Episode 6 - SMART Goals, Carlota

Podcast: Productivity Alchemy

File Name: PA-Episode6

File Length: 01:25:48

Transcription by Keffy

Kevin:                                       [00:00:00] So, before we begin I would like to warn you that while this is not necessarily an explicit podcast, we do swear a lot, and so parental guidance is suggested. And I might have to adjust that when I get around to talking about school planners and back to school season in like a month or two.

Ursula:                                     [00:00:19] We will do a completely all ages show.

Kevin:                                       [00:00:21] There we go. Welcome to—

Ursula:                                     [00:00:23] Somehow.

Kevin:                                       [00:00:23] Yes, somehow. Productivity Alchemy, episode 6.

Ursula:                                     [00:00:28] Woo!

Kevin:                                       [00:00:29] And this week we’ve got a fantastic interview lined up with our friend Carlota, who’s managing things on a big scale. So she’s got to keep, like lots of people and things organized, and lots of moving parts. It’s pretty cool how she does that. I can’t wait to share that with you. In the meantime, let me start by saying last week was a short week. This week is what we will call a typical week for me, which means lots of meetings, lots of things. An interesting side effect is I’m asking as the scrum-master for one of the projects.

Ursula:                                     [00:01:08] Scrum Master.

Kevin:                                       [00:01:11] Yeah, it’s part of the agile project methodology in that we get together and we figure out what we’re gonna do over the course of the next two weeks, which is called a sprint, and we look at the different priorities of the tasks and things like that. Figure out who on the team is going to do what over the next two weeks, and then everybody agrees and has a chance to say, “Well, no, I don’t think we can get this done,” or, “Really, that’s too big.” Or things along those lines. And then at the end of the meeting, we all agree that this is what we’re gonna get done. We start it, and then basically a clock starts ticking. This will make you crazy. Um. Now we have a deadline. But each of us has to get our pieces done within that deadline.

Ursula:                                     [00:01:58] I admire your ability to work with other humans.

Kevin:                                       [00:02:01] Yeah, that’s part of it.

Ursula:                                     [00:02:04] I… our listeners may not know. Long ago, in another life, I was once offered an art director job. And I thought about it very seriously. That was the last time that I have ever been on the cusp of having a job that involved working with other humans.

Kevin:                                       [00:02:23] Yes.

Ursula:                                     [00:02:23] And, barring a brief sting in an office supply—er, in a art supply store, because, you know, I needed to get out of the house more.

Kevin:                                       [00:02:31] Which is a different environment than an office, or where there are deliverables, or things like that.

Ursula:                                     [00:02:34] And I thought, I would have to rely on other people to make deadlines and then I thought, I would end up doing all the art for every project so that it would get done. And then I thought, “I don’t want to die.” So, I turned the job down, Kevin.

Kevin:                                       [00:02:47] Yeah, yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:02:48] Know thyself.

Kevin:                                       [00:02:49] Know thyself. A side effect of all of that is that at the end of the two weeks what we do is we have something called a retrospective, where I—there’s a button for me to say, “Okay, we’re done now.” And it takes all of the things that we got done, shoves them into a done pile, and then takes everything else that didn’t get done and shoves it either into the next sprint, or into…

Ursula:                                     [00:03:13] What program is this?

Kevin:                                       [00:03:14] This is Jira. Atlassian Jira. An Agile tool. Basically it’s a tool made to do just this sort of thing.

Ursula:                                     [00:03:23] Gotcha.

Kevin:                                       [00:03:23] And then we sit down and we talk about what we did well, what we didn’t do well. And anything that we may want to change in the future. And it’s kind of valuable because we’re noticing that we get a lot of—like, we figure out we’re gonna do X in this amount of time, and then we have fifteen more things come in so we don’t get X done. We get maybe, maybe we’ve got ten tickets. Ten items. Fifteen more come in. We’ve got 10 left over at the end of the two weeks. And we will have gotten done like, pretty much half and half between the fifteen that came in unexpectedly and the ten we started out with. So it comes out as a break even. And that’s really frustrating.

Ursula:                                     [00:04:06] Right, because it feels like you just treaded water.

Kevin:                                       [00:04:08] We’re not going anywhere, yeah. So, one of the things I’ve been doing is talking to the people who are giving us these tasks. We’re driving a lot of this, about how can we reduce this. How can we plan better. And we’re trying to plan around that so we don’t have these big gaps of, frankly scope creep, is what it is. Where the scope of our two weeks, the what we’re supposed to be working on suddenly branches out into other things.

And it’s a really good exercise to do both as a team and as yourself on a personal level to occasionally go back and say what did I get done last month. I think I talked about this when I talked about switching over from June to July and doing sort of my review. How did I do last month? What am I planning to do this month? It’s the same basic idea, except it’s a personal evaluation, like, did I get done what I wanted to get done? Yeah, actually I did. Did I get done the things I needed to get done, yes. How do I feel about that? I feel like I accomplished a lot. But there’ll be cases where I’m going to sit down and I’m going to go, no, I didn’t get everything done. I missed. How does that make me feel? And that’s just—that’s just part of the process. And it’s recommended often you do this in a much shorter cycle so that you have a weekly, a monthly, and a yearly review.

[00:05:33] And, like—just you. Just you. Nobody else looking over it. Just you and your personal self-assessment. The idea is so that you can get better at doing what you do.

Ursula:                                     [00:05:40] Seems like a lot of organization just to remember what I did. Well, I guess… okay, at the end of the year, I frequently will do a blog post that I’m like, “This year, I, looking back I accomplished X, Y, Z, published three books, wrote this much,” you know. Cleared all this dirt, etc, and then I feel better about the year. But… yeah, okay, I can sort of see that.

Kevin:                                       [00:06:01] Yep. And the—but then, part of that is saying, okay, what am I going to do next year. That becomes part of the planning process. Of course, for you, it’s a lot different than for me.

Ursula:                                     [00:06:10] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:06:11] Yeah. So, one of the unexpected things we had to do in this last week was we had to replace the microphone.

Ursula:                                     [00:06:18] Yes, that’s true.

Kevin:                                       [00:06:19] So, we’re using a new piece of equipment. Apologies for any strangeness or extra noises, we’re still—

Ursula:                                     [00:06:25] If you can hear water gurgling in the background, the toilet upstairs is filling wrong and the microphone is now so sensitive it’s picking up the pipes through the ceiling.

Kevin:                                       [00:06:33] I mean, the other microphone that I have for recording Hidden Almanac will pick that up, too.

Ursula:                                     [00:06:39] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:06:40] But, this one is much higher quality.

Ursula:                                     [00:06:44] Thank you Patreon sponsors who begged for the microphone.

Kevin:                                       [00:06:48] Ursula’s Patreon sponsors. I am riding on the coattails. This is all about the Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap and Hidden Almanac that paid for this microphone and all of the adapters we need to hook it up to the computer and stuff like that. You guys are awesome.

Ursula:                                     [00:07:07] It’s okay.

Kevin:                                       [00:07:08] Yeah?

Ursula:                                     [00:07:09] The Hidden Almanac and KUEC don’t mind if you borrow it.

Kevin:                                       [00:07:14] I’m sure. I’m sure. I’ve a couple others to evaluate, you might have noticed. I fell into the other hole I can fall into, which is—I’ll fall into the planner hole and the organization hole and spend hours and days redoing my organizational system and lose a lot of momentum and time doing that. But, that’s been part of my learning process. This time I spent—I want to say, what, like two days figuring out microphones even after we bought this one?

Ursula:                                     [00:07:50] I don’t know. I wasn’t aware of anything like that. I was fiddling on something upstairs.

Kevin:                                       [00:07:56] So, anyway. Here is our wombat test subject.

Ursula:                                     [00:07:58] Woo!

Kevin:                                       [00:08:00] Ursula Vernon, my lovely wife and artist extraordinaire. So…

Ursula:                                     [00:08:08] I became angry this week.

Kevin:                                       [00:08:10] You did. But first, how did the goal setting go.

Ursula:                                     [00:08:12] Oh, yeah. I wrote some down.

Kevin:                                       [00:08:14] You should write the—yeah, yeah. We want to do the goals and then you can be as angry as you want.

Ursula:                                     [00:08:19] I wrote the goals down [crosstalk].

Kevin:                                       [00:08:20] You wrote the goals down, okay.

Ursula:                                     [00:08:20] I need to find out where I wrote the goals down. There. Okay. Goals. Do something with Cryptic Stitching which is my game that I’ve been working on. And then 1: finish Act 1 or do a vertical slice demo. Which is something that a game designer friend of mine recommended as a way to pitch it to publishers. And I even figured out what that vertical slice would entail, it would be the plot line of Wool Tribes: Shearings.

[00:08:47] Um, the second goal was to make Dog Skull Patch useful. Useful is… basically, useful is like one of the highest praises I can give anything. I believe that there are plenty of things that exist only to be beautiful, but… okay, it’s like pottery. There is something about—there are beautiful clay sculptures, I will not argue about that, but there’s something about clay that is inherently, I just feel like clay wants to be useful. I feel like—and there are some chunks of—

Kevin:                                       [00:09:26] Does that include that crappy orange clay we’ve got out front that is nothing but a pain.

Ursula:                                     [00:09:30] It would be if we made it into bricks. That’s what you make bricks out of is that clay.

Kevin:                                       [00:09:33] Oh.

Ursula:                                     [00:09:33] That’s why we have a brickworks down our—

Kevin:                                       [00:09:36] Well, yeah, I knew there was a specific red clay. I didn’t realize it was just the crap we found in the yard.

Ursula:                                     [00:09:40] Yes, that’s Carolina clay, yeah.

Kevin:                                       [00:09:43] Okay then, yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:09:46] The other thing… I feel like some things want to be useful. Farmland wants to be useful. Great big screaming oak forests and mountains, they don’t need to be useful, they can just be there. But, you know—

Kevin:                                       [00:10:01] But they’re useful in their own way.

Ursula:                                     [00:10:03] Yeah, they’re very useful to the things in them. I feel like farmland wants to be useful. And this stuff was useful, and it’s now less useful because it is covered in invasives, and so it could be much more useful. And I don’t mean just to humans. Like, just, you know… it should give back more than it takes. So, number one is to get a hunting license and hunt a deer on it.

Kevin:                                       [00:10:30] Okay.

Ursula:                                     [00:10:33] After that, it occurs to me I can’t very well bulldoze the house until after I get the deer.

Kevin:                                       [00:10:38] Okay.

Ursula:                                     [00:10:40] Because, I suspect the deer will be a little alarmed by the house falling down.

Kevin:                                       [00:10:49] We’re talking about animals who have successfully adapted to construction zones and then urban living. I think the house disappeared—being there one day and not the next is probably not something that is going to be too alarming. But…

Ursula:                                     [00:11:03] Well, anyway. We’ll see.

Kevin:                                       [00:11:05] That’s fair. Yes.

