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My year in review part 2 – Looking at my career in 2022

The PolyBlog
December 31 2022

Previously, I looked at my progress for the year and said it sucked canal water. Lots of things in there where my home life squeezed out other activities. What wasn’t really on my list at the start of the year was much about my career. I mentioned in the previous post that it’s hard to nuance it for context and perspective.

At the start of the year, life was normal-ish. I had accepted a new job starting in mid-January that was slated to run for six months. It would be an opportunity to fully assess if I wanted to be a Director while doing a job I had done most of before and while working on other files that I was ideally suited to lead. In short, it was almost the perfect foundation for a successful stint. While I didn’t and don’t have a burning desire to be an Executive, I did want THIS job. So I fully intended to do everything in my power to make it a success and to qualify in a pool somewhere so that they would have options to potentially appoint me when the opportunity was officially over. That was my plan.

Three weeks in, we got the news that Andrea would start chemo. And I realized that not only would I not have the time to really devote to qualify in a pool, but I also wouldn’t have the mental energy to complete applications, write exams, prepare for interviews, etc. My priorities shifted with no regret at all. I’ve tried explaining this before, and people see it as, “it’s unfortunate this health thing happened while you were doing that acting”.

Except, that isn’t how I see it. It’s not the right nuance. I feel more like the health events were fixed; this is when they happened. If anything, it’s mildly unfortunate that my acting assignment came up when it did. The acting preceded my wife’s chemo, but the only timing part is that the work opportunity came up when I needed to be committed to my family instead. There was no “choice” here.

If the events had happened in reverse order, I wouldn’t even have thought about applying. I would have known that I couldn’t do it full justice while supporting her, and I would have stayed in my previous job. No question, hands-down that would have been the choice. And I would have had no regret about passing on the opportunity.

My only real “regret”, if it can even be called that since I don’t believe in them, is that it would have been good to know up front that her chemo was going to be scheduled, so I could pass on the assignment and give someone else a chance to do it.

Don’t get me wrong. I did my job, and I did it well. But I did it with about 80% of my brain. I had three huge advantages. First, the team was relatively stable and knew their files. Second, I was working from home, and it was easier to adjust schedules to play chauffeur for appointments, run errands, etc.; if I was trying to do all that while going to the office five days a week? I would have had to end the acting early, there’s no way I could have handled it. And third, I had a huge advantage going in that I knew most of the files inside and out, so my learning curve was low.

Anyway.

It was a good assignment; I’m glad I had the experience; I only wish it was next year or two years ago, not this past year. It pulled me away more than I would have liked. I don’t care about not having flipped it into an EX position. I could still do all that if it was what I wanted. But I knew where I needed to be instead, and there were no regrets about that choice; it wasn’t a choice.

When the acting position ended, I had a choice of going back to my old directorate or looking for a new job. The easy solution would have been to go back, but I had been there for several years, so I looked around. Andrea had finished chemo, and life was easing off a bit on the home front. Or so I thought. I had a few job offers, but one stood out. I knew the types of files and how they worked, although not the specifics, and I believed it was a good job. The immediate boss was one that I knew informally from around the branch for a few years, I got along with her well enough for the limited direct interactions I have had with her, and she had a good rep. And her DG had an equally solid rep, although I didn’t know her as well personally. I didn’t know the team at all. So good files + good boss = worth a look, obviously. And my director and I clicked in the first two meetings.

Once I’m over the first hump of even considering a job, I frequently look for three things when I’m interviewing my boss. Yep, it’s an interview on my side too. I don’t have to work anywhere specific. It’s all about the best fit for me. First and foremost, I like transparency in how my boss approaches files. It makes life easier if I know WHY my boss is leaning one way or another, and transparency in management issues is pretty key. She was very open about the current situation, what she’d experienced over the last few years, and what she was looking for in the future. Second, I like openness in approaches. Some people mistake that for simple transparency, but it isn’t. They often go hand in hand, sure, but many people are transparent about files as long as you do it their way. The discussions showed we weren’t locked into a set approach. There were some pieces fixed, but there was also room to manoeuvre within that box. Third, and this is equally critical for me, I can’t work for an intentional squirrel. We can all get squirrelly from time to time, it goes with our jobs. And if there’s pressure on, ANY job can make someone squirrelly as a boss. But what I don’t want is someone who intentionally embraces their squirreldom. I want calm in the face of the storm, not a tempest brewing during calm seas. She’s not a squirrel, so all good.

I had one meeting with her for about 15 minutes and a second meeting for about 25 minutes the next day. And we realized we were both sold. I didn’t even pursue the other jobs in comparison. A solid job, a solid atmosphere, a solid boss. Sounds perfect, right?

