on April 24th. Whew. And a partial surprise on ebooks. I ran a backup in May, and once I see the date, I vaguely remembering triggering it because I was about to try something big and wanted a quick restore option. And I stored it in a weird place as it was “temporary”. But it has almost all of my reorg work there. So I’m feeling like I can handle what’s been loss. My book can be redone, I can finish the ebooks, I can use the missing photos as a reminder to be more vigilant in my backups.
I still feel like an idiot though, because that recovery isn’t solving my problem. My drive shouldn’t be doing what it’s doing, and I should be able to fix it. Which is where the other half of my mental energy is focusing its time.
You see, the data drive doesn’t “crash”, it is just REALLY REALLY REALLY slow. Like tortoise slow. I download some trial software to start my deep level scans, and it starts to find stuff. Windows itself times out, but the deep level scan doesn’t. It can “see” the structure and even lets me recover some files. One of the first things I try for is my work in progress. My HR guide. I was up to version 3, and while I can’t quite get that, I get a decent copy of version 2. Or at least, a “version” of version 2, if not the final version before I switched to v3. One of the many saves I did. Not great, but hey, it’s not nothing either. And is promising. I buy the full version, and I’m disappointed with the final result. Once you get through the deep scan, which takes about 15 hours, the program lets you “save” the info so you can then just reload it later without doing a rescan. Except it won’t reload the saved scan. And once it finishes the scan, it won’t actually recover the files…they all come up, but with zero size. Even the ones it ALREADY found. I’m ticked, and disappointed, but honestly, it did find some worthwhile files, so I can’t fault it completely.
I do some more online searching, and I like the looks of a second program. I download it, pay the freight, and start it running. Very similar interface and operations, and 12 hours later, it shows me what looks like a full hard drive directory. What the heck…I tell it to recover everything to my external drive, and press “GO”. It doesn’t get everything, but it sure tried. 21 hours later, and I’ve gotten everything I am going to get.
Including the “lost” photos and videos of my son’s birthday party and final celebration at school. And golfing. And a bunch of other little things that I’m glad I got back.
And my final ebook “structure”, albeit with a few missing files that I had to manually find.
And.
Wait for it.
My work in progress.
My HR guide, version 3, in its entirety. Which I promptly email to myself, upload to two different cloud accounts and copy to a flash drive.
How much did I get back? I’m not really sure. Some files are going to be “bad” when I go to access them. Perhaps a video file that didn’t quite get fully recovered, or a photo that doesn’t want to load. But if it all works, close to 99% is back. And backed up twice at the moment.
What I learned about myself
It seems obvious now, but it was an unintended and unexpected truth bomb to see it in action. I knew that my goals were tightly entwined with a lot of technology, even if the rest of my life isn’t. Again, it’s not about computers being my life, it’s about the fact that I use them as a prerequisite tool when I’m doing my goals. And I know that my approach to self-improvement, as represented by my goal-setting, is a fundamental part of my self-identity, of how I see myself.
I just never realized how A’s link to B and B’s link to C in this instance means that maintaining my self-identity almost requires a functioning computer setup.
Sure, my wife and son will still love me tomorrow if my system crashes. Yes, I’ll still have a house, get up, go to work, all those things. But without the computer enabling me to keep working on my goals, I feel stagnant. And when I feel stagnant, that is not a good thing for my mental health. Ever. I know that.
When I crashed on the Saturday night after the 3-4 “blows” to my ego, I was pretty damn low. I spiraled like a chipmunk chasing a chestnut in a swirling toilet. I have a pretty healthy ego, and self-confidence, partly born out of my past successes in setting goals and achieving them. Or just a narcissistic personality. And although I’ve been a bit more vulnerable this year with a painful job search (#50by50 #04 – Start a new job), I am pretty good at spotting triggers that can cause me to spiral.
A computer crash wasn’t on my spiral caution list. But apparently it should be.
And it means I need to be doubly pro-active in making sure my computer is working in a way that a technical crash doesn’t knock me out. But that’s already taken care of…
Interestingly, a friend noted that I’ve had lots of big computer problems over the years. Which isn’t quite accurate, or perhaps is a bit overly simplistic, but I realized with the comment, part of it is that when it does happen, it affects me more than most. Because my reaction isn’t about the specific problem, it’s about the link it has to my approach to my goals and how it affects those. Making me perhaps more hypersensitive to those problems when they happen.
But it’s not just about my goals
Part of the problem is what I’m trying to do on any given day. Two people on my FB list made the frequent facile comments made by all Apple users (insert smug nasal voice here to say), i.e. “You should get a MAC, there’s never a problem with a MAC”. Both people who made the comment know me pretty well, and likely know that there is zero chance of my ever using a MAC.
Most people know that Apple has less than ten percent of the computer market, and that’s not because 90% of the people just didn’t know Apple was out there. There are a lot of reasons why people don’t buy Apple, and only a handful why they do. The biggest reason most people don’t buy them is price. Three times the cost of a PC, for about comparable power/specifications. Another “separate” issue is really just the same issue by a different name — Apple doesn’t sell “entry-level” computers … you get the big guns at a high price, or nothing. The other reason so many don’t buy Apple is that the software they want isn’t available for a MAC. Literally hundreds of thousands of programs are only available in PC versions. Other people avoid it because MACs aren’t good for gaming. Reasons in favour include stability — the system never crashes. My Vic-20 never crashed either, doesn’t mean I want to use it. People also like to tout that there are no viruses, but actually that’s not true. It’s simply with less than ten percent of the market, there’s no reason for people to target them. But there are viruses that work just as well on MACs as on PCs. However, the real added value of the MAC is really about graphics, CAD, and video processing. It does all three excellently. And if you’re in advertising or communications, it’s a great tool. If not, most people buy medium-power PCs at 2/3 the price and can work with anyone.
