PhoneBoy Says

My wife brought my daughter back from the hospital this evening after a bag of IV fluids was given to her along with some medicine to calm her stomach. While she's got a ways to go--her energy levels aren't anywhere near where they normally are, she ate and kept it down! She was also singing, which is something she hasn't been doing for a couple of days now. The road to recovery has begun. We'll have to see what tomorrow brings, of course, but at least things ended on a good note.

Meanwhile, my wife is physically and emotionally spent after several days of dealing with this. She passed out rather quickly this evening after getting Gracie to bed. I'm probably not too far behind her as I'm starting to have trouble maintaining focus--a clear sign that I need to get to bed.

It seems like just about every time I go on a business trip, something goes sideways. This one was no exception, though this time it ended up getting worse after I got home. :(

On Thursday night, ironically my daughter's second birthday, my daughter started throwing up. While she throws up from time to time, this began three days worth of throwing up just about everything consumed. On Saturday, I took her to the pediatrician, who thought she had a stomach flu--which isn't something you can do much about. She was given some sort of suppository that was supposed to help the throwing up. It didn't help of course. :(

My mother-in-law called the nearby children's hospital an hour or so ago.They think she is starting to show signs of dehydration and she should be brought in immediately, which is what my wife and her mom are doing now. Hopefully dehydration is the only problem she has and it's not something more serious. But it's a big bummer on the weekend, that's for sure.

Meanwhile, Jaden and I get to spend some quality time together.

One of the things I have spent some time on this week is defining my mission statement as a result of taking the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People training. While I'm not there yet--is anyone ever really there?--I am a lot farther along than I was.

I want my mission statement to be simple. Just a few words that capture the essence of what I want to do and what I want to be. I want to remember it and keep it in mind at all times so I can ensure I am keeping with my mission.

For too long, I have been living by default and not by design. Despite that, I've been pretty damn lucky. I've managed to get myself into a very good position in terms of my work. My family situation, while it can be improved, is also good. However, what I have lacked is a coherent plan for getting where I want to go. A mission statement isn't a full fledged plan, but it's goes a long way towards drafting one.

I have been able to narrow down my mission statement to the acronym SIS: Serve. Inspire. Share. Of course, this isa rough draft and may change. However, as some people wiser than I have said, a bad plan today is better than a good plan tomorrow. It's certainly better than no plan, which is what I have now.

Props to Merlin over at 43 Folders for pointing me at The myth of "keeping up" on stuff.

This is something else that falls out of the concept of "being honest with yourself." If you can look at everything in your life and be truly honest with yourself about whether or not you can realistically do it--or even should--then you can more easily eliminate the "noise" and "stacks of crap" from your life.

I was recently asked to drop everything and write up a plan for something. A couple of hours later, I had a reasonably well detailed about what needed to be done. I needed a time estimate for this task--an estimate I wasn't exactly qualified to make. I send out the plan for review. No response. I sent it out again asking for a response. I get a time estimate. The person who had asked me to do this task and told me how critical it was has yet to respond. So much for this task being critical. Makes me feel like I wasted my time.

One thing I've learned to deal with as a support engineer is interrupts. If you think about it, everything a support engineer does is interrupt-driven. Stuff breaks, customers call support, it's a critical customer, all hands on deck, etc. This is part of the job. However, at a certain point, those interrupts need to be prioritized. What order do you address these tasks in? In my job, at least, I've gotten pretty good at assessing what needs to be done in what order. I am not always perfect, and certainly within my life, I could do a better job prioritizing what I need to do. Even so, there are times when I clearly need help.

At my day job, my management generally has a good overall view and generally do a fantastic job helping to keep all these competing priorities in check. If I come to them and ask "which thing do I do first" I usually get a clear answer. I don't always because, let's face it, sometimes that kind of judgement call is tough to make, but then at least my management and I agree on what the priority is and we move forward. That doesn't mean the situation won't get re-evaluated in a few days or even a few hours, but at least there is agreement. Once we agree, the priority generally doesn't change until the critical situation has de-escalated.

If you're going to be in charge, you have to be able to prioritize. Ten years ago when I was a bit less experienced, I worked ever-so-briefly at the Giant Lizard. My manager was telling my team how it was our responsibility to monitor the support queue and make sure we initially respond to our customers within four hours. This was non-negotiable and must be done. Okay, I understood that. I asked avery critical question: if there are two cases in the queue that area bout to hit the SLA, but I can only respond to one of them, which do I choose? His answer: both of them. I persisted: I have five minutes left until both cases hit the SLA. There is no way I can possibly respond intelligently to both cases in this period of time. How do I choose? He still said: both. A real manager would have given some guidelines for choosing which one, or would have understood the situation and given a standard "use your best judgement, do the best you can" answer.

Not only must you be able to prioritize, you need to be consistent in how things are prioritized. What do I mean by consistent? I mean that priorities are set according to a stable set of guidelines that generally don't change. Does that mean priorities won't change? Of course not, they will change anyway. That's because there are plenty of factors outside of your direct control. You never know when a "more important customer" will call and demand that you fix a bug they've found. However, everyone involved will understand why the priorities have changed because there are guidelines in place.

In another example from my day job, I feel that the product I am working on right now is going in a positive direction. Customer issues are getting addressed in a reasonable fashion. Everyone is fairly clear what the expectations are, clear on how things are prioritized, and generally speaking, the prioritization remains stable. Things are progressing extremely well.