I missed something

I did all the usual things I would do in planning a move, and like all job changes, I took my leap of faith only after mitigating whatever I could and deciding which were “dealbreakers” and which were mere “details”.

But as I did all that planning, I made a huge assumption that served me well for 30 years of my career without checking to see if my assumption still held. I assumed I was at full capacity. Or that even if I wasn’t, I would be able to function near full capacity without too much trouble.

That grandiose view of my own abilities is located somewhere between arrogance, hubris and simple self-confidence. I’ve been able to do just about everything that I’ve ever been assigned and to do it well unless there were specific reasons why it was doubtful anyone could make it work. And sometimes, even then, I succeeded. I have a lot of experience in different types of jobs, I can draw upon lots of different processes and work procedures to get things moving, and even though I was coming into a new job, I had a director who was in her job for at least a year, so I would have guidance.

But I miscalculated my ability to hit the ground running. Yes, I was feeling better after my wife had finished her chemo, and I had completed the previous big project in my old job with some flourish and success. Things were returning to “normal” and I was looking forward to the change in job. Yet I wasn’t at full capacity. As I mentioned above, I ran the previous shop at 80% of my brain power, and that was enough with a good team and lots of corporate knowledge to guide me in my actions.

For the new job? I thought I would go back up to 100% right away as Andrea’s treatments ended, but I didn’t, and 80% was NOT a good starting point. First and foremost, it’s a totally different type of job. I’ve done policy, planning, and operations before, but I’ve mostly done planning and horizontal jobs over the last few years. Most of my operational jobs are in the distant past. In some cases, 20+ years. But it’s not a pure Ops job. Or so I thought. To put it bluntly, I completely underestimated how much “ops” there was and, thus, how big a change it would be for me from my last job. I am normally able to adjust to new rhythms in about 4 weeks, or perhaps 6w at the outside. The new job took me closer to 12, and I’m not totally sure I’ve got the right handle on it.

My new team has fluctuated in size, hovering around the 8-person mark. It went as high as 11, down to 7 at the moment, but hovering around that 7-9 range. I’m used to that size of a team, but of the 7 currently, 4 of them are new to the team since I joined, and 2 more are only veterans by a month or two over me. I’m the third longest-serving member of the team. Which means very little corporate memory exists on a bunch of things. I tried using previous team members to cross-fertilize their knowledge as we onboarded the new people, but it didn’t take as well as I had hoped.

As a result, I came to a conclusion on Dec 1st or so that I needed to put in place a brand new training regime for the whole team to get us up to the same speed and on the same page, so to speak. Instead of the team working at capacity by January 1st, a bunch of the training will happen in January and February. I hope to be at full working capacity by April. But my training all of them is a bit crazy when you think about it. I’ve been in the job 3 months, and now I’m developing a whole new training regime to get them all doing their job the way that I want, and based on having figured their job out myself on the side of my own desk while I was doing my new job. In addition, of the new team, 3 are relatively new to the government. They’re all excellent, but some are a bit greener than others, and all are green to the area. I have a positive outlook on where we’ll be in another three months, but it will take a fair amount of work to get there.

The end result is I’m logging some overtime to compensate for my being new to the files, and everything takes a bit longer than I think it should, the first time through, anyway.

It’s better than it was. I put in some control structures I needed, rearranged a few agendas to work better for me, got some people working on things I could take off my own plate, etc. Yet I haven’t felt like I was really on top of my files for the last 13 weeks or so. I’m also trying to integrate back into the office 2 days a week, which has been an extra adjustment. I’m close to where I want to be, and I’m closer than I was, but it’s taken way longer than I expected.

Cuz I overestimated “me” in the equation. I have high standards for myself, sure, but I have seen myself dropping from 80% in September to probably 65-70% heading into the Christmas break. I haven’t been able to regenerate or regroup.

The fall has not been as easy as I had hoped on the home front. We have had a lot of appointments for Andrea and Jacob, which affected my schedule during the day. I time-shifted to accommodate them, but it can sometimes be a struggle if I have to go go go all day and then add an extra hour or two at night just to catch up because I’m slow or to time-shift breaks from earlier in the day. There have been a few nights where I’ve logged on after 10 or 11 and worked until 2 or 3 in the morning. On the positive side, there aren’t any interruptions then, but it’s not sustainable.

Yet, if I’m honest, work is going “fine”. My bosses are happy, and I’ve started to feel more comfortable with my role and decisions. I’m starting to take on more things that should be with me and off my boss’ shoulders. I’m fulfilling more of the complete manager’s role than I have been. A couple of files have gone off the rails, but as my executive coach says, cut myself some slack. If my bosses think I’m doing fine, and the only one questioning my performance is me, then perhaps I should sit down, take a break, and STFU.