But those are the “general” reasons people don’t buy MACs, they’re not really the reasons I will never have one. I wouldn’t even take one for free. I simply don’t like Apple’s approach to systems design.
They are very much a one-size-fits-all model. You cannot customize a MAC, Apple doesn’t want you to do so. Because then it might not work and you’ll want tech support. Which is expensive to provide. They also have maintained tight control on both the hardware and the O/S to force that “any colour you want as long as it’s black” approach. It’s also one of the reasons why the system is so stable. It is so locked down, you can’t possibly tweak anything that will cause instability.
That design is pretty good, more or less, when it comes to tablets. I bought Jacob an iPad, and recommend iPads for less-technology-friendly family members. An iPad will just work, straight out of the box. It won’t let you do anything to force it outside of its comfort zone, it won’t get up and dance for you in the way you want it, but if you press the buttons in the order Apple tells you to do, it will do some pretty great things. You’ll pay for that privilege and security, but it’s a solid product. Similarly for iPhones. I even had one as I wanted a bit more bling at the time, but it didn’t take me long before I was frustrated with default settings and had to jailbreak it.
But when it comes to my PC? No way in hell am I letting someone dictate how I do something or whether I can even tweak it. I’m not a hard-core techie, but I do have some special demands. For example, on a busy day, it’s not uncommon for me to be:
Trying out new-to-the-market organizer programs while synching with my tablet, phone, and online websites;
Editing a video down in size, or changing formats, and using three different programs to match my workflow;
Sorting through hundreds of photos, customizing a few on the fly;
Stacking some astronomy photos in the latest astro program, only available on PC;
Ripping music from my CDs into my system;
Running multiple browser windows simultaneously;
Streaming shows;
Managing multiple cloud accounts for storage, along with backup solutions on the ground;
Managing my ebook library and transferring files to and from my Kindle, Jacob’s Kindle and Andrea’s Kobo; and,
Using Office 365 for Excel, Powerpoint and Word documents.
Of those 10 main functions, I can use a MAC for part of b; c; e; f; g; h; and j. What I can’t do is customize the workflows I would use for each to the way I work — you have to use the MAC’s approach, because it can’t be tweaked. And I can’t do a, d, or i at all, because MAC doesn’t have the software for those, or when they do, it’s several iterations behind the PC version. With the exception of the videos and the photos, almost NOBODY uses a MAC to do those things because the software and the power just isn’t there.
And more importantly? I am often doing 3-5 of those things SIMULTANEOUSLY.
I don’t even like the way iTunes manages music (see above link about avoiding disaster), and it is endemic of the way Apple treats customers. Like stupid sheep that have to be herded in the same direction. You can be creative, but only with your output…not with the design of your system.
I’ll buy iPads for Jacob, and iPhones for Andrea, partly because I know I won’t have to provide any tech support that way. They won’t have the full power that I have available to me to do all the things I want to do, but they also can’t get into too much trouble if the system is locked down as much as Apple likes to do it. I would use Linux before I would go to Apple. About the only exception I would have to that rule is the full MacBook Airs. They are super light and lightyears beyond the sleekness of other manufacturers. If I was in the market for a high-end word processor and web surfing tool for travel or just out and about around town, the price is terrible but the product is perfect for it.
What I really find funny though is when people actually think a MAC would be a viable option for me. It would be like talking to someone with a motorcycle problem with their custom-built Harley, and suggesting to them they wouldn’t have the problems they have if they would just drive a nice reliable but really expensive Vespa scooter. Umm, sure. I’ll get right on that.
Moving forward
As I said, computer functionality and my frustration with it when it drops quality is now on my trigger caution list. I hadn’t viewed it in the same way as other triggers before, but because it was a downstream issue, I didn’t see the link.
I’m testing various new backup tools, and am closing in on a solution. I’ve repurposed my 2TB external drive into a relatively stable / not-much-changes drive, and made my 3TB drive my primary backup. Everything is backed up there twice — one collection of “old” backups, and one copy of the recovered drive. Just in case in future a file turns out to be corrupted and I can’t access it, those two old backups are now permanent copies. I’ll copy them to NAS storage too.
I haven’t figured out quite what to do with some OneDrive and DropBox space that I have. I don’t want it synching in the same way and making another copy, but I do want to “send” them some files for safekeeping.
And I probably won’t talk much about computer problems in the future. Because people think I’m really talking about something “simple” like a glitchy hard drive, when it is more closer to a full on mental meltdown that just happens to be digitally triggered.
When I set my goals for the year (Goals for 2017 – Nudging the needle), I had some astronomy goals in mind. Specifically, under my blue goals, I wanted:
Astronomy: Fixed battery supplies + 1 viewing…I want to attend the RASC annual meeting, do at least 1 viewing at Star Party+Luskville+cottage, but I’ll start with 1 viewing. And work on reading the new RASC guidebook for the year.
and under my yellow goals I had:
Astrophotography: One decent shot…Sure, I would like to do more. Level 2 would likely be a complete set of moon phases (1/4, 1/2, 3/4, full). Level 3 and beyond could be constellations, planets, figuring out the laptop thingy, filters, etc. But I’ll start with the moon. And somewhere in there I have to sort my existing astro photos.
Since my new 50by50 goals kind of overtake the regular 2017 ones, I wanted to keep something in my new goals related to astronomy and I wanted to be realistic. So, in the end, I chose:
Upload my previous astronomy photos to my photo gallery;
I didn’t expect to meet all five of those in one week!
