Episode 72 - Turkey Job Hunt, Christy "Lilisonna" Howard

Podcast: Productivity Alchemy

File Name: PA-Episode72

File Length: 01:42:35

Transcription by Keffy

Kevin:                                       [00:00:00] Hi, folks. This is your weekly reminder that we record this podcast in a house full of animals. There are dogs, there are cats. The sun is still up so the chickens are still outside doing chicken things. And when we break, I’ll go outside to put them away so they don’t get caught in the dark because it’ll be dark soon.

Ursula:                                     [00:00:18] And nothing is worse than sad chickens in the dark.

Kevin:                                       [00:00:22] No, not really. Except happy chickens being eaten by coyotes.

Ursula:                                     [00:00:27] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:00:28] That’s… that’s—I think that makes a sad chicken.

Ursula:                                     [00:00:30] Yeah, well. I don’t honestly think that it takes long enough for them to really experience a significant shift of emotional state.

Kevin:                                       [00:00:39] Fair. The other thing to mention at this juncture is this podcast is generally rated PG-13. That means we swear a lot but we don’t talk about anything explicit. But due to the nature of the podcasting companies, it’s an A/B switch. It’s either clean or explicit and so we have to mark it as explicit. It’s not really. So, it’s okay, Mom and Dad, if your kid’s listening. Or it should be.

Ursula:                                     [00:01:03] Probably.

Kevin:                                       [00:01:04] Probably. Welcome to Productivity Alchemy episode 72. I’m really excited. I have our guest Lilisonna this week and we had a great discussion—

Ursula:                                     [00:01:17] Woo!

Kevin:                                       [00:01:18] —about her crafting and her making and some of her LARP stuff and her profession where she is a product manager. A testing/QA manager.

Ursula:                                     [00:01:31] Awesomesauce.

Kevin:                                       [00:01:31] So, there is a lot to focus on in there and a lot to talk about. It was a great interview. We had a lot of fun. But we’ll get to that in a little bit.

[00:01:41] This week in terms of productivity, since the last show, I’m still job hunting, but you know, I’m finding some leads. I’m talking to some new people. I’m starting to get requests from people who aren’t necessarily listeners to be interviewed on the show, so I’m starting to juggle that sort of thing. It’s very weird. I’m very excited and I just set one up that I’m not gonna really…

Ursula:                                     [00:02:02] If you podcast a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.

Kevin:                                       [00:02:07] Yeah, I’m really excited about a couple of these and we’ll be talking about them as I finalize them. But, needless to say, I’m just floored and astounded and flattered and confused because I’m just this guy who does this little podcast. I’m… yeah. And, you know, otherwise, targeting the companies I want to work for, I found a couple new resources for jobs that are primarily remote. So, I’m excited about that. For those of you who are listening to this on the day of release, it is Thanksgiving in the United States. We’ll be at family’s house so there’s been some juggling around, you know, logistics around that. Not as big a logistic or planning problem as if we were having dinner here.

Ursula:                                     [00:02:50] No, no. It’s fortunately… Kevin’s lovely cousin Amy does the Thanksgiving every year and we go there. We eat. Kevin takes over cooking something because it’s what he does.

Kevin:                                       [00:03:04] It is what I do.

Ursula:                                     [00:03:04] And… Amy and I drink heavily and sit around and are good-naturedly drunk.

Kevin:                                       [00:03:14] Which is—which is good, yeah. And everybody—

Ursula:                                     [00:03:16] I know what my job at these things are. Is to provide a liver so that Amy does not drink alone and so that your—also whenever I show up at any family function, immediately they pour me booze. And the theory that has been put forward is that they are trying to get me too drunk to run away from what may happen later if—

Kevin:                                       [00:03:40] It’s been ten years now. I don’t think they’re getting rid of you that easily.

Ursula:                                     [00:03:43] Well… I mean the ham is really good.

Kevin:                                       [00:03:45] The ham is good. There’s ham at every family dinner just for Ursula now.

Ursula:                                     [00:03:50] Yes. It’s—Amy’s mom, Kevin’s aunt, plies me with ham at every gathering, so I am plied with ham and booze and it’s like they think they have to keep bribing me to keep Kevin. And, I’m like—no, I would keep Kevin anyway, but I’m not gonna turn down the ham and booze.

Kevin:                                      [00:04:10] No, I really can’t blame you on that one. The other thing about it though is that I used to do the big orphans Thanksgiving, and I would invite—I would just do a blanket invite. If you don’t have family, if you want to get away from your family. If you just want to come over. I will have turkey and people can provide other things and I’d just have people over and it was an all day event and it was so rewarding and wonderful and exhausting and as much as I enjoyed doing it, I’m kind of glad to have taken the last, what? Five or six… seven years off. Because—

Ursula:                                    [00:04:48] I mean, you were doing it for quite a while and it is a big logistical thing. I—for lunch today swung by Angelina’s, our—

Kevin:                                       [00:04:55] Oh yeah, yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:04:56] The little Greek restaurant in town. She is prepping dozens of Thanksgiving things and I know Angelina does a lot of work with the food insecure in the neighborhood so I—a lot of those were probably, I am making you a Thanksgiving, damn it. And some of those were undoubtedly, you know, people paying for Thanksgiving stuff, and just you know, hotel pans of stuffing going by and whatnot and I’m like. Have—have a good Thanksgiving. Actually, just have a good rest after the Thanksgiving, and her husband was like, “YES.”

Kevin:                                       [00:05:33] Yes. No, and I remember watching, like, our friends over at Lily Den Farm. Every year when the turkeys come due and making sure that everybody picked up their turkey. Now, this is also the farm we got the—how much did that turkey come out to, dressed?

Ursula:                                     [00:05:53] It was ridiculous. They had to—they got the poults too early and turkeys, the broad-breasted white—don’t get me started with the problems with the broad-breasted white, but they just continue to grow. And, you know, these were free range organic turkeys, but as he said, once they found where the feeder was, he would go and tell them to free range. They would just be like, “Feeder’s right here. I’m not going anywhere.” And they got emmense. And like, he was like… you want a turkey for Thanksgiving? And we’d thought about getting like a half one, I think, and he was like, “How about a full size.” We’re like, okay. He’s like, “And can—maybe you should invite a few more people over. Like 30 or so.”

Kevin:                                       [00:06:39] We, um…

Ursula:                                     [00:06:40] He had—he was having to scald them in 50 gallon oil drums.

Kevin:                                       [00:06:46] Yeah, they were that big. To be able to pluck them. I ended up taking it apart when we got home. I mean there was so much turkey that I think we had a breast and a leg and that fed everybody in the family.

Ursula:                                     [00:06:59] Like ten people, yeah.

Kevin:                                       [00:07:00] Yeah, and I still had a breast and a leg for Christmas.

Ursula:                                    [00:07:04] And I—you took a big chunk of it over to Friend.

