On family road trips, I was always captivated by the tall silver cylinders that rose out of the ground to the sky in the endless flats of grain country. They’d often be the only thing on the shimmering landscape; no trees, no buildings taller than a single story, just the these monolithic containers, reaching above the world like rural, windowless skyscrapers.
I always wondered what was inside.
It wasn’t until my adult years that I discovered these were silos: giant canisters to store grain or silage (feed for livestock) that needed to be protected from insects and the elements, that needed to be contained, and that needed to be easily dispensed when the time came.
When I discovered what silos held, I became more fascinated instead of less. I imagined the tonnage of wheat, or oats, these structures held: billions of particle in those shiny columns. If you put a spigot on them, think how long the golden grains would flow, and the vast piles that would be exposed to light for everyone to see.
We talk at work about not wanting to silo knowledge. In support at Automattic, the company where I work, we do not specialize. We are generalists in our knowledge and our methods of support, so that if one product’s support queue gets backed up, or if live chat is slammed when our email queue is under control, we are all able to pitch in without having to wait for the experts to arrive: those shiny towers of knowledge that are inaccessible except when the dispenser is open.
Still, we each become knowledgable based on the information we learn as we go about our jobs: workflows that help us gain efficiency, phrases that convey our empathy for certain circumstances, workarounds when something is broken.
Even in a generalist model, in our busyness it’s easy to let those grains of knowledge pile up in the containers of our minds, secreted away like silage in a silo. Or as generalists, we can often fall into the trap of thinking, “Everyone already knows this, there’s no need for me to share.”
At the recent SUPCONF NYC, a colleague shared his persepective on providing support using a partnership model rather than a transactional one, where you build relationships with customers instead of treating each ticket as a discrete problem to solve. He worried before his talk, “Everyone is already going to know this. Who’s going to care?”
His talk was riveting to me. I didn’t already know the insights he shared, and I cared. I brought back new ideas for my own work that I would not have had without his talk.
It’s important to open the spigot and let our insights out, to show what’s in there, even if we feel like it’s just boring old grain that won’t be special to anyone else. That often will not be the case. Release your knowledge into the open for everyone to consume and gain nourishment from.
Silos photo courtesy of Matt Batchelor via CC lic 2.0. Image was flipped horizontally to better fit the header space.
This was a ten-minute free write on the topic “silos” pulled from my prompt box.
A few weeks ago, I drafted a blog post for work. I wasn’t sure about the tone or the message, and since I wasn’t confident about posting it, I decided to put it aside for a bit while I took a few minutes to grab a shower: the one thing in my day that I always forget to plan for.
I used to be a shower-first-thing person. My whole life I’ve rolled out of bed and gone straight to the shower, before even getting coffee. It was as regular a ritual for me as reading before bed.
When I started using a tread desk, that habit changed. I walk every morning for four hours while I work. I sweat.
I don’t take a shower first thing now since I know I’ll spend the morning sweating. The problem is now my shower doesn’t have a designated slot in the day. Every day is different, and being a routine-driven person, the lack of regularity throws me completely. After 35 years of showering first thing in the morning, now, every single day, I realize at some point, “Oh crap, when am I going to fit my shower in?” This is my personal occupational hazard of working from home.
On this particular day, when I wasn’t sure about the internal blog post I was to publish, stepping away from it seemed the perfect time to squeeze in my unplanned-for shower.
In the shower, I enter fully into the inner world of thought. I’ve written before about how the shower is like a fairy forest: I step in, and time warps. In the steam, the white noise of droplets clattering on the tub, the warm water on my skin, I immerse so totally in day dreams, time and space become irrelevant. I forget whether I’ve already washed my hair. I have to check the dryness of the washcloth to determine if I’ve already washed my body. I don’t know if 5 or 30 minutes have passed.
The shower is my thinking place. I don’t intentionally go there to think — our water bill would be outrageous — it just happens. Sometimes I think about cats. Sometimes I think about the grocery list. Sometimes I think about space. Sometimes I have no recollection of what I’ve thought about.
Sometimes I have breakthroughs.
I have another thinking place, and that is in a notebook, in the world of words. I write to discover what I’m thinking, to find holes and explore how to fill them. Strangely, though, I do not want my two thinking places — the shower and the notebook — to overlap. I don’t want a whiteboard in my shower. I don’t want a waterproof phone to capture aha moments.
The beauty of the shower as a thinking place is that the thoughts are uninterrupted. I am out of the way of them because I am usually unaware they are even happening. Writing would break that. It would stop the thoughts, it would disrupt their momentum. The physical act of writing would attach them and make them stick in a place where I am literally washing myself clean and trying to unstick things.