Ursula:                                     [00:11:07] Then, so, I actually made a list. So, get the hunting license to hunt a deer. Tear down the house. Hook up power and water and arrange septic, and then I can put a yurt on it and depending on how much free time I have, either I can set to work on it or I can have a yurt and with plumbing and be like… would anyone like to be a tenant farmer, and in fact my buddy Neolithic Sheep is trying to—is like, once you get things set up there are a couple of people who would love an arrangement where here is seven acres, I can’t really take care of them, but if you want to just stay here and caretake and graze sheep and help clear property. So…

Kevin:                                       [00:11:51] Yeah, we’d have to set down some rules. The usuals, the no pesticides, no…

Ursula:                                     [00:11:55] Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, if you’re grazing sheep, you’re trying not to hose down poison on the grass.

Kevin:                                       [00:12:00] Yes, yes. So, one of the things I mentioned last week was that we were going to talk about SMART goals. And, I think you’ve got great goals. I think these are fantastic goals. I think you’ve done a very good job. And I also think you inherently, even though we only really touched on it, you made them SMART. Usually—

Ursula:                                     [00:12:18] This is an acronym, people, or an anagram or some crap.

Kevin:                                       [00:12:22] It’s, uh… SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. Right. So, they’re all very specific.

Ursula:                                     [00:12:29] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:12:31] They are all measurable. You can tell when you’re done with all of them. They are all attainable.

Ursula:                                     [00:12:36] I hope so.

Kevin:                                       [00:12:37] Yeah. They are reasonably realistic. There’s no blue sky dreaming there. And, they’re all timely, in that you can get them done in an amount of time.

Ursula:                                     [00:12:48] The longest one is going to be honestly getting septic hookups. And… but if I can have the Dog Skull Patch one done in a year, I’ll feel like I did okay.

Kevin:                                       [00:13:01] And one of the things that a lot of people make a mistake about, which you didn’t, and I’m very proud of you for that, is they forget the attainable part. They’re SMRT goals. Just like Homer is so smart.

Ursula:                                     [00:13:15] [sings] S-M-R-T.

Yes, okay.

Kevin:                                       [00:13:17] Yeah. And that is, they forget that goals you set for yourself should be attainable.

Ursula:                                     [00:13:23] So, if my goal had been become a millionaire.

Kevin:                                       [00:13:29] While attainable, is significantly harder. If your goal was, you know, colonize Mars. That’s not attainable. Right.

Ursula:                                     [00:13:39] Well, not for me, personally.

Kevin:                                       [00:13:44] So, that’s sort of a—that’s the sort of thing that a lot of people miss out on, but they’ll forget to see: is this something I can do, and I can attain in a timely manner. And, that leads to a lot of disappointment. Well, I set a goal and I didn’t make it, so… why should I bother, right? Why should I bother with the next one. It’s very disheartening when you set something that you know in the back of your head, you can’t make because it’s more a dream than a goal.

Ursula:                                     [00:14:15] I’m trying to think of an example that you wouldn’t know off the bat was unattainable, like colonizing Mars. Because if you feel bad because you haven’t colonized Mars, dude, come on.

Kevin:                                       [00:14:29] Yeah, there’s that. There’s that.

Ursula:                                     [00:14:33] And part of my brain is saying: like, write a novel, but I mean, I write novels, but… writing novels is a skill set and some people just plain don’t have the skill set and that’s okay.

Kevin:                                       [00:14:43] But there’s sometimes a fine line between a goal and I’m going to use another one of those fancy words: and a vision. Right.

Ursula:                                     [00:14:52] All right, as long as I don’t need to write a vision statement.

Kevin:                                       [00:14:55] You don’t have to write a vision statement this week. And… so, the idea of a vision. A vision is sort of like the guiding star.

Ursula:                                     [00:15:04] So, my vision is don’t die in a ditch next to Walmart.

Kevin:                                       [00:15:06] Pretty much, yeah. So, the vision…

Ursula:                                     [00:15:11] Woo! Shittiest vision!

Kevin:                                       [00:15:14] So, but the idea is to… don’t make your vision the goal. Make your goal something that will help that vision become a reality, right? So, if your vision… if you were going to put down your goal was to travel to Mars. That probably not attainable within your lifetime, but maybe your goal is to fund…

Ursula:                                     [00:15:38] NASA.

Kevin:                                       [00:15:38] NASA. Maybe your goal is that you want your ashes interred on Mars on the first manned space flight. You know, maybe… there are ways to get there, that… There’s a vision that your final resting place will be on Mars whether you’re alive or not. And so, here are the things you can do. Here are the goals, the steps to get there.

Ursula:                                     [00:16:00] So, actually, my goals do fit into my vision of not dying in a ditch next to Walmart.

Kevin:                                       [00:16:04] Absolutely.

Ursula:                                     [00:16:04] Because I can now die in a ditch on Dog Skull Patch, or, if I’m lucky, a yurt with plumbing.

Kevin:                                       [00:16:09] Well, even better. You’ve got the vision of making Dog Skull Patch useful, and these other goals here, to hunt on it, to have everything hooked up, to build a yurt. Building a yurt is a goal.

Ursula:                                     [00:16:20] Yeah, I didn’t want to overwhelm myself.

Kevin:                                       [00:16:24] Right, but then, that will help you attain the vision of Dog Skull Patch being useful. So, this is fantastic. You did a great job with this. I’m very impressed.

Ursula:                                     [00:16:35] Yay!

Kevin:                                       [00:16:35] Yay. So…

Ursula:                                     [00:16:39] Now, can I be angry?

Kevin:                                       [00:16:40] Yes, absolutely. And… let me preface and, you hear crinkling, that’s because I have a plastic thing. We had gone out to—what were we? We’d gone out to look for the microphone. And…

Ursula:                                     [00:16:52] Ah yes, we wound up at Jerry’s Artarama, and then we wound up at the Staples next to it.

Kevin:                                       [00:16:55] There’s a Staples next door. And, while we were in there, we saw, hey, here are disc planner pages, and there were a whole bunch of Office by Martha Stewart. Different planner insert things.

Ursula:                                     [00:17:11] Now, I am not going to slam on Martha Stewart, as it happens. I think a lot of people slam on Martha Stewart, but she is and ice-cold business woman who has achieved an empire and I respect evil in others when executed well.

Kevin:                                       [00:17:27] Yes, and in a lot of cases outside of her financial dealings, I have to say, a lot of that empire falls into the not necessarily evil, but means well. I like her cooking. I’ve found some good recipes from her. I do not like her decorating ideas but they make a lot of people happy, which is really what she’s after. And, she’s made a boat load of money doing it. I do not feel that making money is necessarily evil. Making money the way she did that got her sent to jail for a couple years, that’s evil. But that’s neither here nor there.

Ursula:                                     [00:18:03] Also, she totally treats her media escorts like shit, which I don’t approve of.

Kevin:                                       [00:18:07] Oh, I do not approve of that, okay. Fair. Yes.

Ursula:                                     [00:18:09] They used to give out an award that—media escorts actually like—this is a—

Kevin:                                       [00:18:17] So, let me clarify. A media escort is the person who’s assigned by a bookstore or an event to go with a—

Ursula:                                     [00:18:22] Or a publisher.

Kevin:                                       [00:18:22] Or a publisher, to go with an author or voice actor, whoever…

Ursula:                                     [00:18:25] Or an actor, whoever, yeah.

Kevin:                                       [00:18:27] …to basically make sure they are able to get what they need and go the places they need to go.

Ursula:                                     [00:18:34] It’s basically a combination chauffeur and personal assistant kind of thing, although that makes it sound way ritzier than it is. Mostly it’s I know where we’re going, I know what time you have to be there, can I get you water, can I get you food? The author is clearly panicking, let me talk to them. That sort of thing. And I have—I have had the good, the bad, and the ugly. But…

Kevin:                                       [00:18:56] And the one… and let me [inaudible]. The one that works with the authors here in Chapel Hill that we see all the time, she is fantastic.

Ursula:                                     [00:19:02] Yes, some of them are wonderful.

Kevin:                                       [00:19:04] Yes. I ran into her getting coffee before the Warren Ellis signing, you know… we saw her, I believe, before Scalzi’s signing.

Ursula:                                     [00:19:12] You remember I have the face-blindness.

Kevin:                                       [00:19:13] Well, yeah, of course, of course. But anyway.

Ursula:                                     [00:19:16] That is one of the problems I actually wind up having, tangentially, is that because of the face blindness, and if I’m on book tour, I will have a different one every single day because I’ll in a different city every day. I will rapidly lose track of who I am there with, and I am just like, “Please, God.” It’s fine unless they fall into the school teacher archetype, and then I am boned. But…

Kevin:                                       [00:19:41] You should take like, one of your pendants and say, “Please wear this pendant, I’m face blind. This will help me identify you.”

Ursula:                                     [00:19:49] That’s an amazingly good idea, yeah.

Kevin:                                       [00:19:50] Yeah, I just thought of it. I was like, why wouldn’t she do that. She’d be able to recognize—the only thing is if you had a spot where a lot of fans showed up and someone showed up with a matching pendant, but—

Ursula:                                     [00:19:59] No, that’s an amazing idea.

Kevin:                                       [00:20:00] And this way they get a nice—they will have fond memories because they’ll get a present from you.

Ursula:                                     [00:20:06] Oh, yeah. Yeah. I—that’s genius, dear. Okay, I’m doing that on the next one. Thank you.

Kevin:                                       [00:20:12] Yeah. Sorry.

Ursula:                                     [00:20:13] I always just felt bad because I couldn’t remember them, but anyway. By the fourth or fifth day, I am so fried anyway.

Kevin:                                       [00:20:21] Oh yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:20:21] But anyway. One of my hobbies is that I start asking people questions about what they do. Hobby, okay, this is just a personality quirk, I guess. And, I am very bad at following the script for normal interactions with other people. And, so, I do leave a trail of slightly traumatized people in my wake, although I try never to be mean, I’m just genuinely curious and people don’t expect you to be curious about things. And I didn’t realize that media escorts frequently did not get people who asked about their job and what they did and who they were. Like… I had this one lovely woman who was like, okay, your publicist says you’re an introvert. And I was like gonna try to like not make too much conversation with you because you might be fried… but you’re like… talking to me about horror movies. And I’m like, I’m not that much of an introvert. You’re interesting. She’s like, “Okay, the last author I have sat in the back seat and wouldn’t talk to me until she found out I had a degree from Vassar.

Kevin:                                       [00:21:25] OH.

Ursula:                                     [00:21:25] And I’m like, whoa, what? Seriously? She was like, people are really snobby. Anyway, so. This is all getting off into a terrible tangent, but the point was there is in fact an organization that many media escorts will get together that I assume licenses or bonds them or something, I don’t know all the details. They used to have an annual dinner and they used to have—they would give out the award that was like their equivalent of the Golden Razzie or whatever for the biggest pain in the ass, and then Martha Stewart won it three years running and they stopped giving it out.

Kevin:                                       [00:21:55] Did they stop giving it out or did they just say, “She is now disqualified from the running because we don’t…”

Ursula:                                     [00:22:01] According to the nice guy in St. Louis, they stopped doing it because Martha Stewart just won every time.

Kevin:                                       [00:22:07] Oh.

Ursula:                                     [00:22:09] So, anyway. I don’t approve of that.