The last two weeks have been hard, too, even though it’s the Christmas break. I have a file that we’re trying to get back on track, and we have a way forward, but it’s a bit “crunched” for time. We’ll get it done, not quite as well as I had hoped at the beginning, but good enough. But at home, I’ve been super stressed about Andrea. Yet nothing about cancer. This was something new and unexpected.

Most of our close friends know that Andrea has limitations in her eyesight. I don’t talk about it much as it is not my story to tell. If she chooses to share it, that is up to her. The challenge right now is that she has something going on that is causing the deterioration of her sight. It is likely temporary, a normal part of life, just something that can happen to all of us, but she is at higher risk, and it is happening earlier for her than most people. But if it’s not? There is a risk of a serious decrease in her sight. With the incumbent effects on her life, and thus the knock-on effects for Jacob and me as well.

She’s already faced some of those question marks this year. We thought her cancer would likely be relatively straightforward to treat; it’s not curable but highly treatable, but it could drop into remission for 10 years, all good. Instead, the treatments were highly debilitating for at least six months, she’s off work for most of a year, there are many side effects, and the remission period may be as low as 3 years. So instead of six months out of ten years dealing with treatment, she could, in theory, be looking at one year out of four. That is a different view of the rest of our lives, affecting all forms of retirement planning and even current living situations.

Finishing the year

As I said in the heading, the year sucked canal water. We started with dashed hopes, and our whole life shifted for the year. Ultimately, we have good outcomes. On a more superficial level, we have good jobs, strong medical coverage and support. We’re better off than 90% of the planet. But the year still felt like it sucked.

Some part of me feels like I’m whining. Most of what happened this year happened to Andrea. For Jacob and me, it is just knock-on effects. Andrea and I both worry about the impact on Jacob, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised to see his increased maturity for the year, along with decreased anxiety. It seems counter-intuitive, but he’s growing and maturing in real and impressive leaps. We’re hugely proud of him.

Yet this blog is about me. And the issues I’m dealing with throughout the year. Although it was “Andrea’s cancer”, the year affected me too. As does worrying about Jacob, and everything that goes with his medical conditions. On top of my own, and the stress of work.

The other night, I was trying to fall asleep, and I couldn’t stop thinking, “What if..?”. What if Andrea loses her eyesight or experiences a significant reduction? What if the cancer remission is shorter than we hope? What if she can’t go back to work? I couldn’t stop my damn brain from racing from one terrible outcome to another, feeling it was completely unfair. It doesn’t happen often, but I do experience those thoughts from time to time. In a moment like that, it is hard to find perspective.

As we head into 2023, there are more unknowns and uncertainties than I would like to be dealing with right now and I need perspective.

I want to find a different way of looking at things. A different way to view the year. And that will be my next post. Flipping the narrative from one of despair to one of success and hope.

My year in review part 1 – 2022 sucked canal water

The PolyBlog
December 30 2022

Each year, as January 1st approaches, I start thinking about the past year and my plans and resolutions from the previous January. I often have pretty ambitious plans, and up until a few years ago, I would say I did pretty well overall for any given year. I know I accomplished stuff, even if it wasn’t always as much as I wanted.

Yet, don’t get me wrong. I had impossibly long lists of options of things I wanted to do or at least work on, literally too many things to do in a single year unless I quit work, stopped sleeping, invented a really effective cloning technique, accessed time travel, or recruited henchmen and minions. And even then, it was probably too many things. That wasn’t accidental. The list isn’t meant to be a to do list in the normal sense, it is more of a master options list of sorts. In short, it is just a way of remaining ambitious so I don’t turn into a couch potato playing on my phone.

Last year at this time, I talked about the ghosts of previous years. I went back 31 years and looked at various docs from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. (https://www.thepolyblog.ca/the-ghost-of-new-years-past/)

As I went through that review, I identified some things that were important to me, some of PolyWogg’s Rules so to speak.

– Dare to dream but live in the real world
– An unexamined life isn’t worth living.
– To thine own self be true.
– Better I be a dolphin swimming with sharks, than a shark.
– Some of the saddest words are “unrealized potential”. Who begins too much, accomplishes little; who begins too little, wastes a life.
– 20% of your effort gives you 80% of your results, the remaining 80% delivers the next 20%.
– Being busy is not the same as being happy. You may not always be able to be around but at least be nearby.
– Every encounter deserves to be treated as sacred. There’s no such thing as a casual conversation.
– Never assume someone will say “no”, don’t be afraid to vocalize your desires.