That day, on my unexpected trip to the shower, with no intention to change my thoughts or think about my blog post, and with only the intention of squeezing in a shower so I would not forget to clean myself before taking my daughter to swim practice in the evening, I took my shower and ended up thinking about the blog post. I thought about the tone, I thought about ways to make it more collaborative, and I thought about ways to improve.
When I emerged, I knew the edits I would make so I could feel good about publishing the piece. My showers aren’t always so productive, but I’m finding more and more that this disruptive showering in the middle of the day is working for me. Even if, as a structured, routine-oriented person, the chaos makes me crazy.
This is my entry for the Support Driven Week 3 writing challenge: Thinking space.
My husband and son are out of town for a soccer tournament, and my 10 year-old daughter and I are having a girls’ weekend while they’re away. We are celebrating our together time with bad pop music, potato chips, dinner at Tropical Smoothie, and Cajun French fries while we watch Cupcake Wars.
My daughter and I are spending the weekend laughing, singing, and smacking gum when we get in the car and listen to K92 radio (All The Hits!).
My favorite part, besides the together time with her, is that I got hooked on Duolingo this week. It’s an app that helps you learn languages. For free. I’m freshening up my Spanish for a trip to Mexico in March, and I’m also dipping my toes in Portuguese since three of my teammates and one of my closest friends at work are Brazilian.
I’ve been playing with languages every day, and yesterday, as I practiced “I am a woman” in both Spanish (Yo soy una mujer) and Portuguese (Eu sou uma mulher), it occurred to me how much our daughter loves to learn and to push herself. I told her about Duolingo, thinking she might find it fun.
Now, she is snuggled under a blanket on the couch, with kitties in her lap, and as I write this, she is learning Italian. Every few minutes I hear her speak Italian into her iPod — “Sono una regazza” — and then trumpets blare as she earns points.
My daughter and I spent our Saturday night watching Cupcake Wars. We watched bakers peel waxy paper from half-pound blocks of butter then tumble the heavy slabs into stand mixers with vanilla extract, powdered sugar, and sometimes mascarpone cheese, or sour cream, or cocoa powder. I didn’t understand how the bakers could refrain from reaching elbow deep into the stainless steel bowls to scoop handfuls of buttercream into their mouths like Veruca Salt scooping the goopy filling from confections in Willy Wonka’s garden.
I bake with salted butter. I like salt with my sweet. I do not adjust the salt in cake or cookie recipes to compensate for the salt in my butter. I am teaching our daughter the same.
Unsalted butter is good too, don’t get me wrong. Creamy unsalted butter on a thick slice of freshly baked bread is one of the simplest, finest foods on earth. In Vienna I breakfasted on fresh rolls and soft butter. No honey, no jam. Just the crisp crust and spongy crumb of a home-baked roll and the satin smoothness of unsalted butter.
When I was nursing my son, I craved shortbread. Butter, flour, and a hint of sugar creamed together, then baked at 350 until golden brown. I made it daily, patting the dough into a rough rectangle and then cutting it into uneven bars. I wasn’t going for pretty — this shortbread was pure function. The rustic bars baked into delicate cookies that crumbled perfectly between my teeth and melted in buttery goodness on my tongue.
I ate shortbread every day for weeks. It is the perfect food to bite into when you need something between your teeth and you want the taste of butter.
A friend in Florida makes an apple pie with a shortbread crust, and I don’t know that I’ve ever eaten a more perfect pie. I tried to recreate it once, he told me how, but working with a butter-based pie crust is maddening. It softens while you’re rolling it out. It tears. It sticks. I ate raw crust to salve my frustration while I rolled pastry. When I finally got it into the dish to fill, the crust ended up not being big enough thanks to all my stress-eating.
It’s a good thing I’m full and it’s late. My mouth is watering now. The kids have all this Halloween candy I keep eating, but nothing will ever compare to a homemade butter-based pastry.
This week’s SupportDriven writing challenge focuses on tools, and specifically on the tools we use for time and task management. When I moved into a leadership role this summer, my day-to-day work changed significantly, and in any given week I’m trying 2 or 3 different tools to find an effective combination that helps me get the right work done on the deadlines I’ve committed to.
This past month, I think I finally found it. The combination includes prioritization (3 priorities per day), a personal private website using the WordPress P2 theme, and a calendar. I also use several supplemental apps to make super quicks notes that remind me to add things to my TODO lists.
