After lunch with my work team in a delightful restaurant overlooking the bridge (which I’m just-about pointing at in the attached photo) I decided to take a diversion on the route back
to our coworking space to come and find this geocache, my most-Easterly yet.
The coordinates put me exactly at a likely spot, but it actually took until I’d searched three different candidate hosts before the cache container was in my hand. Signed log and
(stealthily) returned to hiding place. TFTC!
With visa complications and travel challenges, this is the very first time that my team – whom I’ve been working with for the last year – have ever all been in the same country, all at
the same time.
You can do a lot in a distributed work environment. But sometimes you just have to come together… in celebration of your achievements, in anticipation of what you’ll do next, and in aid
of doing those kinds of work that really benefit from a close, communal, same-timezone environment.
Hanging with my team at our meetup in Istanbul, this lunchtime I needed to do some accessibility testing…
(with apologies to anybody who doesn’t know that in user interface design, a “kebab menu” is one of those menu icons with a vertical line of three dots: a vertical
ellipsis)
I’m visiting Istanbul to meet with colleagues, but we took some time off from our meetings and work this afternoon to come and get lost in the Grand Bazaar. While browsing the amazing
diversity of stalls I found myself staring at the floors, which are made of the same kind of limestone as my kitchen floor (in which my kids love hunting for fossils!). Wouldn’t that
make a great Earthcache, I thought… and it turns out it anyway is one! So I spent a little while hunting for the best fossil I could find (I’d hoped for a gastropod of some kind, but
had to settle for a bivalve), and sent the answers to the CO. Fantastic stuff. TFTC! FP awarded. And,
possibly, FTF!
Last month my pest of a dog destroyed my slippers, and it was more-disruptive to my life than I would have anticipated.
Look what you did, you troublemaker.
Sure, they were just a pair of slippers1, but they’d
become part of my routine, and their absence had an impact.
Routines are important, and that’s especially true when you work from home. After I first moved to Oxford and started doing entirely remote work for the first time, I found the transition challenging2.
To feel more “normal”, I introduced an artificial “commute” into my day: going out of my front door and walking around the block in the morning, and then doing the same thing in reverse
in the evening.
My original remote working office, circa 2010.
It turns out that in the 2020s my slippers had come to serve a similar purpose – “bookending” my day – as my artificial commute had over a decade earlier. I’d slip them on when I was at
my desk and working, and slide them off when my workday was done. With my “work” desk being literally the same space as my “not work” desk, the slippers were a psychological reminder of
which “mode” I was in. People talk about putting on “hats” as a metaphor for different roles and personas they hold, but for me… the distinction was literal footwear.
And so after a furry little monster (who for various reasons hadn’t had her customary walk yet that day and was probably feeling a little frustrated) destroyed my slippers… it actually
tripped me up3. I’d be doing
something work-related and my feet would go wandering, of their own accord, to try to find their comfortable slip-ons, and when they failed, my brain would be briefly tricked
into glancing down to look for them, momentarily breaking my flow. Or I’d be distracted by something non-work-related and fail to get back into the zone without the warm, toe-hugging
reminder of what I should be doing.
It wasn’t a huge impact. But it wasn’t nothing either.
The bleppy little beast hasn’t expressed an interest in my replacement slippers, yet. Probably because they’re still acquiring the smell of my feet, which I’m guessing is
what interested her in the first place.
So I got myself a new pair of slippers. They’re a different design, and I’m not so keen on the lack of an enclosed heel, but they solved the productivity and focus problem I was facing.
It’s strange how such a little thing can have such a big impact.
Oh! And d’ya know what? This is my hundredth blog post of the year so far! Coming on only the 73rd day of the year, this is my fastest run at
#100DaysToOffload yet (my previous best was last year, when I managed the same on 22 April). 73 is exactly a fifth of 365, so… I guess I’m on
track for a mammoth 500 posts this year? Which would be my second-busiest blogging year ever, after 2018. Let’s see how I get on…4
Footnotes
1 They were actually quite a nice pair of slippers. JTA got them for me as a gift a few years back, and they lived either on my feet or under my desk ever since.
2 I was working remotely for a company where everybody else was working
in-person. That kind of hybrid setup is a lot harder to do “right”, as many companies in this post-Covid-lockdowns age have discovered, and it’s understandable that I found it
somewhat isolating. I’m glad to say that the experience of working for my current employer – who are entirely distributed –
is much more-supportive.
3 Figuratively, not literally. Although I would probably have literally tripped
over had I tried to wear the tattered remains of my shredded slippers!
I decided to take my meeting with my coach today in our house’s new library, which my metamour
JTA has recently been working hard on decorating, constructing, and filling with books. The room’s not quite finished, but it made for a brilliant space for a bit of quiet
reflection and self-growth work.
(Incidentally: I might be treating “lives in a house with a library” as a measure of personal success. Like: this is what winning at life looks like, right? Because whatever
else goes wrong, at least you can go hide in the library!)