The scary part though is that as I moved into looking at 2020, 2021, and 2022, many of the main items on my big to do list and my yearly to do list remained the same. I wanted to learn to bake, help Andrea and Jacob with their stuff/issues, improve my website and get into some astronomy areas, plus something “creative”. That kind of still holds for this year.

Wrapping up 2022

I often try to think of metaphors to bind years together. I was watching some YouTube videos as well as reading a recent post from Chuck Wendig, and a sense started to gel that perhaps 2022 isn’t a year at all. Not a standalone year. If 2020 was the lost year, and 2021 was merely a watered down echo year, then 2022 was supposed to be the rebuild year. The year that everything returned to normal. But in Chuck’s post, he noted a metaphor from his wife that 2022 was the mental equivalent of defragging a hard drive. After two years of everything getting jumbled across the whole disk, saved here / there / everywhere, a mental defrag realigns all the files back into some form of contiguous blocks. Extending the metaphor too far, you could even argue that some of those blocks had missing data, incomplete files that ended up just getting truncated or deleted due to gaps.

As I started the year, I had my paradigm (my development model, generally), and my tools for planning, plus my PolyWogg’s Rules. And it let me set some big goals.

Under Learning, I wanted to get a 3D printer. And I did. Well, sort of. I bought it in May, and then it sat in my basement for six months. I got someone in one of the local groups to assemble it for me in November, and it’s ready to go, but I have another big project to finish first before I let myself get sucked into playing. I’ll give myself two stars out of five for that one.

Under Reading, a lot of what I planned was my own Reading Challenge group. But something untoward happened early in the year with my online experiences, and I divorced myself from much of the online engagement I had created. The net effect of that was to remove my access to the Reading Challenge and send me off on a search for new homes for my engagement. I found a bunch, but they were too remote for me…if I do them or not, no one notices except me. As life intervened, I dropped almost all of it. I’ll give myself one star for this one.

Under Astronomy, I had grand plans that started with simple sorting and would have ended with trying out new scopes. The sorting happened, at least in rough terms, but nothing else did. One star.

Under IT, I had plans to set up a bunch of stuff in the basement, none of which happened, although I have done a decent job of sorting some stuff. Two stars.

Under Finances, I had some health claim stuff that mostly got resolved (some pieces outstanding) and taxes to be done (mostly by Andrea). We also pulled it together enough to switch all of our investments over to a better advisor, bank a bunch of extra cash, and generally get things in much better shape. Four stars out of five, although I could be convinced it’s five out of five since we went way farther than I thought we would on the planning / organizing side.

Overall, for those five areas under my “Mind/Intellect” quadrant, it would average out to about 2/5 per item.

In the Heart/Emotion quadrant of my human development model, Family is the first item. Looking back, it seems almost laughable. My goals were simple — help Jacob and Andrea with pandemic adjustments, plan some weekly family night activities, etc. I was looking to slightly improve our personal connections, a bit more support to my family if you will. I was not expecting that almost the entire year would be adjusted to only focus on this item.

For those who read my blog posts in the last year, you’ll know that we started the year with Andrea dealing with some lingering breathing issues and some leg pain. It was not entirely clear what it was linked to, only suspicions. Until we moved into February when it became obvious that her lymphoma numbers had jumped. After five years since diagnosis with no treatment warranted yet, it was time to start treatment. So she did. Six rounds of chemo, March to July. She was off work, some parts of the chemo treatment went well, some parts didn’t. Lots of appointments. Lots of trips to the hospital, labs, pharmacies, other things. While overall things went “well”, as they say, the mental energy required sucked all energy out of anything else. Other projects? Fuhgeddaboutit.

Was I the perfect father or husband for support? Nope. I didn’t suck, I wasn’t horrible, but I wasn’t the poster child of calm and support either. I did what I could, I suppose it is difficult to ask for more. But I found it really hard to balance work and family for the year. Many weeks I just felt pulled in too many directions, even after the chemo stopped, where I had to get Jacob to / from school, Andrea had appointments even for massage or physio, and I was trying to balance a busy work schedule around it.

In the end, I’ll give myself three stars out of five overall. I coped, I supported, I survived…I didn’t “thrive”. And some of that blows back too. Andrea could see me struggling with the stress, and if someone asks me, I talk about it. She doesn’t, she tends not to vocalize what she’s feeling, more able to articulate it in writing later when the immediacy is gone. Which is a vicious cycle for stress too. She wants to know what’s on my mind, but I can’t really talk to her about my stress without adding to her stress, yet she can’t articulate what she’s feeling, so I try to just push past it and talk it about where I can with others instead. In the end, I blog to release.