Kevin:                                       [00:07:08] Oh, Friend, yep. I think I took like thighs. Because the thighs were the size of a normal turkey breast. It was incredible. I’m never doing that again.

Ursula:                                     [00:07:22] It—they were—they were excessive.

Kevin:                                       [00:07:25] They were excessive.

Ursula:                                     [00:07:27] Anyway. One thing I would put in, speaking of all of this. Kevin, of course, is a feed people kind of person.

Kevin:                                       [00:07:35] Kinda am.

Ursula:                                     [00:07:35] So are most of his relatives. I have had many Thanksgivings where I sat at home by myself with Chinese takeout and played video games and it was glorious.

Kevin:                                       [00:07:46] Oh yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:07:46] It was—it was like, fantastic. I enjoy going to Kevin’s cousin’s. I am not in anyway, you know, saying I would rather stay home and play video games. But, if you would rather stay home and play video games. That is totally cool. Do not let anyone shame you and like, “Oh, it’s so sad you’re alone on Thanksgiving.” No. If you want to stay at home in your underwear and play The Sims, my God, get down with your bad self.

Kevin:                                       [00:08:08] And I have at least one person I follow online who pretty much lost all of her family. And she’s in her late 20’s, early 30’s, and she gets very angry at all of the family focus that goes on right now because she literally has no one and nothing and does not like these holidays at all.

Ursula:                                     [00:08:30] No, the holidays can be very hard for people, and—which, certainly, that’s a separate matter. It’s just that there’s also a—if you’re just an introvert and you just want to hang out by yourself, there is this whole sort of societal pressure, “You must go do a huge family gathering.” And, you don’t have to. Nobody tells you how to enjoy a holiday. So, don’t—don’t let anybody be like, “Oh, you poor thing.” Nah. Just—

Kevin:                                       [00:08:58] We do know—

Ursula:                                     [00:08:59] —play Sims in your underwear.

Kevin:                                       [00:09:00] Oh, please. We do know that holidays can be hard for people who don’t have family, have lost their family. Are—

Ursula:                                     [00:09:07] Would prefer not to deal with their family.

Kevin:                                       [00:09:09] Are estranged from their family, things like that. And, you know, there are lots of—help is available, companionship is available. There are—you have friends out there, I’m just saying.

Ursula:                                     [00:09:21] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:09:21] Um… now, I’ve got another matter I want to talk about.

Ursula:                                     [00:09:24] Oh dear.

Kevin:                                       [00:09:25] Now that we’re done with the holiday. No, this was something was originally going to be in the November letters show that got preempted by the live show, which was so much fun and I hope everybody enjoyed it. And that is—but I looked at it and I said, this isn’t something I can wait a couple weeks til December for. And so, it was a letter that came in.

[00:09:44] Dear Kevin, Thanks for the podcast, I’ve enjoyed listening to it over the past year. Also, a big fan of the other two.

Ursula:                                     [00:09:50] Woo!

Kevin:                                       [00:09:50] As you’re also in job-hunt mode, I was wondering if you had any advice. I’ve been looking for a new position for a while and it can be frustrating. I’ve gotten a couple of interviews, lots of form letters saying I’ve not even gotten that and not offers yet from all the jobs I’ve applied for, and the whole thing sucks. I also have depression, which does not make the rejections easier. How do you keep yourself from getting frustrated with the whole process and do you have any advice on what helped you land jobs previously. Regards, Al Mog[sp?] And also there’s a P.S. Regarding my name: don’t bother trying to get the pronunciation correctly, just do your best.

[00:10:26] So, here’s the thing about it. I have gone through this cycle a couple times. Sometimes it’s—I have a job and I’m looking for a job. Sometimes it’s—there was an unfortunate event. There’s been a layoff, there’s been a business change. There’s—I have not ever been out and out fired fired except the one time. But, it’s hard. And it is harsh. And I’m not gonna say that it’s easy, and I have points like I think a week and a half ago. Two weeks ago, as I was filling out all the unemployment paperwork and all the stuff for that, and looking at how much money they weren’t going to give me and how much they were. And it’s just, you know, like, crushing to think that they’ve got questions like—on it like, “Were you offered a job and turned it down?”

[00:11:22] And the answer to that determines your eligibility not just for that week’s benefits, but for all your benefits from there. As if the most important thing on it is were you offered a job, and if you were offered that job, did you accept? And you better accept because we don’t want to be paying you, right? Even if you’re a bad fit, money, whatever. It’s much harder when you’er getting the rejections. I got a rejection last week on a company I really wanted to work for. I got a rejection the week before on a company that that one was a shoot the moon sort of situation. I’m in that luxurious position where it’s not mission critical I have a job and work tomorrow. That doesn’t make it any easier, right?

Ursula:                                     [00:12:02] To be rejected, no?

Kevin:                                       [00:12:04] To be rejected—

Ursula:                                     [00:12:04] Except that you have one less layer of panic.

Kevin:                                       [00:12:07] Exactly. I have one less layer of panic. It’s not this rejection means I don’t eat. It’s this rejection means I didn’t get a thing I really wanted. Which is still hard. In the past, the biggest thing to keep my spirits up has been Ursula coming in and kicking me in the ass. If I start—seriously, if I start to get into that spot where I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m never gonna get a job, this is so hard, it is so depressing.” She will come in and say, “All right. That’s enough moping, next.”

[00:12:38] You’re, you know. She’s my gatekeeper on that.

Ursula:                                     [00:12:41] I—well. I think it’s just because I did it once and with my usual tact and grace…

Kevin:                                       [00:12:50] Which is none whatsoever.

Ursula:                                     [00:12:52] Yeah—well… You were getting pretty bogged down in self-pity and I was like, yeah, well, you and everybody else in the world has had to deal with some shit, and…

Kevin:                                       [00:13:05] I mean, and it’s—

Ursula:                                     [00:13:06] This is not really a helpful thing to someone saying, “How do I—how am I not depressed about getting rejected?” Me showing up and going, “Well, everybody else in the world has shit, too,” does not help you. So, I don’t think this is necessarily good for the letter writer.

Kevin:                                       [00:13:06] No, it’s not. But… I—

Ursula:                                     [00:13:22] I’m glad it helps you, dear.

Kevin:                                       [00:13:24] It helps me, but it also. I mean, before that in a couple of job hunts. The first time I was actively fired, right, was terrible. It destroyed me. Now it didn’t help that at the same time I was dealing with you know, my marriage falling apart, which I didn’t know at the time. But, it was, in hindsight.

Ursula:                                     [00:13:46] And even the—the pre-shocks of that usually are pretty damn stressful.

Kevin:                                       [00:13:51] Right, and so. You know, I mean, I—before—

Ursula:                                     [00:13:53] Didn’t you have small children?

Kevin:                                       [00:13:54] Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was 2005, so… Jake would have been about four and Ray was coming up on seven. Seven or eight.

