Caged Perspective and the Omen
This morning I was greeted with an omen. One I probably should have listened to. Shut the laptop, asked for a holiday, and spent the day pretending to be a rally driver on Dirt Rally 2.0. With my last blog post being on attitude, positivity, and focusing on my cactus (it’s still alive and relevant), I tried to face this BSOD with the outlook of a possibility thinker!
“Well, now I have the possibility of concentrating on the high priority stuff, rather than having to boot up the computer to tab back through 32 chrome windows of articles I’m interested in but cannot read, 16 teams notifications and an inbox that resembles my garden - growing quicker than I can maintain.”
It’s safe to say that chrome remembers your tabs, MS teams takes pride in notifying you, and outlook enjoys starting when your machine does. So back to square one.
Rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic
If you wish to know your past life, look to your present circumstances. If you wish to know your future life, look at your present actions
- Padmasambhava, Buddhist saying
Being a Scrum Master for 3 teams and wanting to serve them all equally, timely and to the best of my ability at all times is perfection I know I can’t achieve, but it doesn’t stop me trying and punishing myself for after I eventually fail to do so. Miserably might I add. Time and time again I have struggled with prioritising and understanding where I should be at any given time. I have had mentors suggest focussing on top 10 issues and just focussing on what I CAN get done rather than worrying about the host of other items other people need my help with. This has been effective but it wasn’t enough. It resulted in me rewriting my to-do lists in different ways to see if it would change the problem, but in reality, it made me realise something. Something that was the worst of all - it make me feel busy.
Here’s a few...
Post-it notes on a laptop screen
Post-it notes on my wall
Endless lines in a notebook that acts as a “source of truth”
Post-it notes AND lines in a notebook
(I thought that experiment would work. Hindsight says it's pretty hilarious how I didn’t see that one failing at all...)
Reminders on my phone
Alarms on my phone
Automatic Emails
Calendar Slots
Outlook Notes
Onenote
You name it, somewhere along the way, I’ve tried a flavour of it. It got to the point I was doing things that didn’t matter. Just do something, even if it was changing my email contact list and tidying the calendar. It felt like I was rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic.
Some of the best firefighters are also the best arsonists
People in our industry love the use of the firefighting analogy. I believe it’s because it’s effective and gets a point across, but equally, there is an element of heroism to it. You are a heroic person, doing meaningful, important, and urgent work - saving lives and putting out fires! In reality, we’re likely backing out changes from live that graham decided to push before heading home suspiciously early without running any tests and thinking he's done an awesome job today! Thanks for coming in today Graham! Good Work. 👍🏼👍🏼 I find myself in this analogy a lot of the time, except I’m trying to put out multiple fires across multiple cities with nothing but a bike and a water pistol from Poundland. Rearranging the work didn’t help and I was back to square one (again) - the fire-putter-outer that was surrounded in fire. I decided to think about how I can organise the work to make more sense of it so I can make better decisions about where I spend my time...
Ask yourself 2 simple questions:
Is the activity important?
Is the activity urgent?
This lead to four categories:
Fire fighting (activities that are urgent and important).
Fire prevention (activities that are important).
False alarms (activities that are urgent).
Fire escapes (activities that are neither urgent or important
Great, four perfectly new categories, each to hold my numerous post-it notes and books! I started plotting away and just found myself putting a lot of things into fire fighting. Hmm.... this exercise didn’t seem to work but it got me thinking... (again...)
How many fires am I responding to and how many of these fires am I responsible for starting?
This lead to the thought that some of the best firefighters are also the best arsonists. Always active, always busy and available to help no matter the cost. Not at one point did I think that I could be causing fires by dropping cigarettes into the road as I peddled to the next city lock and loaded, only to leave a path of fire behind me that I would put out later. It dawned on me that I see this behaviour not just in myself but in a lot of people in my day to day and now I wonder what the world would look like if we spent more of our time in fire prevention where we are being pro-active rather than reactive.
Raging Inferno
The more time we spend preventing fires, the less time we have to spend putting them out and dealing with the super urgent, hyper important issues such as figuring out whether we’re collecting the Chinese takeaway tonight or getting it delivered. This is because we’re innovating in fire prevention, creating fire-resistant material, planning, training, and ultimately stopping the fire before it becomes a raging inferno. These types of problems don’t require getting involved and solving them, they require anticipation and small bets to test our thinking and way forward. To douse the infernos that surround, I realise I need to be creative and anticipate fires before they start rather than spending all of my time fighting them. It might mean some houses and buildings fall, but sometimes we can learn from destruction and more beautiful things can emerge from the rubble. It’s a hard concept to put into practice and equally difficult to have the perspective to bring yourself out of the carnage to see where you are. Sometimes it takes a bike ride and a makeshift vista for you to realise you were having a caged perspective.