Managing

Tell ya what, it has been a busy few months. How do I manage? I've been asked so many times in recent weeks. The word has almost lost its meaning.

This week is a week of work that stands a good chance of seeing me doing my job and nothing too much else outside of work. It's bliss, in many ways. Last week and the weeks before that I was learning how to do my job being a new manager, whilst moving myself and my family to Denmark from the UK and going to, assisting with and speaking at Codegarden 22, our annual developer conference, here in Odense.

This is where I was asked that question the most. Two weeks after a slew of life-changes, I found myself doing what I love - I was able to help people to make their first code contributions to our repo, connect developers with other developers, introduce our new MVPs to the wider community and talk and talk and talk to the people I have worked alongside for years and the brand new people learning what this community is about.

This week, I am a new manager, full stop.

Thankfully, I still get to do those things, just at a more-manageable pace. I spent weeks wondering whether I could be described as a hit-the-ground-running sort of new manager or more of a give-her-time-and-she'll-settle-in type. I haven't decided and the likelihood is that it's a bit of both but feeling the world around work slow down a little (and with a 2 week break from work looming) has made me unusually reflective; it's given me time to work out how I work. Some meta work can happen.

One of my emergency implications was to create (or more specifically repurpose) a Trello that could act as my bucket. The bucket is the place where all the thoughts are kept. Reminding myself to chuck a keyword into a bucket is far more manageable than reminding myself to do a thing. The bucket must be a single source of truth or else the bucket cannot work. If I rummage around the bucket every morning, before I get stuck in to anything else, I am less likely to experience overwhelm. My experience of my own productivity is that everything gets done. I always do the things and they are done on time but the psychological pressure I place myself under is dependent on the systems I employ to task manage. In short, I can work on things confident that I'm delivering what I promised and it's an enjoyable experience that actually tops up my self esteem OR I can work while terrified that I'm letting people down and missing something and it feels like I'm on fire and I will die. The bucket is the tool that saves me from that.

A minute ago, I was talking about life, right? Life is always a bit too big. It's a nice problem to have, don't get me wrong, but there's tonnes of it. And with all these wonderful changes, the overheads cannot be ignored. Great news though! There's a bucket for that too.

The bucket system is versatile, as well as low maintenance. My life-bucket doesn't even live in Trello. When I'm doing 'life' I'm usually only near to my phone so that lives in a task list on my home screen. I can't access any of the sweet, juicy, dopamine-producing apps without seeing it. I do ignore it plenty, sure, but again, I can be confident that if I throw a thing into the bucket, lo and behold, at some point it'll get done.

"What's the meaning of 'Sausages' in this context please?"

A couple of buckets then, keep me sane. You're welcome. Full disclosure though: this system does not scale. I have tried to share access to my buckets and the time it takes to explain the system and then the queries I will get renders it unproductive. The beauty of the bucket is that I don't need to take time to adapt my notes for other people's eyes. I can't say I always understand what I written but the freedom to just chuck in a word keeps the bucket system sustainable. On top of the bucket system live a series of more complex processes - complex because they require more cognitive effort. It's working out what 'sausages' meant, it's categorising things into lists of things that are important, things that are important and urgent and things that are neither. I can walk away from this framework and still feel safe though. As long as the bucket underpins the rest of my processes, I'm going to get things done.

Some systems are empowering

So far, life as a new manager looks like this: creating new systems to cope with new types of work in real time while coping and using those systems. No project would be run this way. Actually, let me take that back. No project should be run this way. But it's what I had. I'm a big fan of change and with all that delicious novelty comes a need to adjust and to create ways that I can do just that without royally screwing anything up. In my first week as manager, thanks to a slippery copy-and-paste finger, I presented my metrics to the rest of the team and I was left baffled when it transpired I had missed out the most important numbers. Whilst the feedback was constructive and kind, my inner-critic was not. That was rocket fuel to keep her going across an entire weekend. The bucket might not had prevented this from happening but it saves me the trouble of experiencing an awful lot more.

I'm a great believer in systems, if only so we can deviate from them. I love nothing more than looking back at a week of 'productivity' and appreciating that I was able to attend to everything. Not finish everything, but to have a good idea of what's going on and ensure that things will happen when they need to. Sometimes that thing is a mammoth project that I've sweated to get finished and other times, it's a call from me asking for more time. Both things are deemed acceptable in my reflective Friday-bar musings. In the deviant weeks, the weeks where I ignored the buckets entirely, I am comforted by the knowing that all I need to do next week is pick up the tools.

In this case, it's two of the same tool. A couple of buckets.

Simple is as simple does

I don't think this is a radical system but one of the things I learned when I started working was that one person's everyday can be an epiphany for another. Mostly though, I share for identification. In case you are on the hunt for a more sophisticated system when your bucket/sieve/pen and notepad system is all you really need. In my experience, making things simple is the way to making them sustainable.