Ursula:                                     [00:14:07] Yeah, that’s… that’s a little stressful.

Kevin:                                       [00:14:09] Yeah, and so, and I’ve got—you know, my ex-wife. I’m like, I don’t want to travel because you know, I want to be able to spend time with you and the kids, and she was like, “No, if it’s 50% travel, 75% travel, that’ll be awesome.” In hindsight there’s a clue there. But—you know, and so I mean, I did literally after a couple of rejections find myself in the parking lot at the Food Lion in downtown Pittsboro waiting for the bus to come drop off my kids weeping uncontrollably about how I was a terrible person and a terrible father and a terrible provider and all that shit society lays on top of you. Now, I am medicated now.

Ursula:                                     [00:14:50] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:14:50] I—this helps emmensely, and I got medicated—that was when I called my doctor and said, you know what? I think I may be depressed and perhaps we should medicate this. Because I’d been avoiding—she had said that it sounded like I was clinically depressed and perhaps I would like to try medicine. And I was like, no no no no no, it’s nothing like that, I don’t think. Oh yeah, I changed my tune really quick and it was a Godsend.

Ursula:                                     [00:15:15] My doctor did that, too, actually. And she said something that was very wise and which, of course, I did not listen to. It is one of those amazing pieces of good advice that I didn’t take at the time. Which was, “If you need something it’s better to start it now when you just need it a bit than when you’re at the bottom of a hole we have to drag you out of.”

Kevin:                                       [00:15:40] Yep.

Ursula:                                     [00:15:40] And that was very intelligent but like probably 99% of humanity, I had to be in the hole. And I got into the hole and was like, “Shit. Shoulda done. Oh, this is what that—oh, yeah, she was right.”

Kevin:                                       [00:15:56] Yeah, and that’s kind of the thing about it. When—now, for the actual job hunt part of it. There’s the whole, I did a lot of faking it about being cheerful. And that’s not healthy, but like depression comics from the guy who did. I can’t remember the—the Clay is the artist name. He’s like, oh, no, you seem so cheerful. And the person who is standing in has like a paper—a paper smiley face in front of their mouth showing that they are pretending to be happy. I did a lot of that. It’s not—it’s not fun. It’s not easy, but sometimes that actually, you know, helps going into the job. Now, in terms of actually finding a job? I have a vast personal network that I have built and cultivated over the last 20 years in this area. So, when I say, “Hey, I’m looking for a job and I’m looking for it in this industry. Typically I know somebody or I know somebody who knows somebody.

Ursula:                                     [00:17:03] Honestly, I think part of the reason it’s taking so long for you to find one right now is the fact that you’re at the end of the year.

Kevin:                                       [00:17:08] Yeah. Yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:17:09] Yeah. Had this happened five months later, you’d—yeah.

Kevin:                                       [00:17:13] Yeah, it would be different. The other thing is that unlike prior times, I’m being very specific and targeted about what I want. I’m not wallpapering the internet and the Research Triangle Park with my resume.

Ursula:                                     [00:17:26] And—and we may yet get to that phase, but—

Kevin:                                       [00:17:30] We may.

Ursula:                                     [00:17:30] The problem is on the rejection terms. When you’re applying to stuff that you specifically would like and can imagine yourself working, it hurts a lot more than when it’s just generic company 75.

Kevin:                                       [00:17:40] Yeah, I mean there was a lot of that when I talked to the one company that I would love to work for, and there may still be something in 2019. But when I was talking to them and they were basically saying, “We’ve decided not to go with that role this year. We need this other role more.” And I’m like. I understand that completely. That doesn’t mean I didn’t have a moment of, “Damn it.” I just, you know. Even though it was literally not me, there was still a bit of that, “I’m not good enough.” That impostor syndrome, or whatever. And it’s hard to deal with and the rejection is hard to deal with and, you know, I don’t know if I have any helpful advice on getting through it, except—

Ursula:                                     [00:18:26] Solidarity.

Kevin:                                       [00:18:27] Solidarity. Call your friends. If it’s getting tough, call your friends. Call—there are support lines out there. If you—your friends are frankly being assholes and are tired of hearing about it. That’s—you know, there’s stuff out there. There are people to talk to. Make use of them. If the depression is getting hard and getting difficult to deal with.

Ursula:                                     [00:18:53] And if it’s a medical issue and you have not, you know, hunted down that route, I will say, one of the problems with many antidepressants is the symptoms are frontloaded.

Kevin:                                       [00:19:04] Oh God, yes.

Ursula:                                     [00:19:05] You start taking them and you have a week, like, if I go off Effexor which I never will do again. But, when I go back on it, I get a week of the flu, basically.

Kevin:                                       [00:19:15] See, I—I don’t.

Ursula:                                     [00:19:17] Brain flu.

Kevin:                                       [00:19:18] Brain flu. Brain flu is a good one, because it’s not actually like sneezy-coughy flu.

Ursula:                                    [00:19:22] No, it’s just—but I lay in bed and don’t do much.

Kevin:                                       [00:19:25] Yeah, I… when I go off it, I get headaches. When I go off mine, I get headaches, and my doctor’s like, “You’re not supposed to be able to feel when it’s working.” And I’m like, “Oh, I know exactly when it’s working.” Um.

Ursula:                                     [00:19:35] I will just say that if you’re going to frontload the effects, while you’re unemployed is an excellent time to do that.

Kevin:                                       [00:19:41] It really is. Yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:19:43] In terms of scheduling. And then, unrelated note, if you’re going to go on them—the reason a lot of people I think, don’t give them as much of a chance is because it does—you do feel shitty at first. It’s not great.

Kevin:                                       [00:19:54] Oh God, yeah. Yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:19:55] But, if you know you’re going onto it, schedule some down time, if you have vacation or sick days or something.

Kevin:                                       [00:20:02] Yeah. And—

Ursula:                                     [00:20:03] That’s just general advice, not job-hunt advice.

Kevin:                                       [00:20:06] Now, specific to finding a job. I work my networks, right? I work my networks, I talk to my friends. I, you know, I am on LinkedIn right now every day just checking. Maybe commenting here and there. LinkedIn is possibly one of the better resources for, if you want a big corporate job, then LinkedIn is like Goldinum. My last two jobs were basically through LinkedIn. One I applied for and one was basically a cold call. And, so, if you’re not on that social network, on LinkedIn, you need to be, if you’re allowed to be. I say that because I have some friends who are barred from social networks due to issues. So that’s neither here nor there. The end result is, though, that you’ve gotta just work those networks. There’s no—there is a lot of hustle that goes on. And, you know, it may come to the point where I’m wallpapering RTP with resumes and taking that job that requires me to do the hour one way commute every day, because… you know, it will have hit that point. I’m trying to avoid that like the devil right now.