Friday, Saturday and Sunday of this last weekend was the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Annual General Meeting, and because it was Canada Day, the Ottawa Chapter (of which I am a member) had offered to host the meeting. About 150-200 attendees across the three days, I think. Including…dun dun dun…me!
Yes, I registered, and yes, I went. I confess readily that I suck at attending RASC meetings. The local chapter meets the first Friday of the month, and there is a mix of technical and non-technical presentations. But the meeting is way across town, you have to pay for parking, the items I usually care about are only part of the meeting, and the reason I joined RASC is not really what they do. I originally hoped for more “informal training”, as I generally don’t know what I’m doing. I had hoped, I guess, that there would be more offerings on set themes, kind of like groups going out one night at the start of the year where everyone gets to figure out how to work the scope better; then perhaps a night aimed at studying the moon; another aimed at planets, or constellations, or clusters. Not really how it works. And I thought the star parties would lead to more obvious bonding, but honestly, you’re in the dark and you can’t even really see the other person you’re talking to most of the time! Don’t get me wrong, some people find it great; I’m an analytical introvert, and mingling is not one of my big skills. All things being equal, I feel I might as well stay home and watch the YouTube feed. 🙂
But I join every year, I pay my dues, and this year, I decided I would go to the annual meeting. I know! Surprised me too!
I won’t cover everything, but I picked up my registration on day 1, including my extra swag, a nice t-shirt for the conference. I was already wearing my “You have a place in space” shirt from the US Planetary Society; if nothing else, I have the group swag. I checked ou the displays, spoke to a couple of people, and said hi to Tristan working the Focus Scientific desk (more on that later). And then I decided to attend a sesson on “50 years of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) at the Algonquin Radio Observatory”. I know, right, how could I pass up such a stimulating topic? Dr. Brendan Quine was presenting, and I had heard good things about him, but seriously, why would I care about the topic? Cuz it was a title that did not do the presentation justice. He was fun, engaging, and talked about not only the basics of VLBI and it’s foundational work to create GPS, but also the transfer of the ARO from the government to the private sector and what his company (Thoth) was doing these days. Including workable ideas for space elevators. Not a dry technical presentation at all, although some in the room could have likely handled that detail too, and highly entertaining. Plus I found out that the ARO rents rooms out to guests who want to come and hang out i.e. a place where I could do a weekend’s worth of observing in Algonquin Park where the observing + sleeping is the same location, not a hotel somewhere nearby. With reasonable rates. Colour me intrigued, and I might book something for this fall (when the bugs are gone!).
I even attended the BBQ the first night. I normally eschew the social aspects by nature, but if I want to meet people, I kind of have to do it, right? So I did. And ended up sitting at the same table as our local rock star, Gary Boyle. Okay, so there is nothing remotely “rock star” like about Gary, but he is regularly interviewed by CBC, his name is recognizable to anyone in the Canadian astronomy community plus lots of people internationally, and not for nothing, he just had an asteroid named after him. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/astroid-named-after-gary-boyle-1.4075015 Plus I actually managed to talk to someone I had never met before, Heather from Calgary, who helps out with the Executive and is on several sub-committee/task teams. Practically being a social butterfly by my normal standards. And checking off part (a) above…meeting attended!
I left the BBQ and headed to pick up my son Jacob and wife Andrea, then a friend Mike, and we headed out to the star party in Carp. The weather wasn’t looking awesome but it was still a “go”. We arrived just around 8:30 as the sun was still setting, and Ingrid (wife of Attila, owners of the giant scopes) showed us sun spots on her small 4″ scope. We had a lovely sunset, and then we got to see the Moon, and then Jupiter along with four moons eventually as the night got a bit darker. This was the only the second star party I have been at without my own scope, and the first Ottawa one for Mike, Andrea and Jacob. We all walked up and down the row looking through all the different types, seeing the different setups and viewing options. Later, someone had Saturn in their scopes, so we had to look at them all again for that. Easy to see the rings, all good. Then the fireflies arrived. The field next to the viewing area was dancing. And all of that was in about 1 hour, 15 minutes. By which time the clouds were threatening and the bug stuff we were using was NOT working well enough to stay. Great evening, and tick off part (b) of my goal…star party attended!
On Canada Day, I quite enjoyed the presentation on the solar system and current geological controversies from a retired NRCan scientist, highly enjoyable, and again, a topic I normally wouldn’t have chosen to attend if it was part of the monthly series. I even chatted with some more people at lunch — Eriq La Salle, and his friend Taras, plus Mike M of course — and got some really good advice from Taras on viewing areas and my battery problem. I avoided the opportunity to go visit the Hill that night for Canada Day, and hung out at home with my family. Sunday was okay too, nothing big sticks out, although I skipped the actual AGM in the morning and the banquet at night (which apparently was quite good).
I mentioned above that I talked to Tristan, as well as Taras, and most of that conversation was about two things. First, I have a battery problem. I have two PowerTanks to power my telescope, but they are both standard batteries, which means if you over charge them or leave them on charge or let them go too low on charge, they die. Never to work again.
I killed a large PowerTank, I killed a small PowerTank. And the pain of figuring out what to do with them has been a bit paralysing. I sought other people’s opinions and options online, and found out I could try putting the PowerTanks on trickle or DC charge to see if it would help revive them, but reliability would always be an issue even if I get them to work. Or take them apart and replace the core batteries in them. Which has a bunch of labour involved, not very clear instructions, potentially a need for soldering (!), and no guarantees of success, plus the cost of the batteries, maybe $175+ to attempt to fix both? Or I could say screw it and buy one of the almost idiot-proof lithium ion phosphate ones that don’t die if you mess up the charging schedule. But they cost almost $200 and well, I already have these other ones, they just need fixing. Grrr…
Problem solved. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the old ones, maybe offer them to anyone who wants to try to repair them or for parts. In the meantime, I had power for my scope. You know, that scope I haven’t really used in over a year. Tick box (c) above…power issue solved!