Using WordPress internally at Automattic as a productivity tool is great… until you have to call in sick three days in a row and Jetpack treats your “streak” as an “achievement”! 😅
It’s possible I don’t understand social media any more. To be fair, it’s possible that I never did.
This is something between absurd and hilarious. Aside from the 100 year plan (which is fascinating, and I keep meaning to share my thoughts
on), I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be advertising. Maybe it’s trying to showcase how cool it is to work with Automattic? (It’s
not… exactly like it’s depicted in the video. But I’d be lying if I said that fewer than 50% of my meetings this week have included a discussion on snack foods, so maybe we are
I guess at least a little eccentric.)
I think I understand what it’s parodying. And that’s fun. But… wow. You don’t see many videos like this attached to a corporate YouTube account, do you? Kudos for keeping the Internet
fun and weird, WordPress.com.
[a quote from Ed Catmull’s book Creativity Inc.] made me think a lot about the early days of Gutenberg and the huge
resistance it had in the community, including causing the fork of ClassicPress. Now that we’re much further along there’s a pretty widespread acceptance of Gutenberg, and it’s
responsible for the vast majority of all WP posts and pages made, however if we had taken a vote for whether it should happen or not, it probably wouldn’t have ever gotten off the
ground.
What’s funny is if you go back even further, using a visual WYSIWYG editor in the first place was very controversial, and many people didn’t want the classic editor brought into
WordPress.
Long-term WordPresser here; I remember when 2.0 integrated TinyMCE and it was absolutely necessary to ensure that raw HTML editing
remained an option, clear and up-front. Which I’m glad of: I probably hit raw HTML about once a month when I’m blogging, to this day!
I was among those who strongly resisted Gutenberg. Nowadays I use it every day! But my primary personal blog, which was already almost six years old when it migrated to WordPress 1.2
back in 2004, still uses the classic editor. I enjoy that I have the freedom to do that.
When we talk about open source meaning freedom, this is the kind of thing we mean. Years ago, I was in charge of the CMS for a major academic
institution when the company behind that CMS made a gradual and concerted effort to become less-open-source. That CMS didn’t have the ecosystem
and community around it that WordPress has, and so no forks took off, and so my employer got locked-in to upgrading to a new version that was mostly-closed-source and was in some ways
inferior. Ugh.
(Incidentally, I got them off that CMS: they’re now using a mixture of WordPress and Drupal for most of their
systems. Open source won.)
Change isn’t always good. But open source provides the freedom to embrace change in the way that suits you best.
I have A Plan for today. Step #2 involves a deep-dive into Algolia search indexing, ranking, and priority, to understand how one might optimise for a diverse and complex dataset.
So obviously step #1 involves a big ol’ coffee and a sugary breakfast. Here we go…
Once all the matches have been burned, you can’t use them to light any more fires. It’s not the best metaphor, but it’s the one you’re getting.
If I were anybody else, you might reasonably expect me to talk about work-related burnout and how a sabbatical helped me to recover from it. But in a surprise twist1, my recent brush with burnout came during my sabbatical.
Somehow, I stopped working at my day job… and instead decided to do so much more voluntary work during my newly-empty daytimes – on top of the evening and weekend volunteering
I was already doing – that just turned out to be… too much. I wrote a little about it at the time in a post for RSS subscribers only, mostly
as a form of self-recognition: patting myself on the back for spotting the problem and course-correcting before it got worse!
When I got back to work2,
I collared my coach to talk about this experience. It was one of those broadening “oh, so that’s why I’m like this”
experiences:
The why of how I, y’know, got off course at the end of last year and drove myself towards an unhealthy work attitude… is irrelevant, really. But the actual lesson here that I took from
my sabbatical is: just because you’re not working in a conventional sense doesn’t make you immune from burnout. Burnout happens when you do too much, for too
long, without compassion for yourself and your needs
I dodged it at the end of November, but that doesn’t mean I’ll always be able to, so this is exactly the kind of thing a coach is there to help with!
Footnotes
1 Except to people who know me well at all, to whom this post might not be even remotely
surprising.
2 Among the many delightful benefits to my job is a monthly session with my choice of
coach. I’ve written a little about it before, but the short of it is that it’s an excellent perk.
Today was my first day back at work after three months of paid leave1. I’d meant to write about the overall experience of my sabbatical and the things I gained
from it before I returned, but I’m glad I didn’t because one of the lessons only crystallised this morning.
This is about the point on the way back from the school run at which I pull out my phone and see what’s happening in the world or at work. But not today.
My typical work schedule sees me wake up some time before 06:30 so I can check my notifications, formulate my to-do list for the day, and so on, before the kids get up. Then I can focus
on getting them full of breakfast, dressed, and to school, and when I come back to my desk I’ve already got my day planned-out. It’s always felt like a good way to bookend my day, and
it leans into my “early bird” propensities2.
Over the last few years, I’ve made a habit of pulling out my phone and checking for any new work Slack conversations while on the way back after dropping the kids at school. By this
point it’s about 08:45 which is approximately the time of day that all of my immediate teammates – who span five timezones – have all checked-in. This, of course, required that I was
signed in to work Slack on my personal phone, but I’d come to legitimise this bit of undisciplined work/life-balance interaction by virtue of the fact that, for example, walking the dog
home from the school run was “downtime” anyway. What harm could it do to start doing “work” things ten minutes early?