Ursula:                                     [00:21:21] I mean, it’s a rough place to be. And, you know, if you have to do a commute like one day a week or two days a week or whatever, we’ll make do. But, uh… I know there was like at least one that that might be in the cards. We can make that work.

Kevin:                                       [00:21:35] We can make that happen, yeah. The—

Ursula:                                     [00:21:35] It’s just the—when you have to spend two hours of your day in a car every day. That starts to suck your soul out through your nose.

Kevin:                                       [00:21:42] And there’s a lot of—yeah. And it drives me insane because that’s an hour where I can’t be doing things. It feels like time wasted.

Ursula:                                     [00:21:50] Yeah.

Kevin:                                       [00:21:51] And, yes. I could be bettering myself with audio books. Everybody said, oh, well, I listen to audiobooks and podcasts. I can’t do that. I—I need music because if I get into an audiobook or a podcast, I tend to focus more on that than the actual driving and that’s bad. That is bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

Ursula:                                     [00:22:08] My thing, I very rarely listen to audiobooks because my audio processing is frankly shit, and hell, half the time these days I don’t even listen to music. For long trips I will load up a podcast that is interesting enough to keep me going, but—yeah.

Kevin:                                       [00:22:27] I—meanwhile, I can’t stand to be in a silent car. Even by myself, I want music. I want something. When the two of us are driving around town in your truck with—and the radio’s off and we’re not really talking or something like that, I start to bug out. I really do.

Ursula:                                     [00:22:45] You can always turn the radio on, you know. The knob is right there.

Kevin:                                       [00:22:47] I’m respecting your choice as to having the radio off, but…

Ursula:                                     [00:22:51] Usually… No, I turned the radio down because I was trying to listen to something, or you were saying, and no—it’s…

Kevin:                                       [00:22:59] Right. Well, that’s the problem, yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:23:00] Anyway, that’s neither here nor there.

Kevin:                                       [00:23:01] Neither here nor there. So…

Ursula:                                     [00:23:04] I wish we had more of a magic bullet this—

Kevin:                                       [00:23:06] I really do.

Ursula:                                     [00:23:06] —this letter writer. You know, there was some big support group or something. But… all the ideas are often so hokey.

Kevin:                                       [00:23:16] Oh God. And some of them don’t even apply.

Ursula:                                     [00:23:17] Like, when I was single, my mom kept telling me to take a cooking class and to this day, I’m like, “That is just… no.”

Kevin:                                       [00:23:23] Well, and then there’s things like last time I was in this position. I mean, admittedly it was eight years ago. But, I’m in a required class at the employment securities commission and they’re saying, “You know, if you don’t get a response, go to the office and ask to see the hiring person.” And I’m like, you do not do that in my business. We… no. No no no no no. You do not show up with your resume in hand to apply at an IT firm. That is a no-no. That is a you get escorted from the building and not asked back kind of thing. That is not done in the 21st century.

Ursula:                                     [00:23:56] I sometimes wonder if some of the horror stories you hear about writers hounding agents are they’ve taken advice about—thinking it’s like a job application, they’re taking that kind of advice.

Kevin:                                       [00:24:07] And there is—there are books on how to get an agent from 30 years ago that people are still buying that still cover that sort of thing because—

Ursula:                                     [00:24:19] Probably…

Kevin:                                       [00:24:19] —30-40 years ago, we didn’t have the internet. We didn’t have these electronic submissions or whatever. It was—

Ursula:                                     [00:24:25] Yes, internet people. If you would like to tell us that we had ARPAnet, yes. Thank you. Hold your fire.

Kevin:                                       [00:24:33] Well, let me—yes. So, let me back that up.

Ursula:                                     [00:24:37] Some people on the internet enjoy being right.

Kevin:                                       [00:24:41] 40 years ago, sending your resume in online was not an option.

Ursula:                                     [00:24:45] All right. There we go.

Kevin:                                       [00:24:46] Yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:24:47] So, something that is an option—

Kevin:                                       [00:24:49] Yes?

Ursula:                                     [00:24:49] —is listening to a fabulous interview.

Kevin:                                       [00:24:53] It is.

Ursula:                                     [00:24:53] Which I believe you have lined up.

Kevin:                                       [00:24:54] I have a fabulous interview with Lilisonna. And thank you, Al Mog for writing in. And, we will go talk to her right after this.

[00:25:02] [Productivity Alchemy segment change music plays. Jaunty, pleasant, jazzy piano with accompanying bass.]

Kevin:                                       [00:25:43] Hi folks. I am here with Christy Howard who has been very gracious and agreed to talk about how she stays productive with us this week. So, Christy, can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what it is you do, since I forgot to ask that in all of the prep work we did.

Lilisonna:                              [00:26:06] That is totally fine. So, I’m Christy Howard. I am a test and QA manager at a large technical company which will remain unnamed because it is a large technical company. I am a parent to a wonderful 13-year-old daughter who may wander through at some point and interrupt me. It happens [crosstalk] a parent.

Kevin:                                       [00:26:32] Oh, I’m aware, yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [00:26:34] I’m a spouse. I do live-action role play, which is super fun and also needs lots of systems and organization. And one of the reasons that I went into wanting to talk to you is I am not a crafter. I’m not a maker. Yeah. So, I am not—

Kevin:                                       [00:26:56] Hang on, hang on, hang on. You LARP, but you don’t craft.

Lilisonna:                              [00:27:00] I am a—my husband does.

Kevin:                                       [00:27:02] Okay. There we go.

Lilisonna:                              [00:27:03] And I am problem-driven. So, I will make stuff, you know, if necessary. I make swords and I make costumes and things, although, usually my husband does a lot of that. He is much more the maker, the crafter, that sort of thing. I break things.

Kevin:                                       [00:27:23] Oh yeah, you’re in QA, yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [00:27:23] I’m a [crosstalk]. Yes. And so, I look at things that are kind of working and figure out how to make them work better, but I don’t usually do a lot of ground-up building.

Kevin:                                       [00:27:36] Gotcha.

Lilisonna:                              [00:27:38] And that’s one of the things that is sometimes hard to organize because a lot of what I do is not necessarily—I wake up in the morning and I’m like, “I need to accomplish X, Y, and Z.” It’s I wake up in the morning and it’s, “What problem has fallen out of the sky today that I need to go deal with.”

Kevin:                                       [00:28:01] Right. Right.

Lilisonna:                              [00:28:01] And that is a different sort of productivity and a different sort of organization than, I want to make a dress, what do I need to do to get that in.

Kevin:                                       [00:28:10] Right. Right right right. And that’s fair, because testing and QA is—in some ways it’s there to be proactive towards the product and the end result, but it is in fact a very reactive situation, because today might be the day the new build comes in. Tomorrow might be the day the new product comes in and they’re like, yeah, so, here’s the new thing and we need those results tomorrow.

Lilisonna:                              [00:28:35] Right.