The fourth item on my list was to have one decent shot of the moon. I have a range of options to do this, none of which I’ve figured out how to do reliably or consistently:
Smartphone by itself, not very exciting;
Point and shoot by itself, ditto;
DSLR by itself, with a tripod, at least now I’m in the ballpark;
Scope + smartphone over eyepiece — hard to get the phone centred above the eyepiece;
Scope + point and shoot over eyepiece — similar to smartphone problem, but I have this little adapter thing, just never got it to work very well;
Scope + NEXIMAGE 5 + laptop + software — I’ve done this before, even got some shots, but stability was definitely an issue, plus replicating the outcome from shot to shot.
Scope + DSLR with adapter — sure, this is supposed to be easy, but I’ve struggled on anything other than the moon;
Scope + DSLR with adapter + laptop + software — supposed to take a lot of the guesswork out of the previous option but I haven’t figured that one out yet;
Now, I have been treating these like a series of more and more complicated options and / or more reliable and sophisticated photos. Bear in mind that I am using a SCT-style scope on a basic alt-az base…this is NOT designed for sophisticated astrophotography, and honestly I don’t want it to do that…I just want some quick snaps of what I’m seeing, preferably all less than a second or two of elapsed time. I won’t get the beautiful colour shots of other people, but I’m okay with that. More souvenirs of what I saw, records of my viewing, than art.
And I can pretty much eliminate (a) and (b) above. I haven’t tried (c) yet for the DSLR just on a tripod, not consistently, although I do have a photo or two of the Milky Way and constellations. D-H are all increasingly complicated, as I said, and I wasn’t really into it.
Until I went to the conference and saw what Tristan was selling. A Meade smartphone adapter, one with a very simple setup, with good reviews online. For $30. Hell yeah.
It is a simple adapter that attaches itself to your smartphone and puts a little ring adapter over your camera so that you can “mount” it over an eyepiece i.e. the ring holds the top of the 1.25″ eyepiece (without the rubber cup around the EP) and thus allows you to almost centre it perfectly before you even put the EP into the scope. You can see the layout of it here at the FS store: https://focusscientific.com/product_info.php/products_id/1354
And I managed to get a few decent shots…they are not DSLR quality, nor will I be publishing them in an astro magazine, but as a fun addition to my hobby, I was pretty happy. Then I tried to get a “little” fancy, and do some zooms.
I have moon maps, so I can go through some time and label some of the features. But for now, I’m happy with just getting the shots. Part (d) complete…a good shot of the moon.
Which has left me with one simple piece outstanding — to organize my astronomy photos over the last 4 years and upload them to my site. I had them semi-organized at one point when I had a Piwigo sub-site, but never got around to fixing the mess of how they are stored now that I’m with SmugMug. I hadn’t even uploaded them. So that’s fixed too. I have shots of the sun (1), moon (54), Venus (2), Mars (6), Jupiter (5), Saturn (19), Milky Way (8), Constellations (6) and my gear setup (1). Not all photos in those batches are created equal, but it’s the best I have so far. And with that, I’ve completed part (e)…upload astronomy photos to the gallery.
Which means one of the items that I didn’t think I would come close to completing before the fall is done. I’ve re-started my astronomy hobby. Feels good.
Back in April, I blogged about Starting the Official Job Search of 2017 and I added it to the list of “50 things to do before I’m 50” i.e. find and start a new job. I mentioned at the time I started my search that I have been in my current “box” for the last nine years, and while the job changed a bit in there — six years of performance measurement plus special projects and three years of planning — it has been a similar job for most of that time. I thought about leaving before, and I’ve had offers, but either the timing wasn’t right or it wasn’t the right job. And, as I like to be brutally honest on my blog, one of the main reasons I didn’t leave was that I was comfortable.
I had good files that I liked and that I’m good at too, I had a good team, work/life balance was near perfect, and I had bosses that trusted me and gave me autonomy and room to work within my sphere. What was there not to love?
In a word? Variety.
I have a very high threshold/capacity for corporate work. I actually like it most of the time, when most people run the other way. And managing corporate planning files lets you dip your toes into a lot of pools. Public engagement through reporting, ties to policy priorities, budgeting and operational priorities, high-level management and low-level operations, audits, evaluations, risk, business planning. Lots of things that other people hate and that I quite enjoy, if enjoy is the right word. But the planning cycle is, indeed, a cycle which means that it repeats. And while it is a bit or a lot different each year, it is variations on a theme, not true variety per se. And I didn’t realize how much I needed a change until back in April when I started the official search.
Now before I tell you where I went, or even how I got to the decision, I have to confess something. I completely screwed up. Out of arrogance, mainly. But I could have really screwed my career doing what I did, I just happened to luck out near the end.
Here’s the thing. I’m a manager, and I’m not looking for promotion. That means just deployment at level. And I’m a good manager. Separate from my opinion, I entered my job search with three 5.0/5.0 ratings in a row for my formal performance, and nothing less than a 4.0/5.0 since the formal numbers started. I have had job offers with acting promotions, I have been recruited by people in the know who believe I’m good, and my own employees give me higher than average feedback as a manager, usually markedly higher in 90% of the categories. And, even without that, I’ve had other managers seek me out for advice on management issues because they’ve heard from employees i.e. word of mouth that I’m a really good manager. So my employees told other employees who told other employees who told their managers, and their managers have said, “Hey, I was curious if you have time to go for a coffee to talk about something I’m dealing with.” Even if I wasn’t naturally arrogant, I have external evidence to suggest that I’m good. This is not to say I’m not a Grade A whack-a-doodle on a regular basis, but overall, I’m good at my job.
