Quitting Feels Like Death

When you first hear news of a co-worker resigning, it feels like a small death. Everything you’ve come to appreciate about them for so long will no longer be yours to enjoy, and they will be gone forever. Even though they gave two weeks notice, each day you are staring at a ghost. Their impending…

Summer Six Pack

A young guy a few cubes over who is about 10 pounds overweight despite playing in sports leagues announced his current goal was to have six pack abs by summer, presumably as an indicator of his desired level of fitness. One of the older guys who used to be a wrestler tried to give him…

Dysfunctional Offices

Do you really want to be somewhere organized and effective? This question sounds crazy at first because so many people complain about their insane work environments. It’s far easier to endure a chaotic work environments where projects are regularly late and fail than to endure crazy bosses, rigid rules that serve no purpose, and an…

Preparing for a Job Performance Evaluation

When we don’t know what to do, we fall back on rituals. We try to find the closest ready-made approximations and jam it in as a fix. By conveniently assuming dissimilar things are identical, we can treat them the same. Most people have no capability to evaluate, so apply frameworks conceived by others and assume…

Measuring hours instead of completion cheats everyone

I try not to watch others too closely. I’m not the NSA or CIA. The two professional workmen had a long list of tasks for getting my newly purchased house in order, and they had decided to milk it for a one time gain since we had initially agreed to a daily rate. They’d make…

Careers are a prison sentence

Email from Lowell: My job for the federal government is full of people who treat it like a prison sentence. “I get to retire in 6 years, 13 weeks, and 3 days” they say like inmates enduring a long punishment until they can finally get free to do something of their own choosing and take…