Kevin:                                       [00:28:35] Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [00:28:37] Or, you know, you are testing the thing and everything seems to be going smoothly and all of a sudden, oh no. Everything is broken. We have to now go figure out why it’s broken and do a lot of diagnostics and understand it so we can report it to our devs and be like, “Hey, guys, like, what’d you all do?” And so that’s one of the things that’s interesting about my job.

Kevin:                                       [00:29:01] Yeah, no… and believe me. As someone who has had to respond to the results of you know, bug testing and QA and things like that, having a clear understanding of what went wrong where and when is very key. If it’s, yeah, the thing’s broke, that’s almost useless.

Lilisonna:                              [00:29:20] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:29:21] Right?

Lilisonna:                              [00:29:21] Detailed test steps on how you recreate something is so important to devs that they get very cranky when you don’t say this is why this is broken and this is how you fix it. Yeah, so I manage a team of about, with my co-manager, it’s about 30 people.

Kevin:                                       [00:29:45] Wow.

Lilisonna:                              [00:29:45] So, we have a lot of folks. Yes. And I am very fortunate that the place where I work is incredibly understanding of, and we’ll talk about this a little later, I’m sure, of like, how people work in different ways.

Kevin:                                       [00:30:04] Right.

Lilisonna:                              [00:30:05] So, that’s pretty cool.

Kevin:                                       [00:30:07] So, that leads me to a question that’s completely off the map here, because we’re gonna talk about—this is sort of in the introductory bit, but it’s also part of the how do you keep yourself organized bit. And that is, you’ve got a team of 30 people Are they a dedicated team that does nothing but QA or are they embedded with different engineering groups and working closely with the engineers as part of their testing and QA?

Lilisonna:                              [00:30:29] So, to get into the technical weeds, they are—they are embedded tested on Agile scrum teams. The team’s about eight people consisting of, in an ideal setting, one product owner, one scrum master, four developers and two QA. And so, the teams—I’ve lost count of how many teams we have at this point. There’s lots. But the teams operate really independently because how they get their work done? I don’t care. It’s one of the weird parts of me being this kind of manager is like, I don’t care what your day-to-day task is. I don’t care what you’re doing for your specific goal. What I care is your philosophy. I care how you are communicating with the rest of the test organization and I care about do you have any problems that I need to make go away.

Kevin:                                       [00:31:31] Right. So, you probably spend a lot of time talking to the scrum masters when there’s blocker or something like that, or something is preventing your team from being able to work. And how you can help the scrum master clear that.

Lilisonna:                              [00:31:44] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:31:44] Yes.

Lilisonna:                             [00:31:45] You know, do I need to go take it to a higher lever and go yell at my boss, and be like, “Hey boss, there’s a big blocker happening and the scrum masters simply don’t have the leverage.” Do I need to find another team that someone has to go talk to? Do I need to talk to some of my co-managers on the dev side and be like, hey, my tester raised a problem that’s really a dev problem. It’s not a tester problem. But, it’s on the dev side can you go run this to ground and figure it out. So yeah, a lot of…

Kevin:                                       [00:32:21] ‘Course as far as the devs are concerned, they’re all tester problems.

Lilisonna:                              [00:32:25] Right, they’re all tester problems. Although to be fair to my devs, at this point they are very much in the mindset of everyone is responsible for quality. We all have to figure out how to make it work. They are very well trained. [crosstalk]

Kevin:                                       [00:32:42] Good. That’s—that’s a hard thing to get, you know.

Lilisonna:                              [00:32:45] It is. But they’ve seen the advantage of what happens when they work together.

Kevin:                                       [00:32:51] Excellent.

Lilisonna:                              [00:32:51] And once you show them that promised land, they’re like. Oh! Yes. I can do that.

Kevin:                                       [00:32:58] Yes.

Lilisonna:                              [00:33:00] Yes, you can.

Kevin:                                       [00:33:02] Wow. All right. We’ll probably go into the weeds after the bulk of the interview where we won’t be boring people about it.

Lilisonna:                              [00:33:09] Totally fine. I’m all down for that.

Kevin:                                       [00:33:12] Yeah. So, there’s that. So, okay—through all of that, how do you keep yourself organized, before you get to the team?

Lilisonna:                              [00:33:19] So, let’s talk in two spots. So there’s my home life and there’s my work life. In work, white boards. White boards, white boards, white boards, and scrum masters.

Kevin:                                       [00:33:31] Ooh.

Lilisonna:                              [00:33:31] I do a lot of brain-dump onto the white board, sort through it. Figure it out. I’m a very kinetic person and so the act of writing helps me think.

Kevin:                                       [00:33:46] Right. Right.

Lilisonna:                              [00:33:48] And, I can kind of do that with typing but the white board helps. I happen to be very fortunate, I have an office. It is all white board paint.

Kevin:                                       [00:33:58] God I love those. I really do.

Lilisonna:                              [00:33:59] They’re the best, and so I have lots of colored white board pens and sometimes my coloring system makes sense and sometimes it’s just, I want to write in purple today.

Kevin:                                       [00:34:11] Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [00:34:14] And so I dump out a lot of like, what am I thinking about, what do I need to do? All of that goes onto the white board. And then it gets transferred either into meeting notices or it get transferred into a reminder sheet of when I need to do this, or because scrum masters are the best thing on the planet, it gets dumped to one of my scrum masters, and I’m like, “Please make this happen.” And they go off and do the organizational thing. Which is awesome.

Kevin:                                       [00:34:46] Then I got… I have two things to show you, then, since you like white boards so much. The first is easy to find. All right. This tube right here, and the people at home can’t see it. This is the—

Lilisonna:                              [00:34:57] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:34:57] —animate white board sticker. This is a 17”x78” piece of white board PVC with sticky on the back of it.

Lilisonna:                              [00:35:08] That’s the best.

Kevin:                                       [00:35:08] And you can—it even has, on the back of it, I don’t know if I can get it out. It has a grid on it, so you can cut it to size. I’m about to take a chunk of it and put it on one of the kitchen cabinets so I can write the menus. Yeah. It’s a great place.

Lilisonna:                              [00:35:25] Great. That’s really great.

Kevin:                                       [00:35:28] The other thing, though… it should be write here. It better be right here, this is where I put it. Okay, it’s not where I put it. I have a—ah! No, wait. Dang it. I have a collapsible white board.

Lilisonna:                              [00:35:44] Ooooh.

Kevin:                                       [00:35:45] It’s squares or rectangles that are about—a little bigger than index card size, but they’re all like, linked together so that it folds down into something slightly larger than a pack of tarot cards but it folds into, uh huh, exactly.

Lilisonna:                              [00:36:02] Oh, that sounds amazing.

Kevin:                                       [00:36:04] So, it comes out immediately as a grid and at the last event I staffed, at Mag Labs. I was using it to keep track of incidents by day so that I had the columns were like, harassment complaint or drunk or whatever. And then the rows were days. So, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And I was just adding tick marks in the appropriate column on the appropriate day so that we could just look at it and go, okay. So, this is what happened this event, right?