So I went into the job search with high expectations. Which turned out to be way too high. Unreasonably so, apparently.
When I did my last full open-ended job search, it was almost ten years ago and I had nowhere near the experience I have now. I searched pointedly for two weeks and had five offers. One was okay, two were good, and two were great. But five offers. And my network is better now.
My first tactical errorwas in assuming that I would have similar opportunities now, and thus I was quite comfortable telling my boss to go ahead and find my replacement, even though I hadn’t found a job yet. Just because of the environment, and a lack of immediate succession planning for my position in a narrow niche for the type of job (planning is common, but reporting directly to a DG and flying solo as a manager is not), I agreed that I would do overlap with my replacement. This meant that I would leave after they started, and working backwards, we would likely need to find them before I found a new position.
That is NOT the way most people manage their careers, and as per my experience, with good reason.
I also had a small glitch…my french was expired, which means I needed to renew my written and oral before moving on. Written was no trouble, and I was confident with my oral, but there were no guarantees. Plus I got messed around with on my scheduling, and I missed my level on my first try. But the big issue for job searching was that I didn’t want to have conversations too early with my potential targets.
I didn’t want to meet with Jane Manager and say, “Hey, do you have any jobs available?” and have them say, “Here’s one, can you start in two weeks?” because I couldn’t. I not only had to fix my french, but I also had to train my replacement. So I approached a couple of mentors and said, “How do I handle this?”.
Their advice was that as long as I said that I was looking for late Spring, early Summer (i.e. end of June), it would be very clear I wasn’t looking for “now”. So I started my search.
And I perhaps made a second tactical error. Many of my larger network contacts have moved up in the world. Ones that were formerly Directors and Director Generals have now become DGs and ADMs. Of my first eight meetings, I targeted three directors, four DGs, and an ADM. I expected by the time I finished those eight meetings, I would have about 4 offers. I had 0. Add in the next four, and I had approximately 1 real offer, 1 soft offer, and 1 soft interest. But here’s part of the potential tactical issue…DGs and ADMs don’t hire EC-07 managers; managers report to directors. So perhaps some of the people I was talking to weren’t exactly the right level to give me an offer per se so much as information.
Which is partly why I am not sure it is exactly an error. It was more an error of expectation, even though I wasn’t actually asking them for offers. I was in a very formal “environmental scanning” mode, and I was looking for a very specific type of job. In earlier posts, I mentioned that I really like projects. So I wasn’t exactly looking for “here’s an established job for day-to-day duties”, I wanted a large initiative or project. Equally, I wasn’t looking for just any project…I didn’t want to be spinning my wheels or pushing string, it had to be something that was recognized as needing to be done, preferably something that was broken and needed to be fixed, and which people in command actually wanted to be fixed. If that sounds too abstract, let me be precise. I believe our user/security policy in the department is incredibly dysfunctional and broken, and greatly in need of modernization, reorientation, and well, replacement. With my experience with privacy, risk, policy, corporate, IT, etc., I’d even have a pretty good set of skills to bring to the project. And there are lots of people around the department who agree with me on the need. Except for two very important people who like it as is — the Deputy Minister and the DG in charge. There is no desire or traction to make changes. So working on it would be completely like pushing string.
So I was looking for a pretty unique type of job — manager position not executive, problem to be solved, likely corporate, recognized to be fixed, and a desire to fix it. Kind of my dream scenario in some respects. With one extra obvious wrinkle. The position has to be open or about to be open. Of course, if a DG or ADM has a problem to be fixed and there is buy-in to fix it, they probably have already assigned someone to that task. Was that a third tactical error?Looking for something specific in too short a timeframe? I don’t know. An ADM I spoke to later argued it was the main reason, and I don’t doubt his judgement, just not sure that it was the only issue at play.
I met first with an old boss who I have used for mentoring and career advice before, and who is now an ADM. I appreciate his willingness to meet with me, and he gave me a good “practice” run in describing what types of things I was looking for in my search. For example, I described it as wanting to fix things that were broken, and he countered by asking if there were any enabling services in the department that weren’t broken. Good point. Hence the narrowing to “recognized problem and desire to fix said problem”, a much smaller list. He had one big suggestion, but it wasn’t active yet, something to perhaps work towards in the future if it got going — department-wide implementation of the GCDocs system. A major challenge for a department of 25K people and little to no IM practices in sight. And he did advise me that as I talked to others, I would need to narrow my “request” if I wanted to get job offers out of it. I wasn’t worried at that point, I was meeting with people who had offered me jobs before, and I suspect I didn’t listen as strongly as I should have (hence my fourth tactical error, not being pointed enough in my approach).
I also met with a DG who I have worked for and with three times in the past. While the last time wasn’t a rousing success, she has offered me two jobs in the last four years and so I wanted to chat with her, see what was happening. She also has a job that interfaces with a lot of corporate operations, so a good source. I confess I fully expected a job offer of something, and she openly said she had nothing right then (she had just staffed something). She didn’t have a specific idea of a problem to be fixed anywhere, but she did steer me toward a branch that is undergoing massive transformation right now. Not very specific in targeting, but general steerage in that direction. Or perhaps TBS.