Kevin:                                       [00:22:09] Kind of like Doctor Who and Game of Thrones on the Hugos.

Ursula:                                     [00:22:13] The thing I really don’t approve of, however, is this God damned gardening thing.

Kevin:                                       [00:22:21] This is why we say PG-13, folks.

Ursula:                                     [00:22:23] By Office by Martha Stewart. Here is your gardening section so you can have a gardening insert. Plan and document garden activity. This is such bullshit. It is literally… it is like… a whole bunch of pages of just the standard blank lined stuff and then a frickin’ hardiness zone chart. I don’t need a hardiness zone chart in my planner, even with climate change it only changes every five years. I am an 8A. I will be an 8A for a long time. I don’t need a chart so I can check every single day to see yep, I still live in North Carolina in zone 8A.

[00:23:04] Furthermore, there’s a glossary. In case I need to look up on a daily basis what the word “germination” means because I forgot the last time I looked it up. Germination is when a seed… you know, germinates. It grows. Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:23:21] Sprouts.

Ursula:                                     [00:23:22] It has a chart of the names of tools. If I have to look up every single day what a hoe is, I do not need to be in the garden with a hoe. I am not qualified to own a hoe.

Kevin:                                       [00:23:36] Well, you didn’t look like you were pimpin’ pimpin’ to me anyway.

Ursula:                                     [00:23:39] ARGH. I was waiting for that. If you…

Kevin:                                       [00:23:43] PG-13, folks.

Ursula:                                     [00:23:44] If you needed to look up what a trowel was called every single day so you had the sheet in your planner, I do not think organization is the greatest challenge facing you at this time.

Kevin:                                       [00:23:59] So, I’m not going to disagree with any of that.

Ursula:                                     [00:24:03] This had a whole lot of bullshit that was made by somebody who didn’t actually garden. And just thought, oh this is the sort of stuff gardeners like. No. What gardeners need—

Kevin:                                       [00:24:12] And then slap their name on—slap Martha Stewart’s name on it and market it.

Ursula:                                     [00:24:15] And a graphic of a watering can. Yes. So you can have a picture of a watering can and a chart that names your hoe for you. Or your trowel, don’t start.

Kevin:                                       [00:24:28] That’s fine.

Ursula:                                     [00:24:31] I became angry.

Kevin:                                       [00:24:32] For, like… a while. Like, she disappeared into the studio and there were angry noises—she comes downstairs, she storms and says, “This is bullshit,” throws it at me, and says, “I’m going to make my own and stomps off.” So, I have to get the thing back in the packaging and set it aside so she can rant about it.

Ursula:                                     [00:24:49] If you would like a shitty Martha Stewart disc bound gardening insert please comment on this podcast where Kevin will give it away because I want it out of the house.

Kevin:                                       [00:25:00] Okay. It does include, let’s see…

Ursula:                                     [00:25:03] I think I stuffed everything back in the package.

Kevin:                                       [00:25:05] Ten self-adhesive envelopes. Seventy sticky dots and a stencil ruler for drawing your garden plan.

Ursula:                                     [00:25:12] Yeah, it has little wobbly squiggly shapes so you—and then the big ones are supposed to be trees and the small ones are shrubs. I can draw wobbly squiggly without a stencil.

Kevin:                                       [00:25:23] It’s designed around junior sized disc bound notebooks.

Ursula:                                     [00:25:25] It’s a half page, basically.

Kevin:                                       [00:25:27] Right. So, there’s that.

Ursula:                                     [00:25:29] And a whole bunch of just like… lined paper.

Kevin:                                       [00:25:32] Yeah, yeah. Most of it if lined paper. But there’s the gardening tips, which is the part she was yelling about, which probably aren’t. There was the list of tools. Ten pages of gardening content. So… this is a whole lot of—and this was like…

Ursula:                                     [00:25:49] Six bucks.

Kevin:                                       [00:25:50] Okay, it was six bucks, good. It was only six bucks. Um, if it had been ten, I would have been really grumpy.

Ursula:                                     [00:25:57] Such bullshit. Anyway, I went and made my own, which was hard because PDFs.

Kevin:                                       [00:26:04] PDFs are difficult to work with sometimes.

Ursula:                                     [00:26:06] Well, the major problem was JPEGs I can do, and then I would try to transfer it in PDF and it would suddenly change the sizes, and I was like, no, I understand how actual size works. It would be like, no, we’ve just decided it’s different, and I was like, you are not allowed to decide that. And it eventually worked out that apparently Photoshop thinks paper is bigger than Adobe Reader does.

Kevin:                                       [00:26:29] That’s awkward.

Ursula:                                     [00:26:30] It was, yeah…

Kevin:                                       [00:26:31] Since they’re from the same company.

Ursula:                                     [00:26:34] Yeah, it was a little frustrating. Not gonna lie. But I eventually worked it out, so, I have—I made my own. And these include actual useful things. Like, I know the frickin’ hardiness zone. What I want is a plant record for each plant. So, I have a box where I can put the name and a little box next to it where I can put like the year or perhaps a code if I was organized and had everything in a spreadsheet. I want to put everything in a spreadsheet.

Kevin:                                       [00:26:58] Are you well?

Ursula:                                     [00:26:59] [exasperated sigh] No, I was depressed yesterday. So—

Kevin:                                       [00:27:02] That’s fair.

Ursula:                                     [00:27:03] I had the type [crosstalk].

Kevin:                                       [00:27:04] Is it from working on the spreadsheet?

Ursula:                                     [00:27:06] No.

Kevin:                                       [00:27:06] Spreadsheets do that to me, too.

Ursula:                                     [00:27:07] No, no. It was—

Kevin:                                       [00:27:07] Okay.

Ursula:                                     [00:27:08] It was from working on edits.

Kevin:                                       [00:27:10] Okay.

Ursula:                                     [00:27:10] So, for example, I have the Nez Perce bean, or I have the Nez Perce, type: bean. And I have a box for the code, which I could put in if I want to. Source: Russ Crow, who is a nice guy named Russ Crow, who runs the bean collector’s window, and is like a bean hobbyist. He sent me a bag of them. Planted on: I can’t remember what day I planted on, and then I had boxes from seed, from start. Saved seed, and it was from seed. And then I had germination notes, which I had none. And then I had, like, listings of what the plant did, which—

Kevin:                                       [00:27:41] You have little… a little checklist here for whether it—Victory, Whole lotta meh, Died like a dog, I have made a terrible mistake. Oh, I know one or two we did that—that’s the entry for the Carolina Reapers, isn’t it?

Ursula:                                     [00:27:56] Uh, I’m not sure. And there’s “where did this go,” because a lot of times you plant something and then you never find it again.

Kevin:                                       [00:28:01] Yeah, I noticed that the one bean tower we put up is—I can’t tell one plant from the other because it’s just a green tower. There’s a metal thing [crosstalk]

Ursula:                                     [00:28:08] Oh, my brutalist bean trellis, yes. It was a cup holder. Like a commercial—

Kevin:                                       [00:28:15] Like a display for cups from a store or something.

Ursula:                                     [00:28:18] Now it is just a wall of greenery.

[00:28:21] And then I have a section for—that determines whether you will use in the future. Always grow this. Try this one again. Let somebody else grow this. And, special, which I assume is where you just write, “Fuck fuck fuck.”

Kevin:                                       [00:28:29] PG-13, folks.

Ursula:                                     [00:28:32] But then it is two-sided, and on the other thing there is a spot where, again, name, box, where you can put an image if you were like super inclined to put an image. I might just draw a picture of a yellow bean in there unless I get really bored. But, I could, if I wanted to, print one and paste it in, in case I was worried I would never recognize the bean again.

Kevin:                                       [00:28:50] And this is… the beans you grow are pretty unique.

Ursula:                                     [00:28:52] I try.

Kevin:                                       [00:28:54] So, like—but it would still be awesome to flip over the trail of tears page and there’s like a picture of a whole bunch of trail of tears beans, right?

Ursula:                                     [00:29:02] Then I have the location that I planted it, “along the wire mesh” and notes. Did not water, still prolific. Harvest white, darkens to tan when dry. That is an important note, because I kept harvesting all these white beans and I was confused, and then they turned sort of golden yellow once they dried, and then I was like, oh, those are the Nez Perce. I didn’t just underwater the white potato bean. And then there’s a small angry chicken with a trowel.

Kevin:                                       [00:29:24] Because chicken.

Ursula:                                     [00:29:26] I… so yeah. I designed like, these things, and I should really like sell them in my Etsy shop or something. But… um, and it would be really smart if I had set them up to sell before we did this segment, because then I could be like, “And if you want to purchase this, you can go there.” But I haven’t actually set it up because I have to give it my bank information, and I’m like, “Oh, God, I have to go look up routing numbers.” So, at some point, you might be able to buy those in my Etsy shop, but not today.

Kevin:                                       [00:29:48] Yep yep.

Ursula:                                     [00:29:48] Anyway.

Kevin:                                       [00:29:50] Anyway.

Ursula:                                     [00:29:50] And it has no hardiness zones because fuck that noise.

Kevin:                                       [00:29:53] Because if you live in a zone and you’re gardening, you should look that up in advance and you don’t need to put… unless you’re straddling a line and you literally can walk across the property line and—

Ursula:                                     [00:30:02] And even then, you know that. You don’t need to have the entire map of the continental US in your planner so that you know, if you want to check what the hardiness zone in Fargo is on a whim, you can do that out on the garden with your planner. This is a valuable waste of real estate. Or a waste of valuable real estate, or a—

Kevin:                                       [00:30:21] Waste of trees. If you want this waste of trees please comment on this episode.

Ursula:                                     [00:30:26] If we haven’t turned you off with our rage.

Kevin:                                       [00:30:30] Well, yeah, there is that.

Ursula:                                     [00:30:33] It does have a lot of liney pages.

Kevin:                                       [00:30:34] It does have a lot of blank pages and if no one—if I get a whole bunch of comments that say, “No.” “No.” “No.” I’m just going to throw out the gardening glossary and keep the blank pages for myself. Because, let’s face it, we all use more blank lined paper.

Ursula:                                     [00:30:49] Probably.

Kevin:                                       [00:30:49] So, we don’t have to print out more blank lined paper, that’s my thought.

Ursula:                                     [00:30:53] Do I have to something for next week, now?

Kevin:                                       [00:30:56] The only thing you really have wrapped around for next week is to keep up with your planner. We’ll talk more next week about goal progress because you’ve got some things and maybe we’ll—we’ll talk about breaking goals down into tasks.

Ursula:                                     [00:31:15] Okay.

Kevin:                                       [00:31:15] Because that is something that I—

Ursula:                                     [00:31:20] Today’s Wednesday, right?

Kevin:                                       [00:31:20] Today is Wednesday, yep.

Ursula:                                     [00:31:22] I was afraid I’d lost a day there.

Kevin:                                       [00:31:24] Actually, let me back up. There is something for you to do.

Ursula:                                     [00:31:27] Put a gold star on Monday.

Kevin:                                       [00:31:28]  Oh, abs—

Ursula:                                     [00:31:28] Monday I kicked ass and took names.