Task management
If you have more than three priorities, then you don’t have any.
Prior to about four weeks ago, my daily task lists were long and overwhelming. Each day I’d log in and be faced with an endlist to-do list and I would waste time just trying to figure out, “Where do I begin?” Then, in an internal workshop on doing all the right things, my colleague Brie mentioned that she names 3 priorities to guide her days and weeks.
That idea resonated with me, so I experimented with different ways of implementing it. I respond well to checklists, so I started with various checklist apps including idonethis, any.do, and Wunderlist. I liked aspects of each of them: idonethis has fantastic Alfred integration, any.do is a lightweight and lightning-fast way to remind myself of to-dos from my phone, and Wunderlist allows me to drag to-dos into place in a list so that I can prioritize.
But I really wanted to consolidate my to-dos with my personal mission, my goals, and a list of deadlines so that I could plan for the due dates rather than have them sneak up on me. I also have several recurring items, and I wanted an easy way to copy those recurring checklists and then add items to them depending on the tasks on deck for the week.
Using WordPress P2 theme on a site to consolidate the work I need to do
Ultimately, after my colleague Amy mentioned she uses a personal P2 as a task manager, I landed on setting up a free, private WordPress.com site using the P2 theme. The site includes all of the components I need to keep me focused on the work I need to do to be effective in my role, with checklists, priorities, goals, and deadlines all in one place. I set up an example site at examplebadgleyp2.wordpress.com if you’d like to see a template for what it looks like in practice.
I still use any.do for when I’m on the go and remember, “Oh, I need to add that to my to-do list,” and I use Trello to track progress on my personal goals.
Once I’ve got my priorities for the following week outlined, I add them to my Google Calendar to tell me when to do what. I plug in all one-to-one meetings, team hangouts, town halls, workshops, and other scheduled events. Next I add my lunch hour to make sure I don’t skip food, then I then go through the daily priorities from my P2 and plug priorities into open slots on the calendar.
Any remaining open slots after meetings, lunch, and priorities will remain open. When those times arrive in the week, I fill them with other to-dos and with the million unexpected, unplanned-for things that happen throughout each day that need to be responded to.
At a higher time-management level, I front-load my week with tasks so that I can save Fridays for planning, thinking, and learning. I also tried hard to make at least one day of the week meeting-free so that I could use that day as a flex day when I work on the weekend. As a lead with 8 or 9 one-to-one check-ins per week and two standing hangouts (our team call and a leads call), I was not able to accomplish a totally meeting-free day, but did minimize on a couple of days so that I don’t miss too much if I flex on those days.
I use the ATracker app on my phone to track my time so that I can look back each week and see where I spent my time. I aim for balance among leading, direct support, big picture planning, teaching, learning, and dogfooding (using our products). If I spent too much or not enough time on certain areas one week, I know to keep an eye on myself the following week to avoid making the same mistake again. Last week I had a pretty good balance; I didn’t focus on learning, but I did do a good job of abstaining from work on my flex day:
Tracking my time
Communication in a distributed workplace
Tools
P2 (asynchronous text communication with coworkers; replaces email)
Slack (synchronous text communication with coworkers)
Doodle (scheduling dates/times when multiple people are involved)
Time.is (determining what time it is for colleagues around the world)
As you can imagine, working with colleagues all over the globe in different time zones — all from their own homes or co-working spaces, who are sleeping when you’re awake and awake when you’re sleeping, who you don’t see in the office every day and don’t have coffee or lunch or beers with, whose laugh you can’t hear or frown you can’t see — requires some creativity when it comest to communicating. At Automattic, we have a mantra: communication is oxygen.
As a result, we communicate a lot. On Slack, which is where we “talk” to each other all day via text, emoji, and GIFs, I’ve sent 114,330 messages since I started my Happiness Engineer trial in July 2014. On P2, I’ve published 822 posts, 2,434 comments, and 287,928 words.
I share these stats because what I love about using text to communicate is that it’s archived and searchable by anyone in the company. Verbal conversations are ephemeral, are subject to memory lapses, and are not searchable by others. With P2 we are able to find where things have been discussed and see, in writing, workarounds, steps, discussions, and decisions, and we can contribute to those conversations whether they were started four minutes or four years ago.
The tools on this list can be used by anyone, not just folks in a distributed workplace, and I encourage you to click through and play!
This is my entry for the Week 2 SupportDriven writing challenge: “Tools: What tools do you use to manage your tasks and time? (can be personal or professional, electronic or non-tech).”