Now, I had already known of this branch’s massive change agenda, and to be blunt, most of it left me feeling blah. Not because it wasn’t ambitious, but more so because I kept seeing fuzzy descriptions, template processes, and not a lot of actual strategic governance going on. In a branch known for bogging down in processes. Perhaps not rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, more like giving you a template to report how many deck chairs were still available and giving examples of how the policy on deck chair use needed to be simplified. It looked more like barely contained chaos than a well-run corporate process. And while I could see that as an opportunity too, I didn’t know any of the people involved well enough to want to work for them or to be able to choose which pieces might move and which pieces would self-destruct. A major risk for a career move. I put it on the back-burner for now.
I also ruled out TBS. Which is weird in a way. I was looking for a problem to be solved, something to run like a project, with buy-in to fix it. From what people tell me, that’s 50% of the work at TBS. All the time. But going with that is an almost universal disdain for anything resembling work/life balance. I don’t mind working OT for crunch activities, but I don’t want to start working an extra 10-20 hours a week just for fun. Just not the environment I want to part of, and while I have had offers to go there, it wasn’t on my list of desired places.
I approached a contact I had, actually a former boss of my wife. She offered me a great job about three years ago, and the timing was terrible. If she had been in the same position, with the same offer, I would have said yes now easily. But she was in a new area, and it seemed good too, so I wanted to chat with her. Not for her area per se, but good info on life in the HR world. It was a very pleasant conversation, and she offered to set me up with her replacement in her old area, but I already knew that area was “full”. Always a pleasure to chat with her, but nothing that added up to a specific lead per se.
I threw a Hail Mary pass towards a director that I didn’t know at all, but had found out she was in charge of two HR files that interested me — student hiring for the summer and post-secondary recruitment. Lots of stuff going on, good work, potential to expand if there was an opening for me, but she was full up. She had a manager in charge, and it was a great conversation, but more like being outside with my nose pressed against the window. There are other ways to be involved, but no job in the area. It was a very focused conversation, made so partly because it was easy to say no, i.e. she had no openings. Plus, while she didn’t say it outright, I don’t have a huge HR background for the types of things they’re doing — I’m good at HR processes, coaching, etc., but not a lot of formal experience with the stuff they’re doing. Put more bluntly, I’m an EC, not a personnel (PE) specialist.
I wouldn’t say I was panicking at this point, but I was finishing my fourth interview, and nothing resembling much of a lead had poked up in my e-scan. Nor any job offers. I’m being somewhat disingenuous as I say that, as I did have a previous job offer back in February.
When my boss started the search for my replacement, she had to go to our branch workforce management committee to seek approval to launch a deployment notice. So all of WMC i.e. the DGs in our branch and two ADMs all knew and heard I was officially going to be leaving. And one of my former bosses, now a DG, reached out to say, “Hey when are we going to chat?”
I thanked him for the question, and pointed out that I needed to finish my french, it wouldn’t be for another five or six months, I wasn’t really looking for conversations at that point (I hadn’t started my search yet), etc. So he replied, “So how about Thursday?”.
We met, he described the job, and it was a good job. But I wasn’t convinced it was me. Stakeholder relations, open-ended, targeted to business. I’ve done some of that work before, but not really what I was looking for — I was looking for the Mr. Fix-It type job.
But, while I wasn’t panicking, I thought I should shore up my plans with a good old-fashioned firm job offer. So I contacted my former director who had offered me jobs twice in the last three years and told her that I was now officially looking. And in the interest of transparency, I told her she had to make me a good pitch. Her first pitch three years before had been a back-handed pitch. We had been talking about her job, she told me all that was wrong with it for about 30 minutes, just sharing and venting our own frustrations, and then said, “How about coming to work with me?”. Umm, how about no? 🙂
Her second pitch had been better but it wasn’t my dream job. Yet I was willing to consider it because I really like her management style. We worked really well together before — she generally would treat me as a near-equal for the files, lay out the full gamut of management work to be done, and we would just divvy it all up. There was very little of the “I’m a director so I’m doing the fun stuff, you’re a manager, let me dump stuff on you”, and it was very open and collegial. One of the best experiences I’ve ever had as a manager, and partly as I have a lot more experience now than I did before, so it’s easier for my director to do that with me. And she made me a good pitch. Not my dream job, but again, more interested in working with her than the job necessarily. I explained however that I couldn’t say “yes” yet, I was doing a full search until the end of May at least, and wanted to know if that would cause her problems. No, for me, she was willing to wait.
Great, a firm offer.
What I haven’t mentioned in this post is my boss. She had been, up until this point, incredibly supportive. Whatever I needed, whenever I needed it, what could she herself do to help? Could she make calls, what did I need from her? All great. And she had said repeatedly that I shouldn’t take the first offer, take my time, do a proper search, etc. And I was keeping her up to date as I went.
When I told her about this job, and it was good, but not perfect, I fully expected her to say the same thing as I was thinking. It was a baseline, etc. Except instead she suddenly said I should take it, firm it up, was my french a precondition, etc. The complete opposite of what we had talked about. I was like, WTF?
So I waited a day and then followed up on the job, tried to firm it up. And it evaporated. She didn’t know if she could take me as an EC, they didn’t really hire ECs, not sure she’d have the budget, was I really serious, etc. WTF?
My confidence took a major nose-dive. Was that offer back in February, the one I said no to, was it the only one I was going to get? The one that I thought was a sure thing was gone, disappearing into the mist of the branch that was in chaos. I have no idea what happened, I’ll get the full story some point in the future I guess. Things happen.
So I sheepishly went back to my DG, told her it wasn’t solid, and she went back to full support mode. Totally supportive, no issue at all. I realized afterwards it was a bit of a push/pull thing for her with my replacement. She had found someone and didn’t want to lose them, but also didn’t necessarily want to issue an offer to them until I had found something or had a good line on something. And so when she saw that I had a firm offer with a good boss, it seemed like perfect synergy for us to close both deals simultaneously. But then she realized she could always use me on special projects in the short-term if she had to, so no worries. We worked out a deal for the replacement to start, and I would keep looking. Full support. Whew.
