Tag: work

Standing in the shower, thinking

November 19th, 2016

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.
Tools I use for task and time management

November 7th, 2016
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.

— Jim Collins, Good to Great

Tools
- WordPress.com site using P2 theme and checklists.
- Any.do (for quick reminders to add to-dos to my P2)
- Trello (for goal-tracking)
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.

Time management

Tools:
- Priorities from P2 (to remind me of the right work to do)
- Google Calendar (to plan my days)
- ATracker (to track my time)
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)
- WordPress desktop app (publishing and following P2s for work)
- Simplenote (notepad for hangouts or for drafting internal blog posts)
- Zoom (video communication with coworkers)
- Google docs (collaborative editing)
- Google sheets (data sharing)
- Skitch (image annotating)
- Cloudup (image sharing)
- Polldaddy (polls and surveys)
- 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).”
Ecologist to… Happiness Engineer? The evolution of one career in support.

November 5th, 2016

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?”
On my way to Whistler

September 14th, 2016

It’s that time of year again: time for the Automattic Grand Meetup. As a distributed company, with more than 450 employees in 45 countries, we all work from our home offices, coworking spaces, cafes, airports, airplanes, trains, RVs, and family and friends’ homes for 51 weeks of the year. But in this one week in the fall, we all converge in one place to learn and teach together, build new tools, and compress 51 weeks worth of Friday happy hours into 7 days.

This year our GM is in Whistler, British Columbia, and I’m so excited about it, I woke at 3:15, a full hour before my cab was scheduled to pick me up and take me to the airport. My cab driver, after asking where I was headed, said “Oh, Vancouver! I’ve never been there. I hope you’re getting to go for pleasure and you don’t have to go for work.”

I smiled and said, “I’m going for work, but it’s ok because I love my job.”

I’ve heard a lot of people talk about traveling for work, and how it’s exhausting, and at the end of each day they can’t wait to sneak off and get away from their coworkers, and that few people on their business travel like each other or want to hang out together.

That’s definitely not my experience. One of my coworkers describes Automattic business travel as like going to summer camp. That’s the most apt description I’ve heard of what it feels like. My husband and I were talking about taking time off from work to recharge, and he mentioned that I haven’t really taken much — not as much as I could with our open vacation policy, anyway.

“Yeah,” I said, “I haven’t taken a lot of actual vacation, but going on work trips is like vacation for me. They are long days of working and thinking and brainstorming, often from sunup into the deep night, but it feels more like hanging out with friends while also, oh yeah, we’re getting work done.”

One thing I won’t be doing much of on this trip, though, is photography. Despite my post about minimizing, my suitcase was too stuffed with swag for our support team happy hour to be able to fit my camera. I’ll do what I can from my phone, though :-).
Sailing (and life) lesson: know where you want to go.

August 14th, 2016
My first attempt at skippering our 13 foot wooden yawl was a disaster. The wind on Pamlico Sound in the Outer Banks of North Carolina was stiff when I took the tiller and the main sheet (the line that trims the mainsail).

When the wind is blowing and the boat is tipping, things happen fast. As a skipper, all you have is a sail, your body, and a tiller, and you need to be able to react quickly.

You need instinct. And I didn’t have it.

Every time the boat heeled, I steered into the wind to keep from capsizing, then lost momentum. I put us “in irons.” Despite steady, moving air, my sail flapped, and the boat stalled. We’d get going again, the boat would tip, and each time, I reacted out of fear instead of confidence. I was at the mercy of the wind and the chop, knowing nothing about how to use my body, how to work the sail, which way to move the tiller. I ended the day totally defeated, in tears, wondering how I could have lived my entire childhood on the water and have no instinct.

On my second attempt, I took only the tiller. My husband took the sheet. Controlling everything at once was too much on my first skippering effort.

“I won’t let us capsize,” he told me. “Just get a feel for the tiller. I’ll take care of the sail. If you feel us heel, it’s okay, let it tip — I’ll spill some wind if we’re in danger.”

Brian had gotten us into open water on the sound before handing the boat over to me. As I took the tiller and nestled into the stern, my back against the gunwale, Brian said, “Where do you want to go?”

“That green house,” I said, and pointed at the one landmark that stood out and that I recognized.

“Ok, I’ll control the sail. Point toward the house and hold the course with the tiller.”

And I did. It was terribly difficult to hold a steady course. Wind, chop, and the force of water against the tiller required constant adjustment to stay on course. If I didn’t have a mark to watch, who knows where we would have ended up. With all the forces on the boat, it wanted to steer itself, and it was up to me to keep us on course. There was no such thing as set it and forget it.

As we approaced the house, and therefore land, I told Brian, “We need to think about turning.”

“Ok, where do you want to go?”

Uhh, I dunno. “Away from land?” I had already started turning the tiller.