For Home, I’m a bit surprised looking at the list. I actually managed to hit most of the big items linked to organizing and purging. I’m almost completely done the basement, mostly in the last six weeks, and with Andrea’s help. I had hoped to finish all this two years ago and didn’t, last year and didn’t, this year? Mostly done. I’ll give myself four stars out of five.

Overall, for the two areas under my “Heart/Emotion” quadrant, I would give myself three stars out of five (heavy weight to the family side).

For my Soul/Social quadrant, it starts with my creative side and the Website Setup. Because I had some free time late at night, AND I revamped all my social engagement out of necessity back in February, I actually went pretty far in this category. I have reoriented both websites, added a new one for my niece, and maintained the other ones too. I actually went farther than I expected to last January, so I’m giving myself five out of five.

For Writing, I wasn’t surprised when the first 9 months of the year shifted in focus away from this side of my life. I did manage to add a fair amount of content to my websites, BUT I didn’t finish the HR guide that I recommitted to in November. I just didn’t have the mental energy to get there. I’ll give myself three stars out of five overall.

For Blogging related to reviews, I finished all my Book Reviews, added another 20 or so, AND moved almost everything over to a new format on my other site plus made new backups in OneNote that I’m pretty happy about. Five out of five, bumped by my joy and delight with the progress.

For Bloggables, aka other areas, it’s a bit hard to decide. I didn’t write about what I intended to write about. But I DID write a lot about mental health for the year. I’ll call it four stars out of five.

For Photography, the only thing I did was do a basic start on GIMP editing. I’m organized, but I’m only giving myself two out of five on that one.

For Volunteering, I had greatly reduced my commitments. I finished off stuff for RASC National, and still did the audit of the RASC Ottawa books. But I gave up star parties, offering only advice to the new person. My effort was more than I initially thought looking back, so I’ll give myself four out of five stars.

Overall, then, for the Soul / Social quadrant, I averaged around four out of five, being a bit generous.

The Body / Health quadrant is often high on my priority list and low on my accomplishment list. For official Health, I wanted to focus on some basic stuff. I had started Ozempic as an injection, but it wracked my stomach too much and I couldn’t increase the dosage to something particularly useful. I dropped some weight, but not enough. Later in the year, it started to inch back up. I had planned to switch to a new doctor until I met him and saw the way he runs his practice. Hour-long waits were not uncommon, jammed in a small waiting room like sardines. Jacob and Andrea switched, and I thought about it enough to fill out some forms, but in the end, I decided to stay with my current doctor. I hate her bedside manner, but by the end of the year, that wasn’t an issue — she left to do something else (permanent or temporary, I’m not sure), and I have a new one. Sign me up and call me happy. What really took the hit, though, was mental health. I thought 2022 was going to be the year that I moved away from pandemic “survival” into something resembling rebirth, and instead everything else got washed away to focus on either work stress or home stress. Call it two stars out of five.

I felt good at the start of the year for Fitness. I had the workout machine set up, I’d figured out the plan for the year, and then life went in the crapper and I stopped just about everything. Call it zero stars out of five.

For Cooking, I didn’t have huge ambitious plans. Some basic stuff that I wanted to do to expand my horizons a bit. Instead? Not much. We have an air fryer and have done a few new recipes, plus a new toaster oven, but overall, zero stars out of five.

For Activities, I had about 20 little projects, mostly creative outlets for myself, and I did absolutely NONE of them. Some similar ones show up under other headings, and while I could compensate in those other areas, these ones had no such luck. Another zero out of five.

Overall, for the body quadrant, I averaged zero out of five.

I had some ideas throughout the year, little mental boosts here and there. A series of additional “fun” things to help perk up my day — I did none of them. I worked on some reorg stuff at the start of the year, and it took me the whole year to get back to it. I planned stuff around some “themes” for projects, and then my life focus changed. Zero progress.

One small project, similar to that of the reviews, was to recreate my “TBR” pile of all the books I want to read, not just the ones I’ve reviewed. I’ve made a fair amount of progress on it over the course of the year, and I’m quite happy with that progress. I didn’t think it would be as much work as it is, I drastically underestimated it, and it may take me several years to plug away at it to the “final” version so to speak. But it’s some progress at least.

Other elements

So I gave myself:

  • 2/5 for mind/intellect items;
  • 3/5 for heart/emotion items;
  • 4/5 for soul/social items; and,
  • 0/5 for body/health items.

Overall that would be about 2/5 on average. And you know what? I’ll take it. Cuz this year was mostly about survival. The fact that it isn’t negative or that I’m not literally dead is probably a win.