Kevin:                                       [00:31:29] You kicked ass and took names on Monday.

Ursula:                                     [00:31:30] Tuesday, I laid in bed and ate cinnamon gummy bears in despair.

Kevin:                                       [00:31:34] And you—well, you had a rough day. But you—hey you still got the two things written down for Tuesday done.

Ursula:                                     [00:31:43] No, I didn’t. I only got one. I had to move the other one down. I didn’t actually get… I checked it off because I got them done today.

Kevin:                                       [00:31:50] Okay.

Ursula:                                     [00:31:50] The bag Etsy thing. But I did get the check illumination notes, and that’s why I was [crosstalk].

Kevin:                                       [00:31:56] And it’s okay, because things… I want to go ahead because you’ve done pretty good today. And that’s one of the things that can happen, right? You could—you have something on your list and it derails your entire day. Don’t feel bad when that happens. I often have things on my to-do list that like—it looks like it’s going to be easy, or it’s going to take very little time and then it turns out that I’ve just—You know, I have to cross the mines of Moria by myself with a balrog in the middle and nothing else gets done because I’m busy dodging orcs and balrogs.

Ursula:                                     [00:32:32] Yeah, I hate it when that happens.

Kevin:                                       [00:32:32] Yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:32:33] Fuckin’ balrogs, man. How do they work?

Kevin:                                       [00:32:37] Well, they’re big and they’re fiery, and Morgoth was…

Ursula:                                     [00:32:39] I know, okay. Yes. It’s shadow and flame. Do not Tolkien-splain to me.

Kevin:                                       [00:32:46] You asked.

Ursula:                                     [00:32:47] It was rhetorical.

Kevin:                                       [00:32:50] Anyway. But I try not—I will look at something and go, “Ugh, I didn’t get everything done I needed to do.” But as long as I’ve got a mitigating factor, right? If it’s—I didn’t get anything done I needed to do because I sat on my butt and played Tetris all day, which I don’t do. More likely Two Dots, that’s my big addiction right now.

Ursula:                                     [00:33:09] I have a better idea.

Kevin:                                       [00:33:10] What’s that?

Ursula:                                     [00:33:12] I am writing down, “Mope like a boss” on Tuesday and I’m checking it off, because I moped like a boss.

Kevin:                                       [00:33:19] You did. You certainly did, and we did…

Ursula:                                     [00:33:24] Can I get a blue star? Actually. I feel that deserves a blue star.

Kevin:                                       [00:33:26] That deserves a blue star, sure. But you know, I try not to—I try not to—where’s Tuesday? There’s Tuesday. I try very hard when something outside of my control interferes with what I want to get done, I try very hard not to beat myself up over it. It’s difficult. This is why I’m medicated. This is why I have my Zoloft, is because I am broken in a couple places and sometimes I will get into the shame spiral from, this is three days, I didn’t get that one thing done that I’ve been meaning to do and I’m a horrible person. No. Stop. Time out. Right?

[00:34:05] I broke my brain, I burned out a couple of years ago. We’ll talk about that on a—a couple of years ago, almost a decade ago, now. Little over a decade.

Ursula:                                     [00:34:10] Woo!

Kevin:                                       [00:34:11] We’ll talk about that on a later episode, because I really want to dig into burnout. Like burnout month. It’s a big horrible topic.

Ursula:                                     [00:34:18] I feel it’s useful to phrase your failure—like, I just wrote “I moped like a boss.”

Kevin:                                       [00:34:25] Yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:34:25] I didn’t like, you know, waste time and weep and moan and… No, I moped like a boss, damn it.

Kevin:                                       [00:34:31] You did.

Ursula:                                     [00:34:31] I believe you should—and when I messed up my ankle, I believe I said, “Fucked up my ankle like a boss.”

Kevin:                                       [00:34:38] Yes.

Ursula:                                     [00:34:39] If you’re going to, like, need a mental health day. Do it like a boss. Just be like, “Broke down sobbing like a—like a—like Rodney James Dio poster in under black light at the… just.

Kevin:                                       [00:34:59] Wow.

Ursula:                                     [00:35:00] Give yourself some extravagant superlatives. Praise the quality of your fuck up.

Kevin:                                       [00:35:07] And the side effect is—

Ursula:                                     [00:35:09] This may not work for everybody, but I like it.

Kevin:                                       [00:35:11] But the side effect is, just… if you need to take a day, and everything’s thrown out of whack, everything’s cool. Take a break. Regroup the next day. You always have tomorrow.

Ursula:                                     [00:35:24] [whispering] Like a boss.

Kevin:                                       [00:35:26] Like a boss. Um. And we’ve got a letter that I want to get to after our interview with Carlota.

Ursula:                                     [00:35:34] Okay.

Kevin:                                       [00:35:36] That asks sort of about something similar. So, we’re gonna slide over to our interview with Carlota.

Ursula:                                     [00:35:42] Who is totally a boss.

Kevin:                                       [00:35:44] She totally is. I still don’t have music for this interlude because I spent most of the time between last episode and this, well, getting a new microphone. And making it work, and all that.

Ursula:                                     [00:35:54] [singing] Nananana nana nananan nana INTERLUDE!

Kevin:                                       [00:35:59] [singing] CARLOTA!

Ursula:                                     [00:35:59] Carlota!

Kevin:                                       [00:36:00] Here’s our interview with—

Ursula:                                     [00:36:00] We promise to never do that again.

Kevin:                                       [00:36:03] Yeah, so. Here’s our interview with Carlota.

Ursula:                                     [00:36:07] Ding.

Kevin:                                       [00:36:08] This week’s interview is with our dear friend, Carlota. Carlota, can you introduce yourself to the listeners and tell them what you do?

Carlota:                                   [00:36:17] I am Carlota. That’s pretty much it.

Ursula:                                     [00:36:21] They can’t see the hand gestures.

Carlota:                                   [00:36:22] That’s true.

Kevin:                                       [00:36:23] Yeah, they can’t see the, yeah.

Carlota:                                  [00:36:24] I am my own cult of personality. Um, I am—boy, my fancy-dancy title at the cyber security company I work for is Manager of Collaboration and Knowledge Strategy. And, what that means is that I, at a very high level, implement systems all the way down to a very low level. Write individual knowledge base articles to ensure that information inside engineers’ heads gets into a database that can then get out to customers and partners and other people in the company so that they can find answers when they need them.

Kevin:                                       [00:36:55] I think—

Ursula:                                     [00:36:56] You’re a technical writer with power.

Carlota:                                  [00:36:58] I am—I am a technical writer… oh, boy. You know, I hate that, because technical writers are so underrated and underpaid. I get paid way more than a technical writer.

Kevin:                                       [00:37:06] Well, no no… the way, I always—

Ursula:                                     [00:37:08] That’s where power comes in.

Kevin:                                       [00:37:09] Yeah, it’s you’re a—you translate between geek and not geek in a lot of ways, yeah.

Carlota:                                  [00:37:15] Yes, yes. I’d like to say I make engineers sound as smart as they really are.

Kevin:                                       [00:37:18] That’s fair.

Carlota:                                  [00:37:18] Yeah, right? So, they’ve got information that—they can have their head or they can give me the information. They can’t have both their head and the information.

Kevin:                                       [00:37:29] That’s [crosstalk]. Not really, but… So, how do you keep yourself organized? Because you’ve got a lot going on with this.

Carlota:                                  [00:37:35] I do. I do. I don’t. I’m very scattered. I keep other people far more organized than myself, honestly. Actually, that’s not true. I live in an Excel worksheet, and every tab is a different weekly meeting. Like, one tab is my content sink, one tab is my one-on-one with my boss. One tab is my weekly sink with my tech writer in Ireland. And in each of those, I have the date. Whatever we discussed, an action that’s needed from me, and any results of that action. And, it’s—all completely driven through… I just work well with a spreadsheet.

Kevin:                                       [00:38:20] That’s… you know, that’s fine. You are the first person I’ve talked to so far that is basically Excel-driven.

Carlota:                                  [00:38:29] Yeah.

Kevin:                                       [00:38:29] I’m used to having PMs doing their full product management in Excel. It drives me a little crazy, but not really tracking, like, your personal stuff in it. So, that’s nifty.

Carlota:                                   [00:38:43] Yeah, Excel for project management. I was a project manager for a little while and I was apparently exceedingly good at it, but I kind of hated every moment of it, because it’s herding a lot of cats. And I can see where Excel is exceedingly painful as a project management tool, and I would not use it that way, myself. But, in terms of task lists. I’ve tried task lists, I’ve tried planners. I’ve tried Evernote, I’ve tried One Note, I’ve tried, you know, all kinds of Mac apps and phone apps and everything, and I just keep coming back to Excel. I’ve just accepted that my brain works like a spreadsheet.

[00:39:19] When I did my Masters at Columbia, it was the same thing. I would take all of my notes in Excel. And, every chapter would have a row, and the major themes would each have a column, and I could lay out all of my notes very quickly that way. You know, it was—it would take me forever to do the readings because I’m taking these copious amounts of notes while I’m doing it, but I could write a paper in 45 minutes because it was pretty much already written in the notes.

Kevin:                                       [00:39:46] You’re a wizard, Carlota. I can’t—I could not do that in Excel. That’s something.

Carlota:                                  [00:39:51] Yeah, I live in a matrix. Everything—I dream in words, right. Like, my actual dreams are nothing but text on a page, text on a screen, text floating in outer space. Pitch black people talking to me. But, at the same time, I apparently have kind of an odd mathematical mind and I can lay words and concepts out in a grid in a way that nobody else I’ve met will do.

Kevin:                                       [00:40:20] Wow. That’s wicked cool. So…

Ursula:                                     [00:40:26] Was it Charlie Stross who was the one who said that the thing he keeps coming back to is everybody finds one program that works for them and they do everything in it and to stop trying to tell them to use a different program or this program will be better for them. They have a thing they work in and if it works…

Carlota:                                  [00:40:45] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:40:46] Stross would say much more stop telling authors to stop using Word, because in order to do that, you have to get the entire publishing industry to change because the editors use Word…

Ursula:                                     [00:41:00] I’m thinking of a different rant, then.

Kevin:                                       [00:41:01] I think you’re thinking of a different rant.

Ursula:                                     [00:41:03] Maybe it was Cory Doctorow.

Carlota:                                   [00:41:03] But that’s—actually that’s not a bad point, though. Part of knowledge strategy is—when you boil it down, it’s aligning people, process, and technology.

Kevin:                                       [00:41:14] Right.

Carlota:                                  [00:41:14] And, what I have found is that people try to lead with the technology. Oh, we threw a wiki out there, people will come and fill in the wiki, and then that doesn’t work, because you’re not taking into account how people work and what they’re doing. So, I’m finding that I’ve fought that battle at every company. I’m fighting that battle at my company now, you know?

Kevin:                                       [00:41:31] I fight it on and off, I mean, I live in an environment where the engineers and operations—the team I work with—kind of live and breathe in Jira and Confluence, but the customer support people all work—and the sales people—all work in Salesforce and then we’ve got this whole other thing where IT and Marketing and all these guys, they’re over in SharePoint, and there’s like an annual attempt to join it all together or say, “No, this is the strategy, and we’re all just going to use this one thing,” and it never works.