Lilisonna:                              [00:36:37] I need that. That sounds amazing.

Kevin:                                       [00:36:39] Yeah, I’ll find the link for you. I’ll find the link for you.

Lilisonna:                              [00:36:41] Perfect. And so that’s work. Home is slightly different because I’m organizing different things. I live in the Google ecosystem so everything goes on Google Calendar. Which is, if it doesn’t go on Google Calendar, it doesn’t exist. We have shared calendars among everyone on the family. My daughter is getting to the point where she’s putting it on and making sure that the party she’s going to for Halloween is on the calendar so we know about it. I have an Android phone and the number of times I say Ok Google, remind me per day is like constant because…

Kevin:                                       [00:37:23] Is it going off right now?

Lilisonna:                              [00:37:26] No. It went off at 3:45.

Kevin:                                       [00:37:30] No, I meant, I mean, is it listening right now? Did you remember to—

Lilisonna:                              [00:37:33] No, no, I very carefully tucked my phone away for this one. But yeah, so—getting those reminders—I have never been formally diagnosed with any sort of attention deficit disorder, but my patterns very clearly indicate that yeah, I probably do. And if I don’t do it right then when I’m thinking about it, it will go away.

Kevin:                                       [00:37:59] Ah yeah. Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [00:38:00] And so, having that ability to say, “Okay, I am thinking about the fact that I need to go buy detergent. I will put it into my phone and the next time I am home, I can transfer it to the grocery list or whatever. It’s just—it’s a godsend and I don’t actually know how I managed without them beforehand.

Kevin:                                       [00:38:23] So, here’s the best part. At the Hugos this year. Google was a sponsor.

Lilisonna:                              [00:38:29] Oh, nice.

Kevin:                                       [00:38:31] Every single one of the goodie bags had one of these in it. And what I’m holding up is the Google Home puck.

Lilisonna:                              [00:38:36] Nice.

Kevin:                                       [00:38:38] And, I’m not using it as much as I’m using my Amazon Echo devices, but since it integrates directly with my phone a lot better, I’m gonna have to start—now I’m gonna have to start trying it.

Lilisonna:                              [00:38:49] Yeah.

Kevin:                                       [00:38:49] Because it’s really handy to have on my desk, and just be able to, you know, use it the same way with my voice the same way I would my phone. That way if my phone’s not in the room or, you know, I’m on a call for something else, I can trigger that.

Lilisonna:                              [00:39:06] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:39:06] Right?

Lilisonna:                              [00:39:07] And then the other thing I do is I do a lot of Google Chat notes to myself.

Kevin:                                       [00:39:15] Oh, nice, yeah.

Lilisonna:                             [00:39:14] So, I have a Google Chat that is locked just to me. It’s just always there and so when I need to do something, or I need to remind myself of something that is too complicated for just a remind me when, I type it up in there. And so I have a back history of all of those things right at my fingertips. And it’s on my computer. It’s on my phone. It’s on any computer that I go to. There are times because I work for a large technical company that specializes somewhat in security where this horrifies me because everything lives in the cloud and if Google ever gets breached by something, whatever, you’re gonna know everything you could possibly know about it me. But, it’s so handy.

Kevin:                                       [00:40:06] I… actually started using, and it’s a pay-for service, but I paid for like the year’s worth—there are a couple of services out there where you can sync your clouds between each other, so I always have a backup. Right, of things like the chats. Of things like my documents because I’d hate to lose them. And backups are so very important. They’ve saved my—cloud-based backups at least, or some sort of synchronization service have saved my butt so many times.

Lilisonna:                              [00:40:33] Yes. I was an early adopter of the interwebs.

Kevin:                                       [00:40:38] Oh yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [00:40:38] I joined the internet back when it was Prodigy. And not actually the internet. So… I have lived in tech space and found it to be helpful to my organizational system for a very long time. And, you know, it’s gotten more and more sophisticated as the products have gotten mor and more sophisticated, but you know, I made myself a HTML calendar. I’ved used all sorts of Linux-based programs to just please just keep this organized. Dump everything to a text file. And it’s gotten easier and easier as things have gone on. But it’s still very tech based. I don’t do paper. I have a fidget cube which I mentioned prior, I think, before we were formally recording. But, if you give me paper, I shred it.

Kevin:                                       [00:41:32] Oh, you and Ursula. You and Ursula both. Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [00:41:35] Yes. Like, anything that is handed to me as a paper document goes immediately to my husband because I cannot keep it. And I will try. I’ll be like, no, this is an important document. And… I can maybe make 30 minutes. So, paper planners and such things is just, it’s not practical for me.

Kevin:                                       [00:41:56] See, and for these interviews, I’m writing—I’m physically writing notes because if I’m sitting here typing notes, you guys here it, right. Bang-da-bang-da-bang-da-bang.

Lilisonna:                              [00:42:03] Right.

Kevin:                                       [00:42:03] And I can’t. I can’t do that. That would drive me crazy listening to it, right? But I have all of my paper notes and a hard copy. I keep a hard copy of my calendar in the same notebook so that’s like my last resort backup. If everything goes sideways and I still need to know how to get to—that I have a dentist appointment. I have it in paper form as a backup. If my phone dies and I lose my Google—access to my Google account, I’m not completely helpless.

Lilisonna:                              [00:42:38] If I lose access to my Google account, I’m just going to take the year off and that’ll be fine. Not a problem.

Kevin:                                       [00:42:47] Sorry! You’re not going to school today. Mom’s taking the rest of the year off and…

Lilisonna:                              [00:42:53] Have fun. Dad might be able to manage it, but Mom’s not going to. So, there’s that. And then just getting everything out of my head, like I mentioned. The reminders and everything. Get it out of my head. Get it into some place where it’s going to automatically trigger a reminder when I need to. Some place where I’m gonna see it when I need to go do it. If it’s on the grocery shopping list, do that. I have—Shopping List is the one that I think that I use, and it’s actually been very helpful. So, I need to buy detergent. I put it in Shopping List, I move on with my life.

Kevin:                                       [00:43:28] I can’t get Ursula to use any of the apps. It drives me insane.

Lilisonna:                              [00:43:33] I love them. They’re just awesome.

Kevin:                                       [00:43:32] Again. I end up writing it all down on a piece of paper out of planner and hand that to her, and when she destroys it afterwards, who cares?

Lilisonna:                              [00:43:40] Right. And then, you know, Google Chats. Like, I’m at the grocery store. I chat to my husband, “Hey. What do we need? What do we need to have?” Just that circular communication of, “What is it that needs to happen because I am at this specific location?” That helps.

Kevin:                                       [00:43:59] Yes. No no no, and I also—I also have a Google Keep document that I share between me and my son, and that way he can put things on the list without me having to be like banging on the door, like, hey, I’m ready to go, what do you need from the grocery store?