One giant piece is missing from my list, and it’s hard to write. Not because it’s emotionally difficult; rather, I feel at a loss for how to nuance or describe it probably in the right context and perspective. It’s my career. I’ll look at that next.

#MoreJoy – Day 31 of 31 – NaNoWriMo

The PolyBlog
November 1 2021

For those of you not familiar with the acronym, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing in a Month. Ignoring the awkward construction of the title, the premise is simple. People around the world are encouraged to write, write, write every day for the month of November — binge-writing, if you will — to produce a 50,000-word manuscript.

There are LOTS of views about NaNoWriMo, ranging from “everybody just writes crap, it’s quality that counts” to “what a great way to just blast through and remember what’s fun about writing.” There is an equal number of views about HOW to do NaNoWriMo, including from those who plot and plan in advance (plotters/planners) or who write by the seat of their pants (panters).

But I really enjoy the premise. This isn’t a Hallmark commercial thing, the “organization” that came up with the idea is a not-for-profit. Sure, there are lots of commercial options out there tied to NaNoWriMo for trackers, notebooks, mugs, websites, webinars, writing groups, etc., but at its core? It’s writers talking to writers and encouraging them to do nothing more than put their butt in their seats and write. Maybe the 50K will never amount to anything more than the wordcount itself. Maybe you’ll never turn the doc into a book or even look at it again. It’s a small writing milestone where the journey is the goal, not the destination.

Most Novembers, I ignore it. At least, I don’t aim for 50K, I don’t join the community groups, I don’t post updates, I don’t “do” NaNoWriMo in conventional terms. I often try to write a bit more, maybe blogging, for example. Or editing.

This November, I’m fully committing to writing SOMETHING, I just have to choose which WIP, as I have three that are up for grabs. Although, technically, there are six, I suppose, but three aren’t ready for primetime.

My HR Guide

I have been promising / threatening to finish the damned doc for four years now, and I never quite get around to writing it from beginning to end. There’s a solid old draft, and I do bits and pieces, but then I think of something else and I restart a section. Or COVID hits and everything changes for the process. Or there are tons of “new” features to talk about in each section. It is truly evergreen, but I want to FINISH a version in time to release it on January 1st as the 2022 edition. Fortunately enough, it was about 50K words for the 2017 edition. Not a novel, not a lot of “fun”, but a workable product.

My Astronomy Guide

This one is probably too nascent in development to really start blasting through. A couple of the sections I could do easily enough, but there are some that require a lot more research before I can write them. Not really the best option for a NaNoWriMo binge if I have to keep stopping to research stuff. I’ll pass on this one.

Novel 1 and 2

I have two novels in mind for a character, whose initials are CC, and that’s about all I’m going to say at this point. I started writing #2 some time ago, and I was struggling with too much exposition to try and deal with some extended backstory. Until I realized that the main problem was that the novel shouldn’t really be the first book in the series. I actually needed to start with Novel #1, because a whole bunch of stuff that comes up in CC01 is enough to have a whole separate novel, and much easier to plot in linear order than constant flashbacks as a first novel. So CC02 is definitely “out of contention”, I have to do CC01 first. The problem? Well, there isn’t one. I could easily choose CC01 as a perfectly valid choice for NaNoWriMo. It’ll probably be closer to 80K, but that’s a small detail to be ignored. My only hesitation is that I feel like if I get sucked into the novel, I might never come back to finish my HR guide. Perhaps “work before pleasure” is the better side of writing valour?

My Performance Guide

This one is so far removed from development, it barely qualifies as an idea. And yet a little bit of work and I’d be off to the races. But I would never finish my other guides, and the performance guide can wait until I retire. I may even have a chance to do some preliminary work that will make such an endeavour easier but might be a conflict of interest, although more “perception” than “real”. So that one is out too.

Novel Series, YOTG #1-12

For a very long time, I have had a movie projected in my head. It’s disjointed, some parts are missing, but it is a story told in at least 12 parts. Over the last 18m of COVID, my view of that series has changed. I thought it was something I wouldn’t touch until I retire. And yet a few times recently, I’ve had a sudden flash of a scene that was missing, giving me an enhanced feel for YOTG01. I know what happens generally in #01 (80%), 04 (30%), and 12 (60%). I don’t feel I’m ready to write these novels, that I can’t do them justice yet, my writing ability isn’t good enough for them. So, again, a pass. I won’t be able to wait until my retirement to start them, but perhaps 2023 at least. I’m ruling this one out.

