I just sent an email to myself.
There’s kind of a lot happening right now. I work at a major tech company that is both growing and cutting back (looking at our stock valuation vs. our layoffs notice is an interesting, eye-crossing experience). My house is a little upended with some projects, and there are equally intricate family-dynamics things (all goodness just lots of moving parts). I also signed on to be a board member of the Washington Women’s Foundation and that adds another avenue of effort. If anything, work is the most relaxing part of my life at this moment, and that is saying something.
At 5am this morning my eyeballs snapped open, because of course they did, and here with my coffee I am sorting through the different mental threads and trying to find order. Coffee helps.
One of the things that happens semi-regularly where I work is a re-organization of the humans: upon evaluation of the market conditions, or assimilation of another group, or the departure or arrival of New Hotness, we split apart and reassemble our workforce like so many bucky balls. There are benefits and there are detractions: on the one hand, you get cross-pollination, you discover that the tech world is really small (I frequently find myself working again with people I worked with 5 or 10 years ago), you get new technology to play with, and so forth. On the other hand, the relabeling and renaming of things, the re-explanation of charter, and the re-divvying of workloads and requirements can make some apprehensive, some frustrated, and everyone a little less productive (for a time).
And so, this morning as I parsed through mails and thought about impacts, I started to pen a note to our leadership team outlining some of those impacts that would need attention, if not urgently. Renaming and refactoring things has implications to identity and access, and picking through how we can both stop the goat-rodeo of reacting to these reorganizations with short-term solutions for those, while also finding something that is efficient to execute, takes brain space. Again, coffee helps.
About two paragraphs into the email (ya, I know) I changed the “to” line and sent it to myself. It’s not fully baked, and if I send this thing out, the reaction from the recipients is likely to be, “ok, and?”. I don’t want to add to the churn, I do want to think about it more, but if I don’t send this to myself, I’m likely to push it off or at least not have the start of the salient thoughts written down somewhere. It needs to be in my inbox, because I need to consistently reflect on it.
Two months ago, some enterprising person managed to acquire my work email and my personal credit card and wrought some not insignificant damage, the legacy of which is my spam folder is legendary and my inbound email is a Bandini Mountain through which I must parse. Hyper-vigilant junk mail filters help, routine email hygiene helps, but it’s still a volume of stuff to wade through each morning to find the “real” things.
And I have just added to that pile.
Again. Coffee helps.
Bobbie Conti 