Lilisonna:                              [00:44:15] What do you need? Yeah.

Kevin:                                       [00:44:15] Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [00:44:16] My daughter also lives in the Google ecosphere, so I can usually get to her and be like, “Hey, do you need something?” She’ll you know. So. We are a family full of geeks.

Kevin:                                       [00:44:27] Yes. Um, and even though Ursula won’t admit it, she’s a bit of a geek too, so it’s cool. So, we talked a little bit about systems in all of this, so is there anything else in how you keep yourself organized before we go into what systems and habits are valuable to you.

Lilisonna:                              [00:44:52] I don’t think so. I think, you know, what systems and habits are valuable to me. So, the mantra that I try to live by is, Prep it ahead. So, I have a system, for example, for LARPing. I’m looking at it right now. We got back. I have a bin full of all my props. It contains all my belts and my pouches and all of the things that I use for decoration at the cabin and all of that sort of stuff. And I check it when we get home. I make sure that it is all good. That anything that needs to be cleaned is getting cleaned. That anything that needs to be replaced is replaced, and then I pack it away and I forget about it until I’m on site because it’s already done.

Kevin:                                       [00:45:42] Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [00:45:43] You know… I do a lot of the cooking because that’s just the way that our chore distribution wound up. And I do a lot of prep work on Sundays. So, like, there is collards that are chopped and there’s meat that’s marinating and there’s asparagus that’s been cleaned and prepped and ready to go so that when I get home tomorrow after taking my daughter to her taekwondo class and all that sort of thing, taking care of dinner is as minimal amount of time and effort as possible. So doing all the work that I need to do ahead of time when I have the time to minimize the impact of that final 15 minutes of, “Oh God, I have to do it now.”

Kevin:                                       [00:46:37] Right. Right right.

Lilisonna:                              [00:46:39] Doing things when I have to have the time to focus. And then the other thing that is incredibly valuable, and this actually comes sort of into the best advice area, is figuring out the thing that works for you.

Kevin:                                       [00:46:53] Oh, God, yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [00:46:53] And doing that. Like, I have a lot of weird systems that aren’t really worth going off on in this particular context because they’re very individualized. But they are things that I have found that work for me because of the way that I do my life. Like, it’s just how it works best for me. For example, a really weird one. I keep many pairs of shoes in my car because I don’t like shoes. I like to be barefoot. I’m barefoot right now. And I have had several times where I have gotten to work and not had shoes.

Kevin:                                       [00:47:36] Okay, yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [00:47:35] Because I don’t function well in the morning. Everything on autopilot and eventually I learned that for me, I keep a pair of brown and a pair of black shoes appropriate to the general climate weather in my car and if I’m fully alert that morning and I get fully dressed and I pick a pair of shoes out and I go, cool. And if I don’t? I have a pair of shoes that will work with the outfit that I’ve got, and it’s fine.

Kevin:                                       [00:48:05] And—and see, I’m almost the exact opposite on that. Is that, well. All right, this may be the difference in also the parenting experience. I had two boys. Right? And so, in the middle of the night I have stepped on, multiple times, Thomas the Tank Engines.

Lilisonna:                              [00:48:27] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:48:27] LEGOs…

Lilisonna:                              [00:48:29] LEGOs are evil.

Kevin:                                       [00:48:29] LEGOs are terrible. And Matchbox cars. Right?

Lilisonna:                              [00:48:35] Mm, those are fun.

Kevin:                                       [00:48:37] And so, I don’t know how to function if I’m not wearing shoes. If I’m not wearing—the first thing I do when I get up in the morning and I get out of bed is I slide my feet into a pair of slippers because there may be a LEGO between here and the bathroom. Now, my kids haven’t used LEGOs in like ten years. Or more. But at this point, it’s just like, I’m not gonna take that chance. I don’t know why, but now suddenly walking around the house barefoot, it feels like living dangerously.

Lilisonna:                              [00:49:07] Yes, so… last week I was taking my daughter to school and we got to school and I said, “All right, it’s time to put your shoes on.” And she went, “Uhhh uh.” I said, “You left your shoes at home, didn’t you?” And she said, “Yes.” And she’s very fortunate because we wear the exact same size.

Kevin:                                       [00:49:23] There you go. Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [00:49:23] So I handed her a pair of shoes and she went off to school. It’s just—do the things that work for you without worrying about how weird that is because it’s not weird. It’s a functional system that supports the way you work.

Kevin:                                       [00:49:40] Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And not just the way you work, but the way you manage your household, the way you, you know, do whatever it is you do.

Lilisonna:                              [00:49:51] Yes. So.

Kevin:                                       [00:49:51] So, as long as we’re here, we’ll mix things up a little bit. As long as we’re talking about that sort of thing and that falls into the best advice and feedback. Is there any other thing that falls into the best advice or feedback category? And then we’ll loop back to the question we’re skipping at the moment.

Lilisonna:                              [00:50:06] So, I’ve got a couple.

Kevin:                                       [00:50:08] Okay.

Lilisonna:                              [00:50:08] There’s—one of them is very similar to that, and that’s play to your strengths. And this is a big thing that my work pushes. So, you know, work is very, because I’m a manager, I get access to all of the leadership messages and all of those fun things.

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

Lilisonna:                              [00:50:26] Just is how we want the culture to be, and like, I’m kind of scared of these but also they’re not bad and that makes me even more scared, because I’m like, there’s gotta be a trick somewhere. But, so far they’ve been very sincere—

Kevin:                                       [00:50:42] It’s a cult.

Lilisonna:                              [00:50:42] It is. It’s totally a cult, but—

Kevin:                                       [00:50:44] Yeah, really…

Lilisonna:                              [00:50:44] —what they’re pushing is play to your strengths, don’t try to build up your weaknesses and spend your time on that area. Figure out how, in your team, you have other people to compensate for those weaknesses so that you can go off and do the things that you’re good at. And that’s really hard sometimes for those of us who think they should be good at everything.

Kevin:                                       [00:51:14] Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [00:51:14] Or think that, you know, if I can’t do it, then there’s something wrong. But, having that freedom from—having that permission from work to say, “We don’t care about you making the bad stuff better. Find someone who is good at the stuff you’re bad at and let them do that. And you go do the stuff you’re good at is very useful.

Kevin:                                       [00:51:43] Oh yeah. Almost freeing, I would expect.

Lilisonna:                              [00:51:46] It is. It really is. And then, the other thing, this was very recent… I had a friend of mine and we’re doing a yoga class and I was trying a new pose and it was just, it was awful. It was so bad, and she was like. It’s okay. Wobbling is how you find the good bits. And so, like… you know, you can’t figure out what you need to strengthen or what you need to work on or what you need to pass off to somebody else if you don’t let yourself go far enough to be a little shaky. If you stay in your comfort zone, you’re never going to say, “Hey, I can do this.” Or, “Wow, I can’t do this at all, somebody else needs to come in and do this for me.”

