September 2023 – Bobbie Conti

I play a lot of Tetris. Cascading four-block shapes that have to be fit “just so” with one of two goals: either maximize your “points” (in which case your strategy is to build up four lines and then complete them by slotting a final piece in) or maximize the number of rows you exhaust (in which case your strategy is to complete a single line as often as possible). As you play either the cascade speeds up or impediments are put in your way to make it hard to complete rows. (FWIW, Tetris appears to be licensed out to a bunch of different entities and so your version may vary). I will play three or four rounds transitioning between “work brain” and “home brain”, a way to “accomplish” something, much the way finishing a cup of coffee and working out in the morning means I have “accomplished” something and/or doing a load of towels means I have “accomplished” something.

The thing is, as you progress in Tetris the speed and/or impediments do increase and so you rarely get nice, neat complete rows out of the gate (towards either goal). There’s always a gap and you can choose to ignore it (build nice, neat rows above it) or engineer towards it (what do I have to eliminate to get that gap addressed). If you are the type of person who likes everything “just so” you may find yourself using that second strategy and occasionally to your detriment: if you employ the “remove all gaps” strategy, you are giving up on “build up solid rows” strategy.

Of course this is like work.

I am a “Technical Program Manager” – but I expect this is observed and encountered by “Product Managers” and “Software Engineers” and pretty much any other role in which you have to coordinate sixteen things in order to deliver A Thing. Out of sixteen things, four will work perfectly well and four will work moderately well and four will be okay-ish and four will be an abject nightmare of permissions, architecture, personalities and/or randomization. (Your proportions may vary, your encounters will not). You can focus on those last four or you can work around them, but you will rarely, if ever, encounter a program or objective that does not hand you gaps through which you must strategize.

It’s frustrating. It’s also a muscle to build, because the nature of the world we live in now is that things are increasingly more intricate even while we strive to have things like AI and ML make things easier; I would posit that the development of AI and ML solutions have not been easy for those who *build* them. As our careers and technology progress, the blocks start falling faster, and the obstacles increase; and hopefully we get more agile and effective in dealing with them, because they continue.

Or we give up and go do a load of towels.

I am very competitive, and I don’t compete with you.

I realize that may be an aggressive statement so allow me to explain I’ve just had an epiphany, one marked from extremely privilege and pique, and I’m not particularly proud of it but I’m glad I know it.

My Apple Watch died. (I realize this is a privilege problem and it just helped me understand a little more about myself.)

In 2018 my husband got me an Apple Watch, because I had been using a Fit Bit reliably for years and am a sucker for metrics: how many steps, how many miles, how many runs. When “challenges” would get posted in Map My Run or in peer groups (e.g., run 1 mile per day every day for 365) I would happily accept. I’ve been tracking my food in MyFitnessPal for years too (yes, I’m aware that this gives Under Armor a ton of data about me). If I can measure it, I can improve it.

I am not fanatical about it and a couple of bouts with COVID and associated other health problems have clapped back, but for the most part, I have led a life, in the last 15 years or so, of “how much better can I get” (nestled against the reality of physical and mental limitation).

A couple of years back I upgraded my watch and was able to “keep my streak” — the Apple Watch has fitness rings that accrue information about how often you stand, how much you move, and how much you exercise — and you can extend the limits of those rings as appropriate. It also includes a monthly challenge that appears somewhat tailored to you based on your recent metrics. There is a monthly “award” for moving a certain amount each day every day.

It also provides a bunch of other metrics one can rathole on, such as VO2 max (lung capacity), an Oxygen saturation sensor (which is okay), and a heart rate monitor (which is excellent and I over index on it regularly). You can augment some of this data through other methods (e.g., Map My Run) but for the most part, this all hinges on having the watch.

My streak is broken. I have only “feelings” to judge if I really pushed myself in my workout yesterday, I have only “feelings” to judge if I slept well (I feel like I did), I have only “feelings” to judge if I stood enough yesterday. I don’t like it. (Yes, a fix is on the way).

That these metrics mean *nothing* to anyone else is absolutely the point: they mean something to *me* and I miss them. I use them to judge improvement and progress, and without them I’m looking at a space in my graphs. It’s annoying.

What I do not miss, and I never used, was the “competition” feature. There’s a feature in the fitness app that allows you to “compete” with a friend, by sharing your stats. I’ve never used it, even though there’s an easy-to-get badge for it. In a world where I love getting badges for badge’s sake (heck I even did Yoga to get the International Yoga Day one), in the five-ish years I’ve had this watch I’ve not once competed with a friend. I don’t like to compete with other people.

I’m not running down competing with other people, for other people. If you’re into a sport or chess or running for office or any number of professions, competition is real and cogent. It is a zero-sum game; there can only be one gold medal or one Governor or what have you. In those cases, the competition is not set by *you*, it’s set by whatever rules/governing body exists: e.g., we can have only one Miss America because those are the rules of the Miss America Pageant.

I do not have to operate in any environment where that is the case, which is great, because I do not *like* to.

I cannot control what someone else does/did do/will do; I do not like spending the mental energy trying to game out all of the solutions of a human’s behavior. Why should whatever *you* elect to do influence what *I* do in any way? You want to go for that promotion? Go for it! You want to go run that half marathon/marathon/Ironman/etc.? You go! You want to run for office (any office)? Enjoy! And count me out: I seek places where I can improve me and I can improve the things around me, but that improvement should not come at the expense of someone “losing”.

There is an interpretation where I could be considered to compete and that is At Work, come Review Time. (It’s not called that – the process of impact evaluation at my work is called One Thing, and the process by which it is rewarded is called Another Thing). The realities of work budgets are that there is a fixed sum that can be distributed amongst constituents and in a world where Money is the clearest signifier of Appreciation then that can be considered competition: if I get an extra dollar, someone is losing a dollar.

But I’m not deciding who that someone is, and I’m not looking at all of the someone’s and “plotting” my next moves with that in mine. My assumption is I have my charter and the things I need to do and the things I can improve, and everyone else does, too. If I land what I need to land and what I set out to, great. The very best-case scenario is the person who has to do the Evaluating has a Hard Time. But *I* don’t have to do that evaluation, that’s Somebody Else’s Problem. *I* am not competing, someone else is *comparing*. We are not running the same race or playing the same game because our tracks are different, and our hurdles are tailored to us; I don’t have to obsess over how I’m going to be better at you than a Thing because that Thing isn’t even in my wheelhouse or on my radar.

When it comes to competing with myself, though, I’ve just lost some key data sets, and until I get it back, it’s going to be hard to distribute rewards. I am used to having all of that so easily, because of this watch.

And now my watch has ended. (I’ll see myself out).

Month: September 2023

Gap Analysis