I think another thing that goes along with prioritization is the point I brought up yesterday about being honest with yourself. Part of that "honesty" is recognizing your limitations as well as those of the members in your team. Prioritizing your team to do a task they are clearly not qualified to do is not a good use of time, unless of course, it is training within that area. Time is another limitation you must work with. Asking your team members to work 16 hours a day 7 days a week is quite simply unrealistic. However, having clear, consistent, stable priorities allows you to get the things you need to get done right now and not worry so much about the stuff that doesn't get done.

One of the guys who moderate my FireWall-1 Gurus Mailing List wrote these couple of paragraphs in a private mail exchange. I felt the advice given herein was good enough to share with the rest of the class:

I have been through some rough times and have learned the hard way (enough to risk my job) that it is better to make a clear decision and do what ever you choose to do to do well and let others do the rest. Trying to commit yourself to something which you can not find the time for is not good for those who think they can count on you and not good for yourself either.

Ever since I have been more clearer on this, I feel better about myself and others do feel better about me as well because they can rely on me without second guessing. But I have to admit this was not an easy fight. Me being my toughest opponent to overcome.

What I am finding interesting is that the various advice I am starting to read lately involves the simple, yet very difficult task of being honest with yourself and being honest with yourself regularly. The techniques at 43 Folders for bringing your inbox down to zero, for instance, are all about being honest with yourself when looking at email. Are you going to act on it? Is there some action that this email represents? Well get it done and get that inbox empty! While my inbox isn't exactly zero--it does get there sometimes--but it is definitely a lot more manageable now that I ensure that I manage it daily and keep the message count down into the single digits. While it hasn't made me completely ecstatic, it has made my life seem a little less hectic.

Being honest with myself is tough, as this post I wrote about moving the FireWall-1 content on my site to cpug.org shows. It took me a long time to make the realization that post represents. Of course, some people lie to themselves for a lifetime.

There are plenty of areas in my life where I need to be a bit more honest with myself, I will admit. However, at least I am seeing the need to do it, which is a step up from before. :)

For the past several years, ABC in the US has shown the legendary Charlton Heston / Yul Brynner flick The Ten Commandments. Even 50 years later, this movie is still quite a cinematic feat. The special effects definitely show their age, but I'm sure they were great for their time. The acting is top-notch and the story is, of course, as timeless as The Bible.

When I lived in California, rain pretty much caused activities to grind to a halt. Here in the Seattle area, things generally happen rain or shine. Today was no exception as our neighborhood had our annual Easter Egg hunt in the rain and had a fairly good turnout. Even the Easter Bunny sat out in the rain and took pictures. My daughter didn't go because she's a little bit too young to be out in the rain for that long.

And of course the rain continued for my son's tee-ball pictures, which had individual pictures done under tarps and the team pictures done out in the rain. I feel sorry for the kids who had to get on both knees in the mud. I also feel sorry for the parents who have to wash the white pants the kids some teams had. Fortunately, Jaden's team wears black pants and he didn't have to kneel.

Tee-ball is a hard sport to do in the rain, though, so we didn't have our Saturday afternoon game today. That and, after dealing with pictures in the rain and the Easter Egg hunt, we weren't particularly interested in being in the rain anymore. My son and I went home and played Monopoly where he once again managed to beat me.

This has been one of the more difficult weeks I've had in a while. I've been sleeping far more than I usually do this week just due to the exhaustion I have been feeling at the end of the day. Part of it is the amount of work that I've been doing, part of it is some of the emotional turmoil going on with a friend of mine.

This weekend, my wife is out of town attempting to enjoy herself with a couple of friends. That leaves me taking care of the kids, which isn't so bad, but between the lousy weather and being the end of Spring Break, not all of our usual weekend activities are available. It is a bit of a challenge to keep them entertained and get everything else done too.

Last night was a bit of a challenge as I ended up having to strip and remake my daughter's bed while holding her. Nothing like a bit of barf to make things interesting. Today was a bit of a challenge because my son and I were butting heads more often than usual--it is sometimes so painfully obvious that Jaden is my kid it's scary.

On the plus side, Jaden and I played Monopoly and I got soundly beaten by him. I just wasn't getting good dice rolls. He managed to build up just enough so that a fatal visit to Pennsylvania Avenue was enough to bankrupt me. Since he's still learning the ropes--after all, he's not even 6 yet--I aml ooking forward to the day where he can beat me totally unassisted and I can actually unhandicap myself. My wife thinks I play "too hard" with him, though, but she obviously doesn't know how I play when I play for real. What's scary is how much of the strategy I am "teaching" him is already starting to sink in.

Overall, I have to say this has been a productive week in the office. I managed to get a lot done, make some positive "first impressions" on a person that has the potential to be a future boss, and received encouraging news about my future. Considering I've heard and seen a lot of bad news over the past few months, it's nice to know my employer still values my services. The news I received undeniably confirms that.

It was not all positive this week, though. A co-worker in a different group passed on this week, losing his long and drawn-out battle with cancer. Given everything this person went through during the end of his life on this world, he was truly an inspiration. Even has his health deteriorated and he experienced what can be best described as bad luck, he was always positive and didn't complain about his situation. I am happy to have known him and hope that he finds peace in the afterlife.