Carlota:                                  [00:42:08] No, and it never will work because the needs are very different. Marketing, legal, HR, they need SharePoint. They don’t need to—they’re producing a lot of authoritative documentation, right? The engineers are doing a lot of bug tickets, you’re doing lots of one-of information. Wikis work better—their minds map to a wiki, whereas it does not map to SharePoint or a content management system. And then, support, of course, lives in an SFDC, Salesforce, or a CRM.

Kevin:                                       [00:42:37] They have to straddle both because we operate in the—and the things they accelerate to us are coming from them via there’s some Salesforce integration so it can link to Jira, but they have to do both. We’re very happy that we don’t have to touch Salesforce, and they’re very happy that they don’t have to work in Jira except maybe to poke things every now and then.

Carlota:                                  [00:42:58] Right, to open the ticket and link it to the Salesforce ticket. Yeah, and it’s the same—that’s pretty much the same at every tech company I’ve been at. And, honestly, the best thing to do, and what I’ve done just recently—we just launched it in February, and I need to spend the next week or two fine tuning it—is we did a federated search. So, we have an Elasticsearch engine. We have a lot of—and the reason we chose Elasticsearch is that we actually use Elasticsearch in one of our products, so—

Kevin:                                       [00:43:24] You’ve already got the domain knowledge, yeah.

Carlota:                                  [00:43:25] Yeah, so we had lots of people who were willing to contribute on a pet project kind of way. This was a two year, kind of grassroots movement and finally the IT group gave us servers and we went for it. Basically it searches all of the case summaries in the Salesforce support tickets. It searches all of the Knowledge Base articles, it searches the internal community, the external community, the Jira bugs. So, you can go to one place and find all of the information, right?

Kevin:                                       [00:43:56] That’s… yeah.

Carlota:                                  [00:43:57] So that’s really… what you really need to make it work across the board is federated search. But I’m very big on decentralization because teams are going to work the way that teams work, and whatever makes them the most productive is what we want. And if that means, you know, we have three different systems, then we have three different systems.

Kevin:                                       [00:44:18] Then we have three different systems, yeah. And then the federated search is the glue that holds it all together.

Carlota:                                  [00:44:21] Exactly.

Kevin:                                       [00:44:25] So, what habits or systems are important to you? I think we already touched that Excel is important to you, but are there any habits that go with that? Or… are there any other systems that interface that really make your day go smoother, or?

Carlota:                                  [00:44:39] Honestly, we have a system that I hate, to be honest. So, I’m not gonna name it, I don’t want to promote them. They got sold for 460 million dollars a few weeks ago, and I was quite pissed about it, honestly. I’m like, I can make a better product than this. I need to get off my butt and start my own company. But, basically—

Ursula:                                     [00:45:00] I’ll design your logo.

Carlota:                                  [00:45:05] Yeah, but it’s—basically, it’s a forum. It’s a community platform, right. And, really, it’s not for me. But where my strength is for the company as a whole is that I’m just very aggressive about curating content and my team. So, they actually, last—I’ve been doing this for almost four years now and six months ago, they finally hired me a real tech writer. Right? I’m not a real tech writer. I’m a systems person who happens to be a very good writer and even moreso, I am probably the best technical editor you’ll ever come across, which is very distressing.

Kevin:                                       [00:45:43] That’s, yeah…

Carlota:                                  [00:45:43] Because, again, people you want you then to edit, and that just doesn’t make as much money.

Kevin:                                       [00:45:47] No, no no no.

Carlota:                                  [00:45:48] I’m a money-grubbing whore. So…

Kevin:                                       [00:45:50] Fortunately, this is a PG-13, so I won’t have to bleep that, which is cool.

Carlota:                                  [00:45:54] Great, great. Whoo. Shoo. Yeah, I’m not usually a PG-13 person, so. But, no, I mean—

Ursula:                                     [00:46:02] You’re like as a movie, the trailer would be NC-17.

Carlota:                                  [00:46:08] Yeah, I’m really pleased that my sister-in-law lent me my niece for the summer. She’s 17, and I think it’s been a very educating experience for her, so. But back to work. No, really… my value… the tools I use for myself are Excel, like I mentioned, and OmniGraffle. I’m a Mac user.

Kevin:                                       [00:46:29] Okay, yeah.

Carlota:                                  [00:46:30] I never thought of myself as a visual person until I got a Mac. And then, it’s like—oh. Yeah, I am actually very visual in text box form. So, I’m great with work flows. I’m great at taking engineering information about how to—how an appliance works, for example, and mapping it out with enough text that’s descriptive, that it’s actually meaningful for the customer.

Ursula:                                     [00:46:59] And what’s the name of that program again?

Carlota:                                  [00:47:00] OmniGraffle.

Kevin:                                       [00:47:00] Oh, OmniGraffle. It’s a diagramming program, yeah.

Carlota:                                  [00:47:03] Yeah, it’s a diagramming program. It’s like Visio, right? And, I just very natively live in spreadsheets and diagrams, apparently. Which is not something I would have ever guessed about ten years ago.

Kevin:                                       [00:47:14] Have you tried mind mapping, then?

Carlota:                                  [00:47:17] I have, but you know, mind mapping is—and even like, word maps. It’s not, I’m almost too linear for that. I need the what comes first. I need to know what order it happens in, and if it happens concurrently, I need to know that. I need to know where the relationships and the interfaces are. I mean, especially in a tech support situation, right? All of your issues are, let’s say, your hairiest and most difficult issues are at the interfaces between two subsystems.

Kevin:                                       [00:47:46] Yes, oh yeah. Yeah, I’m aware.

Carlota:                                  [00:47:50] So, a mind map doesn’t map that out well, right?

Kevin:                                       [00:47:53] That’s very true.

Carlota:                                  [00:47:54] So you almost have to—it’s like taking apart a car. You have all the individual systems: the drive train, the fuel, you know, the eng—you know, all of the air intake, all of that. And then, you have to map those directly to symptoms. So that you can work your way backwards so that when you get a symptom, you can go backwards and do the troubleshooting.

Kevin:                                       [00:48:20] And you know about rebuilding a car in that way because that’s one of your hobbies.

Carlota:                                  [00:48:24] Yes. Yes. Yes, I do. And I’m terrible with electrical systems. In fact, my lovely little Mazda 3T 3GTX outside, which was running when I moved into this house not six months ago suddenly just doesn’t want to start and it’s getting fuel and now it’s down to the electrical system, which means there’s 80 million relays for me to check, right? But it’s the same concept, is that if I can narrow it down, I can start fixing it. And it’s very true, especially with a—

Kevin:                                       [00:48:54] Just work your way backwards through the system.

Carlota:                                  [00:48:56] Yeah. But in a tech support situation, of course, I’m supporting, right now, I think 150, 160 technical engineers. We have a deeply technical product, right? There’s lots of moving parts. Our—you need to have a really good grasp on Linux and networking and, you know, all kinds of stuff. And so our tier one is a notch above your average tech support tier one. But, even then, you’re almost—especially if you’re hiring entry level or just out of college kids, you’ve got to be able to show them how to troubleshoot. And that’s not what a lot of colleges teach you.

Kevin:                                       [00:49:34] Very true. Very, very true.

Carlota:                                  [00:49:37] So that’s been, um. Really, my whole schtick is making sure these 160 people are working as best as they can, and taking some of the burden off of them by having a knowledge base and a community that we curate very aggressively. We’re actually reaching, on average, 18-22% deflection of customer support cases, which is huge.

Kevin:                                       [00:49:58] That’s huge.

Carlota:                                  [00:49:58] Yeah, I mean, Watson gets that, right? We’re a lot cheaper, my team of two. So… But, and in times of crisis, the other thing I do is the crisis management through the communities. We’re doing 55% deflection of support cases, so…

Kevin:                                       [00:50:15] Yeah, that’s heavy, yeah.

Carlota:                                   [00:50:16] The money is there to prove the value. And there are days when I’m like, why am I here, and then something blows up, and it’s like, “Oh, right. That’s why I’m here.” You know?

Kevin:                                       [00:50:26] Oh, yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Ursula:                                     [00:50:29] Oh, yes. That’s when you flip flop between, “They’re paying me way too much money for what I do. They’re paying me way too much money—they’re not paying me nearly enough for what I’m doing.”

Carlota:                                  [00:50:37] Pretty much.

Kevin:                                       [00:50:37] Yeah. This is…yeah… every time we have an outage and I’m not the communications person on that. I’m the person who’s bothering to fix it, and I’ll have slow days where I’m slogging through, you know, oh goody, I have to slog through a report on all of these security vulnerabilities and figure out which ones are real and which ones are not. And, I’m like, “Why are you paying me so much money to do level one triage work, basically,” and then the thing happens, and I think the last big one that I was involved in, I spent 15 minutes writing an Ansible Playbook that then saved us three or four hours of work. I’m like okay, that’s why they pay me the big bucks.

Carlota:                                  [00:51:20] Exactly. And you know, when you have 160 people, and then of course the work I do, trickles down… ugh, I hate that word, or that phrase, but it also enables our systems engineers, sales team, all of them. It gives them a body of knowledge as well that they otherwise wouldn’t have easy access to. So, my audience becomes even larger. Now my audience internally is 5 or 600 people, and then in terms of the customers, I’m helping anywhere from 12 to 2000 customers a day, sometimes. 1200 to 2000 customers a day. And that’s a great feeling. I mean, that’s—and for me, that’s small-scale. I worked with NetGear many years ago.

Kevin:                                       [00:51:59] You did, yep.

Carlota:                                  [00:52:01] And we got 45,000 a week. And, after two and a half years between the customer services improvements, and the improvements we did with the knowledge base, we got down to 22,000 phone calls a week, which is a huge savings.

Kevin:                                       [00:52:14] That’s a giant, giant difference.

Carlota:                                  [00:52:16] And we shaved time—I think our calls went from 18 minutes in length on average to 15 minutes in length. That’s, again, that’s a huge cost savings when you’re talking about 22,000 calls a week, right?

Kevin:                                       [00:52:28] Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Carlota:                                   [00:52:28] So, and, you know—I think there’s a huge potential, kind of, that people don’t realize, that if you—everyone wants to be the rock star, but if you’re the guy that’s out there just shoveling the dirt, you’re clearing the path and you’re making it easier.

Kevin:                                       [00:52:48] No one wants to shovel the dirt. That is a big problem in the IT industry, and we need more people shoveling the dirt, and not so many people going, “Well, I can shovel this dirt faster by building a different kind of backhoe.” We have a perfectly good backhoe. So…

Carlota:                                  [00:53:05] And, there’s also a certain amount of: it’s not sexy. Knowledge management isn’t sexy, and I happen to be really good at it, and I really get a kick out of it and I really enjoy it. But, even with the Elasticsearch server that we rolled out, my boss thanked the developer, and literally said to me, “You didn’t code it.” You know. “You didn’t develop it, you don’t deserve recognition for that project.” I’m like I designed and I spent two years getting it off the ground, how do I not get recognition for that. So, it’s a really not-sexy job.