WIP Showdown

The showdown is between my HR Guide and my first CC novel. The pros and cons are relatively clear…

I want to finish the HR Guide, it is more “pressing” so to speak, and if I spend the next month on the CC novel and perhaps carrying over into December, I might not finish the HR guide by January.

The HR Guide is a manageable project, I know exactly what is required, and I can finish within the month. It’s almost a guaranteed win. The CC novel, by contrast, is still stuck in the opening chapters, and I am not sure yet if I’m sure who the extra suspects are, let alone how I get them all to the murder scene to make them viable suspects. Which means I could get stuck half-way through and NOT reach my NaNoWriMo goal.

By contrast, the HR Guide is NOT a novel, nor is it a new project. The whole point of NaNoWriMo is to blast through something new. Am I cheating by having something in draft mode, even if I have to completely re-write major portions of it? Novels work well for the binge. A guide? Not so much.

Yet the CC novel would be scary fun. I literally have no idea where parts of it will go, and I know sitting down at the keyboard, the words will come from somewhere. I know my style well enough to know that I can “dream my solution” as I type, although it may mean going back to cut some of the drivel once I know the path. Smoothing out the story trajectory, as they say; eliminating meandering streams of consciousness, as I say.

Pressing and manageable vs. new and fun?

And the winner is…

The HR guide. Another thought occurred to me, which is that if I do the novel first, I’ll likely push the guide back another six months. On the other hand, if I finish the guide in November and edit it in December for release in January, I just might be enamoured enough of the novel to start writing right away.

So I’m going to finish the HR guide for NaNoWriMo. Jacob is going to join me in the writing quest. He’s working on a novel, probably middle-grade level, with a likely length somewhere around 30-40K. He has a title and even the cover. I don’t know if he’ll stick with it, but I’m already proud of him for trying. Of course, he’s already a published author as part of a group writing course he did last summer, so he’s got a leg up on me. Maybe he’ll give me tips as we go. Andrea’s going to write some stuff for ToastMasters as well.

Writing as a family for NaNoWriMo? That sounds like #MoreJoy to me.

#MoreJoy – Day 30 of 31 – Are you a closet dasher?

The PolyBlog
October 30 2021

Okay, so the heading was a bit cryptic to see if you clicked. 🙂 By “dasher”, I mean somebody who likes, designs and uses dashboards.

Obviously, the simplest dashboard is a to-do list. A simple list by itself doesn’t qualify — it shows info, but not status. But as soon as you add a check-box of some sort to show pending vs. completed? Now you’re in dashboard territory.

Those two elements — simple info plus some sort of metric — are the two essential elements of a dashboard. Some people argue that it requires a graphical representation, or an indicator of completion, but that is getting too close to specific forms of dashboards. Your car dashboard indicates speed graphically, which is true, maybe your tachometer in a graphical representation (both usually dials), but it also indicates if your headlights are on or how much gas you have, maybe what your tire pressure levels are currently registering. Even distance. Not all of those are “status of completion”, they’re just a metric.

For those who aren’t really into “planning”, they often think that anyone who makes a list is some form of planner. That the list i.e., the plan, is the most important part. It isn’t. True planners know that the most important part is not the end, but the means and the process. Just as military commanders know that no battle plan ever survives engagement with the enemy, a true planner knows that the value of a plan is the process that went into the actual creation. Knowing what troops you have, how you can deploy them, what resources they’ll need, etc. The end doesn’t justify the means, the means justifies the end product.

I have a huge to-do list, I confess. And it is divided into multiple categories so I’m comparing apples to apples when setting priorities, and into multiple columns for levels of priority within that category. Part of the benefit of that long list is to get it out of my head on to paper so I can easily see what I have in each category and which priorities I might want to tackle this week. But that “list”, even as a to-do list, is not really a dashboard because there’s no real element of it meant to be visual and it runs multiple pages.

To me, you have to be able to see the entire dashboard at a glance. If you can’t, you can’t tell quickly what’s going well and what isn’t, or where you might want to give more attention or take your foot off the gas in another. As such, when I’ve played with my to-do list, I’ve also often had a one-page summary at the front. While it is a dashboard of sorts, it is overly detailed (lots of priorities, not much info) and extremely simplistic (mostly checkboxes). It doesn’t inspire me in any fashion, I don’t look at it and go “There! THERE’s where my attention should be this week!”.

For my attempts at increasing my workout routine, I created a couple of different types of dashboard. The first two are more like info posters than true dashboards, as I don’t modify them regularly. They are overviews for my stretching and workout routines, including the pictures of the exercise for easy memory, and the # of reps or weights I’m using for each. It serves more as an instructional dashboard to get me through the routines than to tell me how I’m doing. It has info and metrics, but it isn’t a “management” tool so to speak. It just tells me where I’m at currently.