Interestingly in this list, you’ll see that I didn’t talk much about my branch. Other than the one offer that I said no to, nobody was knocking on my door. And, truth be told, I was surprised. I thought more than one would knock, and they all knew I was looking, with no invites to chat. Okay, no worries. And truthfully in retrospect, I was looking for corporate problems to fix, none of which they had in their areas. They were all mostly program policy people.
Soooo, six interviews down, no job. Umm. Yep, I sucked apparently. Maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought. I reached out to contacts in two other branches, never heard back from either one. Okay. Maybe they missed the emails. I personalized them, so they weren’t cattle calls. Or maybe they were just busy. Either way, moving on.
I reached out interdepartmentally. I wasn’t looking to leave the department necessarily, but I also needed to expand my interests. A friend knew of some needs at Environment Canada, but they went more internally for the job that I would have been best suited for…she offered to share my résumé more widely, but I held off on that for now.
A former employee of mine had interviewed with ISED, and since she has a similar profile to mine, she wondered if I might be interested. She referred me, the director interviewed me, and there was some interest. But the job had three main files — one that hadn’t started yet but could be interesting at some point; a trade-related file that tied in well to stuff I did before and would like to do again, but is generally responsive only; and a third area that she suggested was quite “minor” but involved a lot of parliamentary relations. Which I’ve also done in the past. But then I realized. The first two files weren’t really active at the present, and she had five employees in the team. Which meant they were ALL doing the parliamentary relations file somewhat, or at least, it was eating up way more than a small part of their time. Definitely NOT the job I wanted to be doing, so I didn’t firm up interest.
At the same time that I was doing all this, I was interviewing candidates to join my team at the EC-06 level. While I was doing reference checks for one of the candidates at Public Health, their manager asked me about my team, and I mentioned I was moving on myself but I didn’t know where. We were doing similar jobs, and we chatted a bit about our experiences, and he asked if I thought about working at Public Health. One thing led to another, and we set up an interview with his boss. I interviewed with them, seemed okay, but there were a few structural issues that seemed “off”. And there was an element that it wasn’t going to be “new”. It was the same job I had now, just in a different department. But a change is as good as a rest, as they say, and I was interested still. Until I did reference checks on the area. And while I expect a few pluses and minuses to come back in any real reference, I got more of a “run the other way” response from people. Poked a little further and suddenly the structural anomalies made more sense in that context. I withdrew my interest, citing my desire for a change. Which was entirely true. The more I considered the job, the less interested I was in replicating my current role.
I am likely missing some interactions in there a bit, but basically, at this point, I was nearing 8-9 formal interviews, and nothing to show for my search. I needed to be more pointed.
I reached out in the short-term to a colleague in one directorate in our branch, and got the lay of the land for her area, but it didn’t look like a good fit in any open positions, and I put that area on the back-burner.
I contacted a DG contact in the IT branch and had a GREAT conversation with her. Exciting opportunities and one, in particular, sounded promising. She offered to follow up with him, and I wanted to think about which area for a couple of days. I also was targeting another branch, and met with the DG, but it was a short conversation, and she didn’t have any suggestions for me.
But something weird had happened in that timeframe too. I had contacted a DG who formerly worked in our branch, and to be honest, I had forgotten she was in this other branch that I was interested in. It was an area that interested me but I had no management-level contacts and hadn’t figured out yet how to contact them. It was also very different from what I was doing. Anyway, I realized she was in that branch, contacted her, chatted, she asked me what I was interested in, etc. I told her the one general area and she knew one of the DGs was actively looking. I didn’t know him but would be happy to have a chat.
The program was Canada Pension Plan – Disability, or as they refer to it, CPP-D. I have had some exposure to it over the years. Back when I was in university, my father was on a disability pension for a while, which meant I could get a “Disabled Contributor’s Child’s Benefit”. Plus I have family members who are receiving CPP-D and I’ve been dealing with an employee who’s gone through medical retirement in recent years.
And I’ll confess…from a policy perspective, I think pensions are just flat-out cool. I don’t care about the finance side, I just mean all the policy issues that go with them. And disability pensions take that “vulnerable group” and “rich policy area” dynamic, and feeds it steroids. Sure, I was looking for those corporate problems to fix, but if I was to go more policy-oriented, pensions would likely top the list.
I met with the DG and the acting director, and I really liked his management style. Open, transparent, plain-spoken. Kind of a blue-jeans and sports jacket vibe to him. We were supposed to chat for about 30 minutes, and I didn’t treat it as an interview really, mainly because I’m not a pure policy wonk nor am I a stakeholder specialist, which the job entails. But the 30 minutes turned into 90, and I grilled him like a fish on the policy issues. I just let my full policy wonk side run wild during the conversation. Pilot projects, program issues, links with the delivery, Parliamentary engagement, FPT roles.
And I found myself really thinking about the job. Normally, if someone said “Stakeholder Relations”, I would run the other way. Often very responsive, too many dockets coming through. But CPP-D doesn’t deal with “all” disability issues, there’s a separate office for that (Office of Disability Issues). It is geared specifically to stakeholders of the program itself. Clients, insurance companies, FPT partners. And they have a formal roundtable set up that meets on issues through-out the year. Put differently, it’s not “open-ended” stakeholder relations, it is a very structured SR. More like managing a large interdepartmental / FPT / client / partner roundtable plus doing bilateral relations. Now THAT’s a different type of Stakeholder Relations that I can manage. I’ve even done variations of that before. Plus it’s for a vulnerable group that appeals to me from a policy perspective. Kind of like when I was at CIDA — “developing countries” writ large didn’t excite me, but Small Island Developing States did. And I did work on the negotiations on the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities back in 2005-06, so it isn’t like it is completely foreign territory either.