Kevin:                                       [00:53:36] It’s… no. Much of the IT industry is not sexy, you know. I believe that.

Carlota:                                   [00:53:43] Exactly.

Kevin:                                       [00:53:43] What’s the biggest help or the biggest piece of advice you’ve been given that has, like, helped you, or… and there’s also the piece where, what would you tell somebody who’s getting into, if not the field, at least trying to get themselves organized. Because a lot of our listeners, they’re not necessarily technical people, they are learning about organization, and they’ve tried different things. So, what would you say that the biggest help for you has been, and what advice would you give?

Carlota:                                  [00:54:15] Oh, wow. Organization at scale is very different from a personal organization, and you have to be willing to give up a lot of control. It’s not going to be perfect. I think the best advice I ever got was from a gentleman in [phonetic Azaides] that was mentoring me at NetGear, and he said to me: Carlota? Shut up and take 80% and worry about the next 20% later. V1, 80% is fine. Version one, take the 80% and then look for the incremental gains.

Kevin:                                       [00:54:46] Then do the improvements, yeah.

Carlota:                                  [00:54:49] I’ve kind of taken that in life in general. I’ve stopped—I’m definitely not the perfectionist I used to be, and yeah… I’m much happier for it.

Kevin:                                       [00:54:58] Yeah, that takes a lot of stress off. Okay, it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be 80% of what needs to be done, and we can fix the rest later.

Carlota:                                  [00:55:06] Yeah, and there is a certain amount of just using htat to talk off my OCD, right? When you’re—when you’re obsessive about the little details and just having that little: take the 80%. It can stop you cold in your tracks. It’s a really good piece of advice.

Ursula:                                     [00:55:21] When I was doing cover art for many years, when I was not terribly good, I would still get the gigs because it would be handed in on time and they would know what they were getting. And they would much rather have the stuff done than, you know, the person who was running after with a paint brush trying to get the last [crosstalk] on it as the mail truck takes it away.

Carlota:                                  [00:55:43] It’s so true.

Kevin:                                       [00:55:44] I have at my desk, and I write it down on like, my wiki page: perfect is the enemy of done.

Carlota:                                   [00:55:50] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:55:50] And I—not everybody feels that way, but I have to remind—I have to remind myself pretty regularly.

Ursula:                                     [00:55:59] We have a cult of perfectionism

Kevin:                                       [00:56:02] Yeah.

Carlota:                                  [00:56:03] Well, and, you know, I think I’ve maybe taken it a little far almost. In, for example, settling into this house, and I open up my—I unpack. I haven’t seen my stuff in over a year at that point, right? And…

Ursula:                                     [00:56:15] You are a nomad.

Carlota:                                  [00:56:17] I was a nomad. I enjoyed the heck out of just kind of being a gypsy around Europe, because I can work anywhere with an internet connection, and then I realized, I have a lot of barware, and I have a bunch of acrylic tumblers, so I look like an alcoholic nine year old. I had no dishware, and I didn’t have anything, and I pretty much, with the barware, especially, I just went. I don’t want anything to match. If it matches, it’s fine. But I don’t need to have four of this glass and three of, you know. I don’t need to have complete sets. I like having the little one-offs. They’re quirky, and it’s really great because friends now, bring me just random things. Oh, I thought of you. Or, you know, I really love this cup but it doesn’t match anything else, and…

Ursula:                                     [00:57:01] I have to say that the Romani would prefer not to use the word “gypsy.” It’s [crosstalk].

Carlota:                                  [00:57:07] Well, see, I’m not Romani, so I can totally be a gypsy, right?

Ursula:                                     [00:57:09] No…

Kevin:                                       [00:57:10] No…

Carlota:                                  [00:57:10] Oh, no. It doesn’t work like that.

Kevin:                                       [00:57:13] It’s…

Ursula:                                     [00:57:13] No…

Carlota:                                  [00:57:13] Damn the sensitivity trainings. All right, well I really enjoyed hoofing it around.

Ursula:                                     [00:57:20] There we go. All right, carry on.

Carlota:                                  [00:57:23] Yeah, it was a great experience, and even then, you know, just learning that things aren’t going to be perfect. Getting trapped in an apartment complex in Budapest and missing my plane, you know, that’s…

Kevin:                                       [00:57:36] Yeah, yeah, that’s… at thing.

Carlota:                                  [00:57:37] That’s gonna be not perfect, and you can be frustrated by it—

Ursula:                                     [00:57:40] I assume that happened, it was not a completely random comment?

Carlota:                                  [00:57:44] Oh, no, that actually happened. If you—actually if you look at my LinkedIn profile, I actually wrote it up because it was just—it was so funny to me. I was frustrated by it, but I was also at the same time very amused by it. And it was, I was very amused. Well, so, you have to have the key to get out of the apartment building. And I had been in the Air B&B. I had not left the apartment building at 4 o’clock in the morning before. I didn’t know that you needed the key to get out as well as to get in. Because in the United States, right, and other first world countries, you have to have egress for fire purposes, right?

Ursula:                                     [00:58:23] Oh…

Carlota:                                  [00:58:25] And I had… this was an internal courtyard. It had a bunch of little apartments facing this lovely internal courtyard, and I had thrown the keys back into the apartment to go out to catch the plane, and I couldn’t get out the front door, and I couldn’t get back into the apartment, right? So…

Kevin:                                       [00:58:42] Oh…

Carlota:                                  [00:58:42] And so… but then you have to get creative. Okay. I’m going to miss my plane if I don’t get out of this building. I actually had to take my—dig out of my suitcase my Leatherman tool and I was trying to take door hinges off. I was trying to do anything I could to get out of that building, and in the end I still missed my flight. But, you can laugh or about it or you can let it ruin your vacation.

Kevin:                                       [00:59:07] Thinking of laughing about things, how do you reward yourself?

Carlota:                                  [00:59:12] Whiskey.

Ursula:                                     [00:59:15] I’m drinking some right now.

Carlota:                                  [00:59:18] How do I not reward myself? I’m kind of the queen of self-indulgence, right?

Kevin:                                       [00:59:23] There is some of that, yeah, yeah.

Carlota:                                  [00:59:25] Yeah, whiskey, shoes, clothing. For material things, and just sometimes, just… sitting down and saying, “You did good.” You know, it’s really important to recognize that you’ve done a good job, because if you are a perfectionist, you will always feel like you have not done as good a job as you can. And, being able to just look yourself in the mirror and say, no, really. You did great. That’s a huge thing.

Kevin:                                       [00:59:54] Especially when you have a situation where your boss gives all the credit to someone else, you have to be able to look in the mirror and say, “The only reason they were successful is because I was successful and so, I have to be happy with their success. Their success is my success.” Yeah.

Carlota:                                  [01:00:09] Exactly. So, yeah. Because there is—it’s like many other thankless jobs. It will wear you down.

Kevin:                                       [01:00:18] Yeah.

Carlota:                                  [01:00:18] Yeah.

Kevin:                                       [01:00:20] So then, the question is: what do you do when you fail?

Carlota:                                  [01:00:23] Oh, boy.

Kevin:                                       [01:00:24] And we all do it, I mean… you know.

Carlota:                                  [01:00:26] We all do it, you know. For me, I almost build failure into my plan. I do so much risk mitigation in terms of just understanding… again this is where those diagrams come in handy. It’s like,okay… and you just plan for the failure. So, there comes a point where I don’t think I’ve ever failed to the point where a project did not get done at all, right? I have failed to the point where it’s like, okay, we’re going to have to go to plan number 3A, right? Or 7C. It’s… I… again, just plan for it. You’re gonna fail.

Kevin:                                       [01:01:10] Oh, yeah.

Carlota:                                  [01:01:12] If you don’t plan for it, that’s a problem. Yeah.

Kevin:                                       [01:01:18] The word I put in—and you’ve read Schlock Mercenary, right?

Carlota:                                  [01:01:22] Yeah, yeah.

Kevin:                                       [01:01:23] You’ve seen Maxim 70, right?

Carlota:                                  [01:01:24] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [01:01:25] Yeah, the “Failure is not an option, it’s mandatory. It’s what you do after.” I’m a firm believer in that.

Carlota:                                  [01:01:30] Absolutely. You pretty much—I don’t think you can succeed without failing a few times.

Kevin:                                       [01:01:36] Only a few.

Carlota:                                  [01:01:37] Well. A few times in a row… for that one single project, right? No, my life is full of failure. I mean… Yeah. And it just doesn’t. I think that’s, I think it’s very true. I think being willing to accept the consequences, that’s really the big thing. Am I willing to accept the consequences. And sometimes the consequences are, I’m going to lose this job if this doesn’t end, and you know, the times when that has been the consequence I have been more than okay with that consequence, because it wasn’t a job that was right for me anyway.

Kevin:                                       [01:02:09] Yeah, by the time you’ve reached the point where it’s like, if I fail at this, I’m out on the street, maybe this isn’t the job I need in? Right?

Carlota:                                  [01:02:16] Right? Exactly. But I… it amazes me. People who can stay in one job or with one company for years and years and years, because I’m very mercenary. It’s like I’m always chasing the next high, you know. I’m always doing—this, the company I’m working for now is the first one that I’ve been at for more than two and a half years.

Kevin:                                       [01:02:40] It’s funny tech is so turnover. This is the first company I’ve been at for more than three years. I’m about to have my six year anniversary, and in tech that’s—

Carlota:                                  [01:02:50] That’s huge.

Kevin:                                       [01:02:50] –That’s amazing. That’s huge, yeah. So…

Carlota:                                  [01:02:54] Yeah, it—I think that having that kind of mercenary attitude is almost, in tech especially, a benefit because you don’t take things personally. You don’t feel like the failure is some personal failure. The failure is, we didn’t plan for something correctly, or we didn’t get something that we needed to complete the project. It isn’t that I’m a bad person.

Kevin:                                       [01:03:17] Or, you can look at the history from the dot com bubble, the more recent bubble, and you can go, no, this was… in hindsight that was doomed from the start because it was mismanaged, the money was mishandled, and why they even let these people run companies is beyond me.

Carlota:                                  [01:03:33] Right?

Kevin:                                       [01:03:35] And there’s still a lot of that happening today.

Carlota:                                  [01:03:37] There are. There are.

Kevin:                                       [01:03:39] But, you know, only some of us who lived through the earlier bubbles are able to recognize it, right?

Carlota:                                  [01:03:45] Yeah. Yeah. It’s an interesting industry.

Kevin:                                       [01:03:49] It is.

Carlota:                                  [01:03:50] I can’t imagine another industry I’d rather be in.

Kevin:                                       [01:03:54] That’s… pretty much where I’m at, until I sit down and I’m podcasting, and I realize I could—love to do this as a living someday.

Carlota:                                   [01:04:04] That’s fair. I think my goal is to just…

Ursula:                                     [01:04:06] Man, there’s like 15 professions including medical test subject before I get into IT. Farmer. Dirt farmer. Dead farmer. Ditch farmer.

Kevin:                                       [01:04:19] You have to be careful with the ditches around the Walmarts.

