I read (watched?) a good thing about 'toxic journalling' last year. It said that what you journal about is where you're putting your energy and focus and you need to be careful not to turn it into a negative process.
That resonated with me so I've been making a conscious effort to take note of Good Things (primarily) and… it really seems to work.
For several weeks on the trot I feel like my weeknotes have just been about how my cup runneth over and I suppose I've getting a bit self-conscious about it. Like I'm bragging about my wonderful life or something.
I know this is stupid. Just observing it.
Not so good things
As it happens, I have a bit of steam to let off this week, and I'll do them first so as not to end on a downer.
Firebreak
The first 'Firebreak' we had at work was at the end of lockdown and a bunch of COVID-related work that had put additional strain of the org during what was already a particularly gruelling period.
The idea was that everyone took a week to pursue a personal development interest and then present back on it. There was an understanding that it should be vaguely consistent with your function as an employee, but other than that you could kind of do what you liked.
This was great; the unconditional nature of the exercise demonstrated trust in the staff and I think it was rewarded. We all presented on our topics and I don't remember anyone taking the piss.
Successive iterations of Firebreak have, IMO, destroyed whatever was good about it. Now we're organised top-down and made opt-in to one of several team challenges with weird, vague ambitions that we can't hope to address meaningfully in 5 days (or 4 or 3 depending on how you factor in people's flexitime).
I'm not going to bang on about all the ins and outs of why this approach is dysfunctional, so I'm only scratching the surface here, but as I said to a colleague:
Ideation is good; self-organisation is good; experimentation is good; collaboration is good; skill-sharing is good; all these things are worth practising, but you can't just set aside one week and say "practise all these things". It's like taking a bunch of quality ingredients - chillis, eggs, honey, pomegranete, tofu, aubergine - fling them into a blender and assume they'll somehow self-assemble into a delicious meal.
What is the value of this exercise to the organisation? I don't believe we'll get anything that's actually applicable to BAU product. I don't believe we'll learn anything meaningful. And, personally, at least, it's not only not fun it's actively stressful.
And to be fair, I think this is what's fuelling a lot of my frustration about this — I'm feeling quite stressed about the whole thing. Being in a group I don't normally work with; no established roles or structure; no clear goal or outcome; a presentation deadline at the end of it. Intellectually I know it's low-stakes, but the dynamics of this is actually giving me a lot of anxiety.
So maybe that's the biggest opportunity for me and I'll try and lean into it — being outside my comfort zone; working without structure; personal politics (exhausting).
Website woes
After that screed my second gripe is rather trivial: being unable to structure this website in a way I feel comfortable with.
Overall I'm really quite happy with the current incarnation of my personal website and messing around with it is (in my mind) one of my favourite pastimes. When the going is good, I really do enjoy it, but this week I've spent a lot of time trying to simplify the template inheritance, use nunjucks and eleventy in more idiomatic ways, and refactor the CSS for clarity, performance, and easy of maintenance.
And it's worked out, I suppose. I've had some penny-drop moments about how template chaining works, how to use CSS grid in a way that's not insane, and I have a site that's presentable (I think) in prod.
But the process hasn't been as fun as I thought. I've had a few late nights desperately trying to unfuck layouts before I feel I can go to sleep and I still can't find my way to organising things in a clean, comprehensible way.
It's felt a bit like when I was playing Fallout 3 and I loved it until, at some point, I found myself grinding away at 3am and taking no pleasure in the process, a bit like drug addiction.
So anyway, there's something to think about there. I should probably be more disciplined about the tasks I do, like I would in work: smaller, well-defined tasks that can be completed and verified and released incrementally. I need to stop wandering off and miring myself in weird dependency chains of whimsy.
Good things
Alright, here we go.
Personal
- Almost booze-free.
- Maintained good-ish diet streak.
- Made some progress with my website, despite frustration.
- Really enjoying reading The Mysterious Benedict Society to K of a night.
- C got some medicine and is getting back to normal.
- Cleared out the freezer, used up food.
- Provided my family with many tasty, nutritious meals.
- 3rd Parkrun, 3rd consecutive PB time.
- 2nd TTRPG session with K, CK & TQ (with figures!).
- Rocking the pottery.
Professional
- Smooth interim release in which I got everything done that I had to do.
- Built confidence around my webpack learnings.
- More good (I like to think) contributions to design system conversations
- Bottomed out a implementation problem so we could accept the constraint and move on.
- Learnt a bit of freemarker stuff in the process.
- Made an effort to introduce myself to a new colleague I'd somehow been left out of the loop on.
- Brought my game face to the whole Firebreak thing, even though it's stupid.
Final thoughts
Having done that whole bit about positive and negative journalling above, and then doing a bit of both, it occurs to me that the bad stuff seems to demand more to record. I feel compelled to get into the nitty-gritty of why exactly the thing is bad, and it tends to be complex.
So although I only wrote about 2 bad things, they took much more space, time and energy than the 20 or so good things I noted. 🤔
It feels like a corollary of Brandolini's law…? The bad stuff comes from disorder, and disorder consumes a disproportionate amoout of energy, one way or another.
Hmmm.
END