I created an actual dashboard for my health, which DOES include a lot of other measures, and which I can update monthly. I’ve even added a basic street-light-inspired heat map of progress – green is good, yellow is caution, red is cause for attention.

Dashboard 21-09

I’ve only used it for one month so far, and I ran into some other challenges this month unrelated to the content of the dashboard, so it will take some time to know if this is the right set of metrics going forward.

Wanting a writing dashboard

But I felt I wanted and needed a new dashboard. One that would help me with my writing goals. I focus a lot of time and attention on the content of my websites, but I rarely think about it terms of actual “goals” or “metrics”. I liked it when I hit 500K words, and again when I hit 1M. My visitor stats go up and down, and while I’m regularly above double digits, another week comes along, and I barely have single-digit coverage. I’m okay with that, partly as I am not blogging to become famous, build a brand or run a business. I’m posting what I want, even if it isn’t completely “brand-friendly”.

I have a post coming tomorrow that will talk about a series of posts in November, but I wanted to see “where I was”, a snapshot so-to-speak on my writing goals.

Writing dashboard - October 2021

It is NOT very sophisticated, I admit. The top part is really just a current status of how many words I’ve written or the number of posts. When I split my website into two — PolyWogg.ca and ThePolyBlog.ca — I lost the combined totals showing up easily. I knew I was over 1.5M words, and over 1500 posts, but I had not tried to calculate a combined total recently (1.67M words + 1626 posts and pages), plus 528 comments. I suck at engagement, but hey, it’s something. I was also curious to see that my “blog” posts, albeit spread across two sites, is at 1042 by itself. I hadn’t really thought of extracting that number from the data previously. But this post, for example, is exactly that type of post. It’s not a review, it’s not a page, it’s just me blogging about, well, me.

While some of that is purely me being anal to see the numbers, the one that was amazing to see was the Reviews total. I often feel “down” about my review numbers. I started the original site to post book and movie reviews, and when I started, I had some 75 movie reviews in the can (but not copied over) and book reviews ready to GO, with hundreds of books ready to be reviewed. Fast-forward almost 20y, and I’ve only posted 199 book reviews? Really? How is that possible?

And movie reviews, some of that is format, design, time, lack of priority, but less than 10? Wow.

Yet I rarely think about what I am doing instead. A couple of music and podcast reviews, but almost 50 related to “general TV watching” and predictions of where shows will go or get cancelled. Huh. And then the real kicker.

I have 233 reviews of TV premieres and another 23 of full seasons of shows. What? I have MORE full TV reviews than I do book reviews? Really? When did THAT happen? Apparently, almost two years ago, and I never even noticed. I have never really thought of them as full reviews as they are more breezy and less structured. Yet I’ve generated 250 of them without even blinking in the last 8 years. Yet I never give myself credit for it.

At the bottom, I just added references to my current works in progress. I wrote it as if I knew what I was going to write about in November, a novel in particular code-named CC, or two other guides that I count as “works in progress”. I’m still debating which I’m going to use November to blast through. My HR guide isn’t really amenable to the next phase, but I might choose it anyway. I don’t feel like I’m ready for the Astro Guide in full yet, but the novel isn’t quite right either.

For now, I listed two types of metrics — word counts in one area, and table of contents as checkboxes in another.

As I said, the dashboard isn’t quite right, but it doesn’t have to be. The point of doing it was to push my planning a little farther from a simple to-do list and more towards thinking about actual outputs in my writing. Just gathering the data gave me a couple of surprises and a new way of thinking about what I am doing as a writer and where I want to expend my energy.

It’s not the prettiest dashboard, but it does give me #MoreJoy.

#MoreJoy – Day 29 of 31 – Music lessons

The PolyBlog
October 30 2021

I have almost no musical ability at all. I can’t sing, I have no rhythm for dancing, I can’t play any instruments. I hope to learn how to play a song or two on our piano just to keep my brain agile as I get older and for fun, but I admire those who can play anything. Even a kazoo if they can do it well.

So I’m not saying that I am taking music lessons and am enjoying them.

No, I mean that I enjoy that Jacob is doing music lessons. I like listening to him practice, I like his recitals when he participates. I like occasionally when I’m listening that he’ll play a couple of the older songs he learned a few years ago that I really enjoyed. Like even This Is It (the Looney Tunes song).

He’s not ready for a concert hall performance, of course, but he could be doing chopsticks, and I’d enjoy it. Well, for the first hour anyway. Just hearing him play anything brings me #MoreJoy.