So I had a bit of a strange end to my work week. I have mentioned, I think, that I retire in about 5 years, and so I expect that is probably 1-2 jobs in the public service before then, likely staying at my current level. I made a huge change about 3 years ago, screwing up a perfectly good job for what I hoped were greener pastures that turned out to be burnt crab grass. But you make your decisions going forward with imperfect information, and I don’t dwell when things don’t work out except insofar as I review what my emotions were leading me in certain directions. Understanding the choices I made, so to speak.

Anyway, I have a decent job, not the most exciting, and while I have had a couple of jobs available to me that would complicate my life, they weren’t anything that intrigued me. Then a boss offered me, or more accurately suggested to me, a change that would enlarge my duties, shift things around a bit, and generally give him a good solution to another problem, the proverbial two birds with one stone. And I said, “Sure, probably.”

But over the course of a day, as I had a couple of other conversations with people, a couple of them asked me the same question about an alternative I wasn’t considering and it got me thinking of the possible change not as a simple incremental tweak so much as a real choice. If I “take” the new job, it’s like choosing between my current job or the new one, not just adding to my duties. And I realized that I probably wouldn’t choose that second job in that A/B choice world instead of a simpler equation of A + some new stuff = B job.

And because I trust the people asking the question, and the way they framed it, I thought about it in a way that changed the options from A/B or A+x=B to A / A + x = B / C. Which is possibly leading towards a fourth option of D. It is not without complications to consider, but I’ve enlarged the conversation to include more variables about what I want to do with my last few years in government. And it might even lead to me choosing a single job that I will do until I retire.

Today I choose to listen to other people’s questions and it helped me improve my own questions and options. I’ll blog about it if and when things firm up more but it made for an interesting last couple of days.

What choices did you make today?