Carlota:                                  [01:04:21] Yeah, fair.

Ursula:                                     [01:04:21] I don’t want to die in a ditch near Walmart.

Kevin:                                       [01:04:23] Right.

Carlota:                                   [01:04:23] No.

Ursula:                                     [01:04:24] Since the show is about goals, Carlota, what are your goals?

Carlota:                                  [01:04:29] In general? Like in life?

Ursula:                                     [01:04:29] Yeah, sure.

Kevin:                                       [01:04:30] Yeah.

Carlota:                                  [01:04:30] Or, um… Well, I mean, I grew up really poor, right? And one of my biggest goals is just to make sure that my nieces have a little bit of help here and there to take some of the pressure off of them so that they can focus on school or work or whatever it is that they want to focus on. I’m not somebody who says, “You have to have a four year college degree.” I happen to have a Masters from Columbia, but I went to Community College, I went to a state school, you know. I—

Kevin:                                       [01:04:56] And I know you—I watched you bust your ass for that Masters degree.

Carlota:                                  [01:05:00] Yeah, yeah. I worked my ass off—and it meant a lot to me. I wanted it. If you aren’t somebody who schools well, then don’t do it. Right? And I’m telling—

Ursula:                                     [01:05:11] Tell the internet what your first degree was in.

Carlota:                                  [01:05:14] My first degree was in Textile Chemistry. Dyes and finishes, right?

Kevin:                                       [01:05:19] You’re talking to a person who has succeed in IT despite having nothing more than a high school diploma.

Carlota:                                  [01:05:25] Exactly, exactly.

Kevin:                                       [01:05:25] Right? So…

Carlota:                                   [01:05:26] And, you know, my favorite VP at my work, the grand poobah of support is—no college degree. Really smart guy, but more importantly, he just really cares about the people working for him. He hires really good people. He takes really good care of them, and I’m very pleased we’ve just finally moved into his organization last month. So, I’m very excited.

Kevin:                                       [01:05:53] Yeah.

Carlota:                                   [01:05:55] So, hopefully my boss will get a little more clued-in being mentored by the grand poobah, but we’ll find out, so.

Kevin:                                       [01:06:00] Well, yeah.

Carlota:                                 [01:06:02] But at least that guy—that guy, at least says thank you. You know, it’s amazing what a thank you will get you in the world.

Kevin:                                       [01:06:08] So much, especially in this industry.

Carlota:                                  [01:06:11] My goal is to just not be poor again. And that’s—

Ursula:                                     [01:06:16] [crosstalk]

Carlota:                                  [01:06:16] Right? Right. And I remember saying to my older niece, who’s about to go off to college, “I’m really glad that your parents really fought to make sure that you had a great home life, that you had food on the table. That’s great, I mean that’s fantastic. But you know, hunger is a really good motivator.” You find out what you want when you’re hungry, you know. So, yeah.

Kevin:                                       [01:06:39] Oh yeah, and you…

Ursula:                                     [01:06:41] [crosstalk]

Kevin:                                       [01:06:43] No, when—

Ursula:                                     [01:06:43] When you can’t afford toilet paper the world narrows to a beautiful starkness—

Carlota:                                  [01:06:48] It does.

Ursula:                                     [01:06:48] That I wish to never experience again.

Carlota:                                 [01:06:50] Exactly. So yeah.

Kevin:                                       [01:06:53] I learned really quick when I’m staring at two dollars and my choice, you know, to get me food for the rest of the week, how much ramen can that buy. And do I splurge and get a loaf of bread to go with it for 99 cents. I mean, that’s.

Ursula:                                     [01:07:06] Ideally, however, we would not have to grow up making such choices.

Kevin:                                       [01:07:11] Right, right.

Carlota:                                   [01:07:13] Yeah, I mean, so… I’m a big old socialist for that reason. I think that if you take care of people you free them to do very good things. And I wouldn’t work for a company if I didn’t need health care. I would go do my own consulting and I think I could impact a lot of companies in a very good way and have—leave support organizations in better shape than I found them.

Ursula:                                     [01:07:33] But you’re a big old pre-existing condition.

Carlota:                                  [01:07:36] I am. I am… I’m a woman.

Kevin:                                       [01:07:38] And so am I… yeah.

Ursula:                                     [01:07:40] You’re a woman with like how many steel rods in her back?

Carlota:                                 [01:07:43] Oh, no no. I don’t actually have any bits of steel. I’ve had 36 or 38 broken bones, right? I’ve had a gallbladder removed at this point. I’m prone to kidney stones. My—I’m getting older. Fortunately, I’m kind of over the pregnancy hump. I’m not gonna have to worry about that any time, but, yeah—you only ever get older and fall more apart. So… We don’t get out of this alive.

Kevin:                                       [01:08:12] No, so we might as well have fun doing it.

Carlota:                                 [01:08:14] Yeah, and that’s pretty much—my personal goals are to just have a very comfortable life and help the people I love. Yeah.

Kevin:                                       [01:08:22] All right.

Carlota:                                 [01:08:23] Cool.

Kevin:                                       [01:08:23] That’s fantastic.

Carlota:                                  [01:08:24] Excellent. What else can I do for you?

Kevin:                                       [01:08:25] No, that’s it. That’s it. Thank you very much.

Carlota:                                  [01:08:28] Thank you, dears.

Kevin:                                       [01:08:28] This is uh… this is our friend Carlota. I will offer her the—we do Open Badges. I don’t know if you knew that.

Carlota:                                  [01:08:35] Oh, no, no.

Kevin:                                       [01:08:36] You know, the Mozilla Open Badge standard.

Carlota:                                  [01:08:40] Oh, okay.

Kevin:                                       [01:08:40] So, I actually have, if you log on, you can—I will give you the code for the special “I was a Guest” badge that you can then export or whatever to your favorite badge handling thing.

Carlota:                                  [01:08:51] Perfect, excellent. Thank you.

Kevin:                                       [01:08:52] You’re very welcome. And thank you for doing this.

Carlota:                                  [01:08:54] Absolutely.

Kevin:                                       [01:08:58] Ta-daa! We’ll get real music here one of these days.

Ursula:                                     [01:08:59] Woo!

Kevin:                                       [01:09:01] Woo. So, that was our interview with our friend Carlota. Thank you, Carlota, for appearing on the show. You were awesome. And I think it was fascinating listening to how she keeps the different groups she has to work with kind of working together and in sync and the whole thing organized.

Ursula:                                     [01:09:21] I just sat on the couch and drank Japanese rice whiskey.

Kevin:                                       [01:09:22] And commented every so often.

Ursula:                                     [01:09:24] Oh yes, that too.

Kevin:                                       [01:09:26] So, I have a letter and it ties back to what we were talking about a little bit. This is from Chris. Twitter @geonaturalist. Dear Kevin…

Ursula:                                     [01:09:40] Do they want their name…?

Kevin:                                       [01:09:41] That’s why I’m only doing that much.

Ursula:                                     [01:09:42] Okay.

Kevin:                                       [01:09:43] “Dear Kevin, I love Productivity Alchemy, thank you for doing this. It has prompted me to start trying different systems and to maintain an active effort to improve my own productivity, which is probably been necessary for, oh, years.” Not gonna lie, that has happened to me more than once.

Ursula:                                     [01:09:59] Hey, you know me and my everything is a cult system.

Kevin:                                       [01:10:03] Yes. “I wanted to reach out to you with a question about the intersection of productivity and mental illness, specifically anxiety. Episode 1 prompted me to try using a basic digital to-do list, which worked for about three hours. Then the list got so long that my anxiety kicked in at all the pending demands and I had to actually shut down the software. Can’t be anxious about it if you can’t see it, apparently, in order to cope. Have you or Ursula run into anything like this, where the productivity tool itself causes a direct problem, or do any of your upcoming guests have techniques to deal with anxiety of a similar nature. I’ve switched to using OneNote. Not having to see all the reminders at once helps a lot, but it’s still missing something, and I’m curious to hear other approaches. Keep up the good work you do with all of the podcasts. I love KEUC and Hidden Almanac and discovered Daft Punk from listening to In The Evening.” Ooh, my music podcast! “Thank you, and keep exploring things with your unique perspective, it’s awesome.”

[01:10:58] Um, wow, yeah. I think you’re one of six people who listened to In the Evening when I was still able to do it and had the time, and I just wanna say, thank you for listening. I miss doing it. I do want ot get back to it one day. Sergei the cat is currently getting comfortable around one of the lamps, so lights flickering, it’s a little distracting. But, to your point, look. I have a similar problem at work. The one project I’m on, the one that I’m primarily on, is a really big effort. I’ve been trying to get it organized and moving forward for two years. It has, I think, somewhere—I think we just opened ticket number 1100 in the project. Right? A lot of these are not done yet. I’ve had to go back and forth and back and forth to clean things up over and over again because I look at that pile and I look at all the stuff that needs to be done and I just shut down because, yeah, it’s a lot. And, even if I look at it and go, well, I’ve got six months to do all of this, it’s still—there’s a part of my hindbrain that goes, “You have to get it all done now. Now now now!” That false sense of urgency. And some of it, I can look at it and go, “Yeah, that’s definitely due today.” And some of it’s like, “I’m never going to do this, I don’t even know why they’re requesting it.”

[01:12:18] But still, when you look at it as a giant list without really parsing it or processing, it’s scary. And I admit to being the kind of person who looks at this huge task list and occasionally just going, “I cannot cope with this. I need to look at something else for a while.”

Ursula:                                     [01:12:36] I’m gonna go play Tetris.

Kevin:                                       [01:12:37] Yeah, or I’m gonna go play Two Dots or Marvel Puzzle Quest, or something like that.

Ursula:                                     [01:12:42] Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Kevin:                                       [01:12:44] Yes. The—and, as I said earlier. I am on mediation for depression due to a burnout incident several years ago, and I’ve—as someone who talks openly about this and I don’t know what—that noise is Sergei playing with something in the cat sleep shelf. I don’t know what he’s playing with. Will you check that while I um… so… I’m very open about the fact that I am medicated for depression. I’m—

Ursula:                                     [01:13:16] I’m medicated for anxiety.

Kevin:                                       [01:13:17] Yeah, and I’m starting to look at some of my symptoms and say, maybe depression isn’t the right thing, and it’s something to discuss with my doctor. Um…

Ursula:                                     [01:13:25] The problem is depression is the—and this is not to belittle depression, but—depression, when people heard of it, became a catch-all, and anxiety got shoved into it. Depression, anxiety are very often mixed together so that wasn’t as bad as it could be. But, every now and then you do get someone, and I am case in point, who does not have depression but has anxiety.

Kevin:                                       [01:13:50] Yes.

Ursula:                                     [01:13:51] I am, I like to say the weasels eating my brain are very cheerful.

Kevin:                                       [01:13:56] That’s, yes. Yeah. Um. My weasels are not. My brain weasels are goth and doom and gloom.

Ursula:                                     [01:14:05] Well, yes.