He felt the boat turn. “Wait!” he said. “Don’t do anything until you know where you want to go. Where do you want to go?”

“Away from land! I don’t want to hit land.”

“But where do you want to go? That’s always the first step.”

I know it is absolutely cliche to use sailing metaphors, and I apologize for it. But this was a pivotal moment for me. For sailing, for my career, for life. The first step isn’t to dodge obstacles or let outside circumstances steer you.

The first step is to figure out where you want to go.

“Point us into the wind and set the mizzen to hold us steady so we can talk,” Brian said. I set the mizzen and we rocked gently on the water.

“Before you steer the boat,” he said, “you need to know where you want to go. Then you need to think it through.”

I had been sailing to avoid interference, going wherever the wind took me. I didn’t know where I wanted to go. I was just reacting to the land that was coming up fast, reacting to gusts that made me fear capsize.

“Don’t let the wind determine where you go,” Brian said. “You determine where you’re going, then use the wind to get you there.”

I pointed to a mark on the horizon, out in the sound. “There, that structure.” We turned, and sailed toward the mark I’d chosen. The tiller became more natural. I didn’t react as badly to the boat tipping. I held a steady course.

“I’m ready to try the sail, too,” I said, and Brian handed me the sheet. Within minutes I realized I need quite a bit more upper body strength. Sailing a small boat is an athletic endeavor.

We sailed about a mile offshore, and I was feeling comfortable that I was getting the hang of it. I no longer felt defeated.

“We should probably get back to the kids,” I said. “Let’s turn around and head back in.”

“Ok,” my husband said. “Where do you want to go?”

Ummm. Home? But when I looked back to shore, I pointed at the only thing I knew: the green house.

“Why the green house?” he asked.

“Because it’s what I know.”

“But is that where you want to go?”

“No.”

“Set the mizzen,” he said. “Let’s think this through.”

By now I knew how to set the mizzen, but I still didn’t know how to think fast enough to know where I wanted to go and do all the things I needed to do to get us there. I fell back on a mark that was safe and comfortable, even though it wasn’t the place we needed to be.

“Where do you want to go?” he said again. I pointed this time to the small channel he navigated us through each time we left our rental house and headed out on the sound.

“Where is the wind?” he asked. I pointed straight ahead, to the north.

“Where do you need to point the boat?”

I pointed to the right of the bow, to what would be 2 o’clock on a clock face. “About 60 degrees off the wind.”

“How do you use the equipment you have — our bodies, the tiller, and the sail — to get you there?”

“We need to lean to starboard to let the sail fill a little, then I’ll pull the tiller towards me to steer the boat towards our mark. I’ll pull the sheet to trim the sail tight, and hold the course with the tiller.”

And then we did it. I sailed us to the channel, where Brian took over and then brought us in. As water slapped the hull, wind filled the sail, and Brian steered us through the channel, I was in awe of the simple, fundamental life lessons I learned on my second attempt at skippering:
1. Know where you want to go.
2. Give yourself a safe space to think.
3. Plan your course, keeping in mind conditions and resources.
4. Make constant adjustments to keep on course.
5. Arrive.
6. Drink, and enjoy the place you’ve gotten to.
These are lessons I carry with me back to work, and through the rest of life.

The kids were waiting their turn when we tacked up to the house. I jumped out and they jumped in. I was giddy with finding comfort on the boat, and though it was only 11am, I poured myself a glass of wine. I don’t have instinct yet, but with practice I will.
My office today

May 30th, 2016

Working from a screened porch on the coast of Georgia.

For the first time in over a year and a half at Automattic, I am taking full advantage of the fact that I can work from anywhere. This summer, my husband and I grappled with how to get our kids from Virginia to Georgia and Florida so they could spend time with their grandparents in each state.

We talked about meeting one set of grandparents halfway, then those grandparents meeting the other grandparents halfway again, then sending the kids home from Florida to Virginia unaccompanied on an airplane.

That would have worked, except that it would have cost us more money than we wanted to spend, and it would have created a lot of driving for the grandparents. Plus, my husband and I wanted the chance to see our parents, but neither of us could justify taking two weeks off to visit everyone, plus another week for our own family vacation in August.

Then one day it hit me. Duh. I can work from anywhere. As long as I have my laptop and wifi, I’m all set. I can be the ultimate mom taxi: drive the kids to the grandparents 7 and 15 hours away and get to hang out with everyone in the evenings when my workday is done

So this morning, I worked from my parents’ screened porch on the coast of Georgia. And as a bonus, I got to use my mom’s laptop to test software on a different operating system and browser configuration than I usually use.

I could get used to this.

Tag: work

Standing in the shower, thinking

Tools I use for task and time management

Task management

Time management

Communication in a distributed workplace

Ecologist to… Happiness Engineer? The evolution of one career in support.

On my way to Whistler

Sailing (and life) lesson: know where you want to go.

My office today