I thought about it for a day or two after the meeting, and my interest didn’t wane. I followed up to confirm my interest, and was happily surprised to find they were interested too, and they didn’t have too many other candidates left to consider. I provided references, we figured out some options around my expired french levels. They were ready to offer and I was ready to accept. Win-win.
Almost.
Way back when my “open-ended” scanning process was on, I thought to impose upon my current ADM for some advice. He is involved in stuff all over the department and has a planning background, so I thought he would be an ideal candidate for some advice if he could spare the time for coffee. We scheduled in early April, and then I got bumped. Again and again and again. It wasn’t urgent, and he’s a pretty busy ADM. A couple of times he had openings when I was off in May with Jacob’s series of appointments. No biggie, we rescheduled. But that meant that by the time I had a chance to meet with him, it was two days before I was to get my formal offer from the new area. I was going to let it go, but my DG encouraged me to meet with him and get his reaction to the job.
We met, I was pretty candid with him about my early experiences in the job search and mentioned I had zero offers in the initial stages. He asked me why I thought that was, and I mentioned targeting DGs and ADMs rather than directors who hire EC-07s. While he agreed that might be part of it, he thought it was more the narrow type of job I was looking for, and that those don’t come around every day. It might take six months to find a specific example of that type, and I was moving faster than that timeline. An interesting thought.
He asked me if I was set on leaving our branch, and I said no, but that I hadn’t really found much interest within the branch either (both from my own searching of work to do / openings or their own expressed interest or not). He pointed out though too that the management all knew me in one specific type of work and thus might not have considered me for other types of files. We chatted about what he thought my real skills were — comfortable creating and telling evidence-based storylines that combine data, policy, and programs together — and about a couple of areas in the branch that might be a fit. And then he offered to reach out to them.
Umm, okay. But I was set to say yes to the other job in two days. He asked if I could extend that deadline by a couple of days, which I agreed to explore. My advisors all agreed that I could be straight up with the new DG about the ADM’s offer, and he fully understood. I told him I was leaning towards accepting his offer, and honestly I would have said at the time that I was 98% sold. It’s just a huge policy rich area, and the DG told me that partly what sold him was that I had an obviously curious mind for policy and I asked a lot of the right questions during the interview, the exact issues they had to deal with behind the scenes and balance out against the public commitments.
So, at the ADM’s nudging, I met with another directorate in my branch. Huge program, lots of policy work across the board. And they had two openings with some great work to do. Two very good jobs. Which left me with an actual question. Stay and do good work in the same branch, where I was comfortable and knew everyone, and would be able to hit the ground at a full run, or move to the new branch, new area, and a huge learning curve.
Interestingly, way back about 20 paragraphs ago, I mentioned that I had met with someone in the branch, this was their area, and I had put it on the back-burner at the time. I had not pursued it as I didn’t see a fit for what I was looking for, and this was very different still. Opportunities we didn’t even know about a month before.
In the end, I realized that I was more attracted to the Disability file. It ties in closer to my social roots, I like the client group, and as I said, it’s a huge policy area with lots of rich pockets to mine.
So I said yes to the new job, and started the countdown from my old job. There were still lots of hoops to jump with various approvals, and I didn’t really tell that many people where I was going officially unless they pointedly asked. There are always chances something will come up, stuff happens. But I started yesterday in the new job so I guess it’s safe to say where I’m “going”. 🙂 I have a slightly smaller team than before, with five employees, including a co-op student, plus a potential sixth coming later. And I probably understand only about a tenth of what the job entails (I only got the basic elements of Stakeholder Relations above, haven’t even touched long-term disability yet).
But it was time for a change and I took the leap on faith.
And then something strange happened. A bunch of people in my old branch said, “What? I didn’t know you were willing to do full policy work? Why didn’t you approach ME?”. Including two areas that I probably would have said yes to early in the process if they had been on the table. Meaning I wouldn’t have considered a larger move to an area that likely suits my interests and skills for the long-run a lot better. But they weren’t on the table, given the way people saw me and that I was originally looking for that narrow “fix-it” job. It all worked out in the end, as they say, but the trip was far more painful than I expected.
I know I made a lot of errors in my planning, which seemed good going in and there were reasons for each leg, but it added to my stress:
Giving up my current job before finding the new one — While it motivated me to actually look, the added pressure was too intense;
Not finding a way (ANY way!) to meet with my ADM sooner — It would have changed the conversation way back at the start, instead of force-fitting it at the end;
Being overly confident — Sure I have high ratings and am flagged for talent management, but that didn’t mean it went well or was easy, although it made it easier for my DG to support me;
Not waiting for my french to be fixed before searching at all — It just added a dimension I shouldn’t have had;
DGs and ADMs are fine for scanning, but I likely should have aimed lower for job offers and been more pointed;
My unique opening target niche was too narrow, and there weren’t any jobs of that type available in the timeframe I had; and,
Since I had been in a specific role for a long time, I didn’t tell people I was open to other types of files too.
None of them egregious, and as I said, it worked out in the end. But definitely not the way to run my career in the future.
On the other hand, I stayed in my last job for 9 years…if I stay in this one for 9 years, I’ll be eligible to retire when I’m done.
I’m sure other thoughts will occur to me in the future…it’s hard to have perspective without some distance between me and the process yet, but this is what I have so far.