Kevin:                                       [01:14:07] I go into the—but that’s the thing. I go into the shame spiral. There’s all this work to do and I’m not getting it done and so I just can’t deal with this, but then I’m not getting it done, and why am I not getting it done, because I need to get it done. And that just builds and compounds and builds and compounds and I end up eventually breaking and, oh, I don’t know, losing my job weeping in the parking lot waiting to pick up my kids and getting medication.

Ursula:                                     [01:14:30] And again, I just don’t actually know if that is depression. And I am—this is, you know, take my armchair psychology to degree for exactly what it’s worth.

Kevin:                                       [01:14:38] But this was 2005. So, you know.

Ursula:                                     [01:14:40] Yeah, that’s fine. My brief stint where I did have depression was a lot of, “I can’t eat and I can’t get out of bed.” The I can’t do anything without sobbing whereas, and my coping mechanisms when I had depression were basically curl in fetal position, sleep, and sob. Whereas with anxiety, my coping mechanisms for everything that’s terrible is work harder, start five new projects, because otherwise I’ll die in a ditch outside of Walmart.

Kevin:                                       [01:15:07] Right.

Ursula:                                     [01:15:07] So, you know. But it… yeah.

Kevin:                                       [01:15:09] But, the solution, and you—

Ursula:                                     [01:15:12] We’re getting side-tracked.

Kevin:                                       [01:15:12] Right, we’re getting side-tracked. The solution to the difficulty with looking at the list and freaking out about the list, is kind of exactly what you’ve done. And that is, don’t have a giant list with everything on it. One of the things I like about a weekly planner is I only have to put in, as I’m filling it out or whatever, I only put in the things that have to be done on a certain day, and I only do one week at a time. And that—

Ursula:                                     [01:15:35] If you’re doing it digitally, also, and this might not work? But would collapsible tabs work?

Kevin:                                       [01:15:42] Well, that’s one of the things that One Note gives you. One Note lets you basically space out pages and set due dates on different… basically One Note looks and acts like this planner, only completely digital. Tabs are top, but you can add pages to each of the sections. You can do it like, you can do a page a day, you can do a page a week. And it’s a really good digital alternative to the paper planners that you and I are using.

Ursula:                                     [01:16:09] I may have to look into it.

Kevin:                                       [01:16:10] Yes. And it’s free for Mac, free for Windows.

Ursula:                                     [01:16:13] Because I would like a digital version to a certain extent.

Kevin:                                       [01:16:17] And I’ll show you some of the neat tricks I know about it with templates so that you can do page layouts like that and have it pre-populated. I can do some cool things in One Note.

Ursula:                                     [01:16:27] We’ll talk about that on the show, but I’m just…

Kevin:                                       [01:16:29] But the idea is that, and it’s very similar to what we do with our two week planning is we look at everything we need to do, and we say, “Okay, there is no way we can possibly get all this done right now. So, let’s pick the things that we’re going to get done in a very finite amount of time.” Here’s the 25 things that absolutely, positively have to be done in the next two weeks.

Ursula:                                     [01:16:51] 25 sounds like a huge number, but if you’re one person… I mean, Kevin has a team of how many?

Kevin:                                       [01:16:54] There’s uh… four or five of us. I think I’ve got six people working on this particular two week stretch of—maybe seven— because we’ve gone outside the team on a couple things. But, that’s the thing. I’ve got a bigger team. But it may be for you personally, it’s here are the five things I absolutely, positively need to do this week. And here’s the days that I need to do them on. And then the rest are on a dated list, or you know, are sitting on the big monthly calendar with where they need to be done, and just forget about them until the end of the week, or until somebody comes in and says, “Hey, I need this other thing done, maybe you have to rejuggle there.” But, part of the idea is to eat the elephant. And, this is a horrible metaphor, I know. But it is one that is used so commonly I think that pretty much everybody understands it. How do you eat an elephant, you eat it one bite at a time. But you don’t eat an elephant by sitting down just in front of an elephant and hitting it with a spoon. You chop it up first. You chop it up into smaller pieces that you can take on one at a time.

Ursula:                                     [01:18:01] I… it should be said. When I do a Hamster Princess book, or one of the other kids books, I have to do 150 illustrations per book.

Kevin:                                       [01:18:09] Right.

Ursula:                                     [01:18:10] And, if I had like a checklist with all 150 illustrations on it, and I checked it off when they were done, I would run screaming into the night and you would never see me again because…

Kevin:                                       [01:18:18] She would be dead in a ditch by the Walmart.

Ursula:                                     [01:18:20] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [01:18:20] Where the car hit her, yeah.

Ursula:                                     [01:18:21] Because—just the sight of 150 filenames. No. I would die. But, so what I do is I mark all of the—I have the whole manuscript in front of me. I mark in red the things that aren’t done yet, and then I just go through and when they’re done, I mark them the same as the rest of the manuscript, so that I don’t see them, when I scroll through. And, then, I just… you know. When I finish a file, I save that in a new thing. And at start, you know there’s like one completed illustration. But by the end, there’s like 140, but what I’m looking at it when it’s a really long list is the really long list I have done.

Kevin:                                       [01:18:57] Right.

Ursula:                                     [01:18:58] So…

Kevin:                                       [01:18:58] Not the really long list of things you have to do.

Ursula:                                     [01:19:00] Maybe, maybe it would be helpful to have a “have done” list.

Kevin:                                       [01:19:05] And that’s… yeah. And that’s something…

Ursula:                                     [01:19:07] You can look at it and go, “Hot damn.”

Kevin:                                       [01:19:09] Yeah, there is a One Note add-in. I think there’s a macro for it in the Onetastic macro set, which I know works on Windows, I don’t know about Mac, but it’s a whole bunch of macros you can add onto One Note to do funky things. And, I think one of them will collect all of your to-do items. The ones that you’ve already marked off and will create a list of all the things you’ve done. So, that’s a way to look at it from, okay, not just here’s all the things I have to do, but look at all the things I did. When we look at our team, when we do our—like I was talking earlier, we would do our retrospective, where we go over all the tasks we had assigned, the tasks that came in, and what we actually got done. I make sure to say, “Look at all the things we got done.” We started with ten. We ended up with 35 needing to be done. We did 25 of those. So, don’t feel bad that we have ten undone so we broke even. Look at everything we got done, because this is all the stuff—the crap that came in and derailed us from getting those last ten things done.

Ursula:                                     [01:20:14] The other thing that—and this may be a crazy writer idea and you can tell me I’m nuts. But have you considered like doing a rough draft of your to-do list, where— because the thing is when you write a first draft, you’re supposed to just blort everything out on the page you can possibly think of. And the kitchen sink, and then you go through and you edit things. So, maybe you just need a first draft of your to-do list, and that’s not the important one. But you’ve just written down everything, and then you go and edit that and pull out all the things you actually need.

Kevin:                                       [01:20:39] Well, and that’s something kind of—

Ursula:                                     [01:20:41] That’s assuming you can look at it again, which, you know, of course…

Kevin:                                       [01:20:44] And that follows a lot of, um… David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, which is—

Ursula:                                     [01:20:51] Oh God, I’ve invented a cult.

Kevin:                                       [01:20:53] Nope. You have—

Ursula:                                     [01:20:55] Reinvented a cult.

Kevin:                                       [01:20:56] You have sidestepped into something that already exists. But one of the things he says is, collect. Collect everything. And he calls this your inbox. From back in the days when you did paper inboxes. A lot of people use email or if they’re using something like One Note, they have a save to One Note button, and it goes to a default page called Inbox. Whatever. So, you collect everything, and then you sort it. Right? And yeah, there might be a pile of stuff, but you take that time, twice a day, maybe? To sort all of those things you saved that need to be done. Or need to be filed away that you might want to reference later, but there’s no action that needs to be done. And we’ll do a whole show on Getting Things Done. It is a fascinating process.

Ursula:                                     [01:21:40]  I want to do a show on One Note, now. This sounds fabulous. I’ve been writing stuff down like a chump, and you’ve seen what my handwriting looks like.

Kevin:                                       [01:21:46]  You’ll notice that despite all of the software I’ve used, I’m writing things down like a chump, too. So. Um. But… The end result is—

Ursula:                                     [01:21:57]  Yeah, but you’re one of those people who writes poetry longhand.

Kevin:                                       [01:22:01]  Not in years. Um… the point is, when you do that draft, that collection of all the things you need to do. Just think of it like that. It’s a collection. Don’t look at it as, oh God, I need to get all of this done now. I know that’s hard. It’s hard for me, too, but to just say, okay. I have this big list, so I’m gonna take the first ten and I’m gonna just take everything beneath that first ten and I’m gonna shove it off to the next page. So, today, I’m gonna deal with these ten, whether it’s schedule them, get them done, whatever. I’m gonna do these ten things. Next day. Flip the page, take the next ten and just spread it out.

Ursula:                                     [01:22:41] Or take two. Or take ten a week, or whatever you feel like, you know.

Kevin:                                       [01:22:44] Or whatever… whatever is a manageable level, right? Because my days vary so much between ticket work and meetings I have to take and appointments and things like that, I look forward to my Fridays. Friday is the day that I’ll only have two things I need to do and the first, is like my morning meeting with the east coast team, we do one every morning. And then—it’s like fifteen minutes long—and then, record KUEC. Those are the only two things I have to do on Friday. The rest of the day is for me to be able to focus on my work work. Like, my day job. And I don’t have any of the distractions of meetings. I don’t have any of the distractions of a to-do list. I tend to shove a lot of tasks that need to be done this week onto Friday because that’s a great time. It’s like the only open time I have to really dedicate to something big. And maybe that’s just it. Maybe you need to take a look at it and say, “Here’s the hour every day that I’m going to go through my to do list and just triage.” Right? Because you’ve dumped all this stuff down. A week later, maybe you find out you don’t need to do X, Y, and Z. Cross them off. Throw them out. Get them out of there. That cycle of triaging regularly, daily, weekly, is very cathartic. Because it forces you to sit there and say, “Do I really need to do this? No. Why do I need to do this? Can somebody else do it? Sure. Does anybody need to do this? No.” And it will take some practice, and you’re going to slip up a couple times. I slip up regularly on that. But if you even just get into the habit or have a reminder that says, “Hey, it’s nine am on Monday, it’s time to just go through the list and see what we keep and we get rid of. That’s fine.” You know. Whatever works best for you, in that case.

Ursula:                                     [01:24:36] We should probably call it there so that this isn’t the longest episode of ever.

Kevin:                                       [01:24:40] No, no no. But uh… we need a badge code and so I am going to go with, um… Let’s see, what do we want to do? KBGODDESS all one word. All caps. KBGODDESS. Because Carlota, at her company, is the knowledge base goddess.

Ursula:                                     [01:25:05] Okay. That’s fair.

Kevin:                                       [01:25:06] She is going to love that code. And so, yeah. That’s gonna be our badge code this week. So, thanks for listening. Make sure you check out all the Open Badges we issue at productivityalchemy.com. Including the special badge you get for joining the first time. Also, check out show notes from past shows, and we’re working towards that—I’m chugging along to get a Patreon going, just for this show, and we’ll figure it out as we go. So, thank you for listening, and we will talk to you next week.

Ursula:                                     [01:25:46] Woo.