Growing up, I did well in math and science — areas I was told repeatedly I was special to do well in. I felt a sense of rarity, and thought, “If I’m good in these, when others struggle, then this is where I should direct my life.”
By the time I arrived in college, it did not occur to me to study anything other than science. I loved nature, was heartsick about habitat destruction and the seeming disregard and disrespect humans had for our own habitat, and I wanted to pursue a path that would apply my science aptitude to helping the environment.
Many times, the first step to helping is understanding. You must know how a system works, what it needs, and how its needs are not being met in order to help make the system healthy again. So I pursued a degree in ecology, the study of the interactions among living things and their environment.
When I graduated, my first job was out in the woods, as a research assistant on a soils project for the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. Mostly I just carried 50 lb carboys of water, and I did a little bit of microbial DNA extraction from the soil. I liked being in the forest, but I didn’t find the work rewarding. I didn’t feel like I was doing anything.
From there, I moved to an entomology lab at the University of Maryland in College Park where I crushed Colorado Potato Beetles and extracted their DNA for population genetics research. The more interesting part of my job was that as a research assistant, I fell into the role of mentoring and training undergraduate students, then graduate students, then visiting scientists who wanted to learn the research methods we used in the laboratory. After a year or two, I became the lab manager, shepherding folks through the lab, guiding lab meetings, helping anyone in the lab with any questions they had, and helping them succeed at whatever they were working on.
During that time, I also became an avid cyclist. I participated in the Washington D.C. AIDS Ride, a 3.5-day fundraising ride of 350 miles from North Carolina to D.C. After my first time, I knew how scary it was to be a newbie in the event. It is a huge challenge, and in the months leading up to the event in subsequent years, I volunteered to lead training rides in the D.C. metro area, helping other riders like me get together and support each other in this crazy scary thing we were doing.
Those training rides led me to my next job: Campaign Coordinator for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team In Training program. I recruited volunteers to raise money and train for athletic endurance events, I recruited mentors to guide them, I recruited coaches to coach them, and I supported the athletes, mentors, and coaches — all volunteers — in performing the amazing feats they had taken on. Now this, this was my kind of work! My entire job was dedicated to helping people: helping coaches coach, mentors mentor, and volunteer athletes raise money and train so that they could help Leukemia & Lymphoma patients.
Do you see a pattern here? Help the environment. Help people in the lab. Help AIDS Ride cyclists. Help volunteers. Help cancer patients.
I did not yet see this pattern in my life, but as I reflect on the evolution of my career, it seems so obvious: I am a Helper.
When I moved out of the workplace to raise our children, I ran an Etsy business for a few years. For that business, I started a blog. It wasn’t long after I started blogging that I became aware my lifelong love for words. I had always loved reading — my favorite courses in college had been literature courses, and I read every night before bed — but I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed writing.
I soon realized I loved blogging way more than I loved making soap for my business, and I closed my Etsy shop. I got a part-time job at Barnes & Noble doing — guess what? Helping people.
Meanwhile, I started a new blog. This blog. After running my own website previously for my soap business, which I found to be a hassle, I was enamored with how easy it was to just pick a theme and publish on WordPress.com. I adored the Reader where I could follow and find other bloggers. I followed The Daily Post for writing challenges and blogging tips. Soon after I began blogging, the WordPress.com editorial team selected one of my blog posts as an editorial pick.
I became a WordPress.com groupie devotee and a blogging evangelist, especially as rejections for writing submissions piled up on my desk. I wanted to spread the amazing feeling of expressing yourself without having to be approved by the gatekeepers of traditional publishing. I wanted to help everyone who wants to write write. I wanted to help everyone who wants to blog publish.
When helping someone, the first step to helping is understanding. You must know how they work, what they need, and how their needs are not being met in order to help them accomplish what they’d like to do. As a WordPress.com power user, I knew the needs of writers, I knew the system of traditional publishing they were working in, I knew the struggles bloggers faced when they just want to write, when they just want to publish.
So I applied for a job as a Happiness Engineer at Automattic, the makers of WordPress.com. And now, I’m helping writers write, I’m helping bloggers blog. I’m helping democratize publishing. I am tapping into my greatest strength, which is not science or math.
My greatest strength is that I am a Helper. And I’m thrilled that my weird, nature-loving, literature-loving, non-tech, totally unplanned path led me to the career I belong in: Support.
I lead a live chat and email support team at Automattic, and this is my entry for the Week 1 SupportDriven writing challenge: “History: Our history shapes us — what path led you to Support? Was it a planned career? Or did you happen upon it?”
Butterfly Mind 