One reason I’m excited about my new job is that I get to work both inside and outside of the process. My last role mostly found me fixated on the proverbial trees: there were only rarely opportunities to step back and see the forest. As a result, process improvements were not only few and far … Continue reading On getting to see the trees and the forest
Category: Working Life
On the skeleton crew
I know the popular opinion that I should care…but I never much mind working this last week of the year. Aside from the irritation of needing to juggle childcare and family commitments—fairly sizable irritations!—work this week has a rare slowness and a quiet to it that vanishes come the first week of the new year. … Continue reading On the skeleton crew
On the office vibe
Every office I’ve ever worked in has a distinct vibe. It’s some combination of the physical office itself, the work being done there, the people, and—of course—the amorphous blob of a concept that is “office culture.” I’m vague on definition here because I’ve never encountered a satisfactory one. Definitions can have the curious side effect … Continue reading On the office vibe
On transitioning to the manager mindset
I saw so many new opportunities come in today that I felt light-headed at moments: How is turning these around possible? How can I— Well…exactly. It’s no longer an I; it’s now a we. In my last role, when an RFP came into the firm, it landed on just one person’s plate: mine. But now…I’m … Continue reading On transitioning to the manager mindset
On the best prank pulled on me this year
Be warned: this is a nasty little piece of business! I was pulling out of the parking lot the other day when something caught my eye: a strip of white paper tucked under my car’s windshield wiper. A glance was enough to tell me it was not a handout from a local Chinese place looking … Continue reading On the best prank pulled on me this year
On information overload
Most of my brain’s processing power this week went towards digesting informations. And I’m exhausted. I read through probably 150 project sheets over two days, and it was like putting my brain through wind sprints. Even worse was when I opened Google Maps and started trying to relate the projects by location instead of just … Continue reading On information overload
On drinking from the new job firehose
My brain is tired. I forget that the simple act of consuming information is still exhausting. That’s not to suggest that related mental activity—generating information, organizing information, analyzing information—isn’t likewise exhausting, too. It’s only to posit something special about the exhaustion of consumption. I’m reminded of those long, quiet days of focused work where I … Continue reading On drinking from the new job firehose
On the last days of my job and the peak-end rule
Look, endings are important. I didn’t need to learn about the peak-end rule to get that. It’s one of those things that school teaches you indirectly—we all remember the frenzy of the final week before summer. Mostly, there is joy to these endings: everyone amped for the start of summer. But then you reach the … Continue reading On the last days of my job and the peak-end rule
On looking at every button
During a training earlier today, several colleagues were shocked at how much I know about InDesign. But it made perfect sense to me, because of something I did over a year ago: I went through every visible button in my InDesign workspace and figured out what they did. With one to three buttons a day, … Continue reading On looking at every button
On asking questions (and questions and questions…)
I got better at a lot of things over the past five years. One of those was asking questions—or, to be more exact—asking questions that no one else would ask. There is, contrary to popular advice, such a thing as a dumb question. A dumb question has an answer that you could have figured out … Continue reading On asking questions (and questions and questions…)
Taylor Coe 