Here. Here is where work happens (or, y’know, anywhere I take my work laptop to… but the crucial thing is that work has a time and a place, and it doesn’t include “while walking the
dog home after dropping the kids at school”).
But walking the dog isn’t “downtime”. It’s personal time. When I’m looking at your phone and thinking about work I’m actively choosing not to be looking at the
beautiful countryside that I’m fortunate enough to be able to enjoy each morning, and not to be thinking about… whatever I might like to be thinking about! By blurring my
work/life-balance I’m curtailing my own freedom, and that’s bad for both my work and personal lives!
My colleague Kyle recently returned from six months of parental leave and shared some wisdom with me, which I’ll
attempt to paraphrase here:
It takes some time at a new job before you learn all of the optimisations you might benefit from making to your life. This particular workflow. That particular notetaking strategy. By
the time you’ve come up with the best answers for you, there’s too much inertia to overcome for you to meaningfully enact personal change.
Coming back from an extended period of leave provides the opportunity to “reboot” the way you work. You’re still informed by all of your previous experience, but you’re newly blessed
with a clean slate within which to implement new frameworks.
He’s right. I’ve experienced this phenomenon when changing roles within an organisation, but there’s an even stronger opportunity, without parallel, to “reboot” your way of
working when returning from a sabbatical. I’ve got several things I’d like to try on this second chapter at Automattic. But the first one is that I’m not connecting my personal phone to
my work Slack account.
2 Mysteriously, and without warning, at about the age of 30 I switched from being a “night
owl” to being an “early bird”, becoming a fun piece of anecdotal evidence against the idea that a person’s preference is genetic or otherwise locked-in at or soon after
birth. As I’ve put it since: “I’ve become one of those chirpy, energetic ‘morning people’ that I used to hate so much when I was younger.”.
The first weekend of my sabbatical might have set the tone for a lot of the charity hacking that will follow, being dominated by a Three Rings volunteering weekend.
The first fortnight of my sabbatical has consisted of:
Three Rings CIC’s AGM weekend and lots of planning for the future of the organisation and how we make it a better place to volunteer, and better value for our charity users,
You’d be amazed how many churros these children can put away.
The trip to Spain followed a model for European family breaks that we first tried in Paris last year2,
but was extended to give us a feel for more of the region than a simple city break would. Ultimately, we ended up in three separate locations:
The PortAventura World theme park, whose accommodation was certainly a gear shift after the 5-star hotel we’d come from4 but whose rides kept us and the kids delighted for a
couple of days (Shambhala was a particular hit with the eldest kid and me).
A villa in el Vilosell – a village of only 190 people – at which the kids mostly played in the outdoor pool (despite the
sometimes pouring rain) but we did get the chance to explore the local area a little. Also, of course, some geocaching: some local caches are 1-2 years old and yet had so few finds that
I was able to be only the tenth or even just the third person to sign the logbooks!
I’d known – planned – that my sabbatical would involve a little travel. But it wasn’t until we began to approach the end of this holiday that I noticed a difference that a holiday
on sabbatical introduces, compared to any other holiday I’ve taken during my adult life…
Perhaps because of the roles I’ve been appointed to – or maybe as a result of my personality – I’ve typically found that my enjoyment of the last day or two of a week-long trip are
marred somewhat by intrusive thoughts of the work week to follow.
I’m not saying that I didn’t write code while on holiday. I totally did, and I open-sourced it too.
But programming feels different when your paycheque doesn’t depend on it.
If I’m back to my normal day job on Monday, then by Saturday I’m already thinking about what I’ll need to be working on (in my case, it’s usually whatever I left unfinished right before
I left), contemplating logging-in to work to check my email or Slack, and so on5.
But this weekend, that wasn’t even an option. I’ve consciously and deliberately cut myself off from my usual channels of work communication, and I’ve been very disciplined about not
turning any of them back on. And even if I did… my team aren’t expecting me to sign into work for about another 11 weeks anyway!
🤯🤯🤯
Monday and Tuesday are going to mostly be split between looking after the children, and voluntary work for Three Rings (gotta fix that new server architecture!). Probably. Wednesday?
Who knows.
That’s my first taste of the magic of a sabbatical, I think. The observation that it’s possible to unplug from my work life and, y’know, not start thinking about it right away
again.
Maybe I can use this as a vehicle to a more healthy work/life balance next year.
Footnotes
1A sabbatical is a perk offered to
Automatticians giving them three months off (with full pay and benefits) after each five years of work. Mine coincidentally came hot on the tail of my last meetup and soon after a whole lot of drama and a major
shake-up, so it was a very welcome time to take a break… although of course it’s been impossible to completely detach from bits of the drama that have spilled out onto the open
Web!
5 I’m fully aware that this is a symptom of poor work/life balance, but I’ve got two
decades of ingrained bad habits working against me now; don’t expect me to change overnight!
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