Avoiding "All Smoke, No Fire" syndrome.

There was a woman at the last startup I worked at, lets call her Z.  Z was a juggernaut of energy, always talking, high volume, lots of movement. I brought her into the project that eventually got spun out as a company because I had previously worked 'around' her, and thought she was smart and had good UX foo. She was smart, and she did have good ideas about UX, but those attributes were offset by an incredible lack of focus that not only paralyzed her, but everyone that worked with her.

One day I complained about this to a mutual friend, G. G smiled knowingly and said: "Ah, Z. She's all smoke and no fire". We both smirked at each other, because as far as we were concerned, we were quite the opposite.

Well, Karma's a bitch, because I have to look at the last couple of weeks and flatly declare myself to be All Smoke, No Fire. Part of it is that I'm working at a new company and don't have all of the expertise I need, so  I waste time doing the wrong thing or looking for the right thing because I want to be seen as a good hire. Part of it is that the new company is undergoing a severe fire drill and it's one of those 'all hands on deck' moments that feels great when you're 23, not so great when you're 40, and a little bit of thrashing is inevitable. And most of it is because despite my best intentions, I get caught up in the moment and just dive in and give it my best shot. Again, and again, until I collapse or I brute force my way through. This tendency may be admirable in a battery ("It just keeps going, and going, and going...") but it's wasted motion that I'm never going to get back. Yes, that's the kind of stuff that you think about when you're 40. It's all about conservation of momentum.

The key here is that when I react, when I just 'jump in', I end up wasting a lot of time figuring out what I should have taken the up front time to figure out. And for most goal oriented tasks, what I need to figure out the most is my exit criteria. Other ways to put it:

1. when do I know I've done as much as I can
2. when do I know it's time to move on
3. when do I know I'm done

If I can't answer these succinctly, then I'm probably not doing a goal oriented task. Staying married, or having kids, for instance do not have exit/success criteria. But if I _can_ answer those questions concretely, I have a task that is goal oriented and therefore is possible.

A logical question at this point: Who (the fuck) cares? It's about the process, not the goal, right? Sure.  For those other things (see marriage, kids). But for the shit that has to get done, i.e. at work, where I am compensated for how effective I am, or fired if I am not getting my shit done well, it would be plain fucking stupid to not have solid exit criteria in place for everything I do, every day. Because if I can establish exit criteria that everyone around me agrees with, they'll know when I've done something well. And I'll have proof that I did it well. Which leads to more confidence, bigger tasks, and (ultimately) more fun.  Not only work, but life as well. When I trained for my marathon last year, there was a lot of mileage/effort that I needed to get through in order to feel confident about running 26.2 miles. The really hard stuff doesn't get done by showing up and looking good. It gets done when you think about it, plan out your execution, and execute.

Plus, establishing exit criteria for daily tasks helps maintain a sense of calm in the middle of a lot of chaos. And, honestly, after the last couple of weeks, I need that sense of calm, because without it I'm just churning in place, doing nothing worth remembering.

So here we go. Day 0 of All Fire, No Smoke. When I get up in the morning, I'm going to break down my day and what I need to do to get the goal oriented shit in my life done, and done well. Then I'm going to have more time/energy to spend on the non goal oriented things that make life really worth living. Fuck, yeah.

Race Report: Kirkland Carillon Point Sprint Triathlon 9/20/09

First things first: I had a blast. I'm hooked. I want to do more of these. The swim was fun (maybe because I stayed out of the scrum and on the side), it was over before I knew it. The bike was fun, lots of hills both up and down, again, felt pretty quick. And the run was....OK the run sucked for the first mile, but it got better after that and I started to feel pretty fast by the end.

I'm excited to do more triathlons In all three events, I definitely felt like I was just getting going when it was time to switch.

And about those transitions:  I have a long way to go. They seem so simple until you're actually in the middle of them. Mine were like two slow motion train wrecks. I pretty much did everything wrong, which is sad, because transitions are an opportunity to be smart, not fast, and while I'm not extremely fast, I thought I was smart enough to figure out how to get out of a wetsuit or change shoes quickly. Guess not!  If I were to match my T1 and T2 times to the average times in both, I would have moved up to 30th, which is kind of incredible considering that the only time I was under 30th was in the bike.

Some Data:

• 35th overall out of 83 at 1:24:29
• 35th out of the swim at 15:29, 1:46/100 yards
  
• 79th fastest t1 time at 4:36 (fastest was 1:17, median was 3 minutes)
• 29th fastest bike at 39:42 or 18.1 mph
• 61st fastest t2 time at 2:24 (fastest was 53 seconds, median was 1:52)
• 34th fastest run at 22:18 or 7:25 minute miles

I need another blog

I started blogging a couple of years ago because I wanted to have a record of what I was saying/doing/thinking. My blog, Waving Not Drowning, has become my 'professional' blog. By that I mean I post things about software development, the technologies I use at work and on my home projects, and approaches that I've seen work, with explicit details about how they worked. That blog has become like my professional long term memory.  It contains the sum of the professional gems that I want to remember but will inevitably forget, and has already saved me from re-inventing particular solutions several times.

So now I really can't put other stuff on that blog. I've been posting about other personal stuff up there, and find that I really don't want potential employers knowing anything more about me than my professional experience.

I want this blog to be the personal equivalent of Waving Not Drowning: experiences/observations that I think are worth remembering, either because I don't want to repeat them or because I want to remember what I was doing circa 2009-??, and this is the cheapest way to do that.

One more thing: the name of this blog. I started this blog when working for my current employer trying to do entity tagging of bands and musicians from blogs. I got to write killer posts like 'Why the IROC ROCKS!" and "Ronny James Dio: The Greatest, and I'll kick Your Ass if You Don't Think So", "Van Hagar: the Suck Ass, Whiny Downfall of the One True VH" and "Def Leppard: Those Bitches Were Killed by The Moog". Who knows? Those were so goddamn fun I might have to resurrect them.