Kevin:                                       [00:52:36] Right, right.

Lilisonna:                              [00:52:37] So all of those things. That works really well together. And then the advice that my husband has been patiently hammering into my head for 20-ish years now is always leave room and time for cleanup. Because I’m really bad about, I have a thing to do and I’m gonna do it and then I don’t allocate time for, and I just made a hideous mess and I need to go clean it up. I just cooked bread, I baked bread, and flour is all over the kitchen and oh crap, I have to be somewhere in 30 minutes.

Kevin:                                       [00:53:23] I—

Lilisonna:                              [00:53:23] Put in the time for the cleanup.

Kevin:                                       [00:53:24] I—I learned at least when cooking, clean as you go. I’m a clean as you go person, but not everybody’s like that and also I’m sure we’ve discussed it in the past on the show. For whatever reason I have this—and we think it’s genetic at this point because I compared with my sister and my cousin, and we all do this, we can’t cook unless we’ve cleaned first. So if there’s dirty dishes in the sink.

Lilisonna:                              [00:53:50] [inaudible]

Kevin:                                       [00:53:50] That has to be dealt with before we can actually cook, otherwise, we can start cooking but then we have to do the dishes because it will drive us crazy.

Lilisonna:                              [00:54:01] Yeah. I grew up in a single parent household. My mother worked a lot of crazy hours. And, when you are in that situation, house cleaning is one of the first things to go.

Kevin:                                       [00:54:18] Oh yeah. Yep.

Lilisonna:                              [00:54:18] And like, totally reasonable, makes perfect sense. You allocate the time you have, but it means that I have somewhat of a blind spot for dishes, occasionally. Again, that my husband has been patiently beating out of me, metaphorically speaking for 20 years and I’m deeply appreciative of this… but [inaudible]

Kevin:                                       [00:54:42] In fairness, I—

Lilisonna:                              [00:54:42] It’s a thing.

Kevin:                                       [00:54:43] Yeah. Yeah. I was a latchkey kid. So was my sister and both Mom and Dad worked. And, when I learned how to cook, Mom was like, this was the greatest thing in the world. She doesn’t like cooking anyway, and I would run into the problem of, I need the sink and it’s full of dishes. And that might be part of why it hammered in, is I need to do something in the sink and there’s no space in the sink. Why is that a problem? Why is that happening? So, a lot of it grew organically, but apparently it also grew to subconsciously in all of us. So, I don’t know.

Lilisonna:                              [00:55:19] I mean, I will say that I see the advantages of it and the reason my spouse has been able to make the successful changes that he has been very patiently trying to get me to do is I’m like, yes! When the kitchen is clean and I do cooking and I clean as I go, it does work better. I get that. It just… habits and time and you know, it’s a thing.

Kevin:                                       [00:55:44] It takes a while to do that, yeah. I mean, what is it? I think it was Franklin Covey did this study where it takes 21 days of consistent repetition to build a habit and it takes three days to lose it.

Lilisonna:                              [00:55:58] And particularly when you’re talking about habits and patterns of thought that was laid down when you were a kid, it takes much longer as an adult. Like, I can see them. I know where they come from. I’ve been to enough therapy sessions that I really do know where they come from. That doesn’t mean that changing it overnight is always possible. Even if I want to. And its’ really easy to backslide. So, having that rule in my head of, hey, if you leave room for cleanup, then even if you don’t manage to clean while you go, or even if you make a terrible mess, you can clean it up at the end—

Kevin:                                       [00:56:36] And you’er good.

Lilisonna:                              [00:56:36] —it’ll all be good. Which makes my house much better and much nicer to live in, so.

Kevin:                                       [00:56:44] Yes. All right. Um, anything else for best advice or feedback?

Lilisonna:                              [00:56:49] I think that’s pretty much it. That is the big ones.

Kevin:                                       [00:56:53] Prep ahead, figure out what works, play to your strengths. These are great. I’m loving some of these. All right, so how do—in a given day—how do you decide what to do first, because that’s a really hard thing for a lot of people.

Lilisonna:                              [00:57:09] So, for work it’s really easy. Either I have a meeting which is almost always true because I try to schedule a lot of one-on-ones and sort of day setting meetings at the beginning. So, it’s already there and it’s already planned. I’m not a morning person. I don’t really hit high gear until about 10 or 10:30. So, if I have things that I’ve already laid out ahead of time, as like, you’re gonna do this, you’re gonna do that. By the time I get to that high productivity, high-functioning time, either something has presented itself as like, this is the crisis of the day that we need to go deal with, or I have gotten my brain in gear and it’s presenting me with things that I know that I need to do. So, typically for work it’s going to be—it’s already laid out, I already know what it is, or there’s a crisis and I have to go deal with it. So, that part is actually pretty easy.

[00:58:16] For the housework the projects and the things that I do outside of work because that’s actually more challenging, what my husband and I have finally come to basically decide how to do that is whatever’s the most urgent or whatever problem is driving me crazy, or whatever problem or whatever project is the most fun right then. In that order. So, like, right now we’re sort of at a lull because I painted the deck this weekend.

Kevin:                                       [00:58:55] Oh my.

Lilisonna:                              [00:58:55] The reason that we painted the deck this weekend is because a) it wasn’t a super busy weekend, which I say kind of aware of the irony of that, because I did a lot. But I had the time, I had the space and it wasn’t raining.

Kevin:                                       [00:59:14] And that’s key, yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [00:59:15] So that makes it—yes. So, like, the fact that I had the time and the space and it wasn’t raining meant that it was really urgent that the deck get painted right then because the next time I had free time, one of those factors might not be there. It might be raining next weekend or whatever. So that was a fairly easy decision. We dealt with a project in the basement that needed to be done because my daughter was having a birthday party and it was like, well, all right, it’s now time to tackle this particular project, you know.

Kevin:                                       [00:59:48] Right.

Lilisonna:                              [00:59:48] It’s been on the list. It’s been on the back log. Now if someone’s actually gonna use the basement, we should get it done.

Kevin:                                       [00:59:56] Probably do something about that, yeah yeah.

Lilisonna:                             [00:59:56] Yeah, we should probably do something about that and the time is coming, and let’s go ahead and do that. And then, you know, after today, I got the deck dealt with and then we looked around and were like, “The house is a mess and we have to fix it.” And it was causing both of us stress, it was causing my daughter stress, and so we were like, that’s it, we’re done. And so that is how we picked, “Let’s go clean the house.”

Kevin:                                       [01:00:25] Right.

Lilisonna:                              [01:00:25] So, usually it’s, there is some urgent thing coming up that I really need to do or the state of things is such that I really need to go deal with it. I expect the garage is going to drift up soon. It’s been artificially depressed because it’s been so hot.

Kevin:                                       [01:00:45] Yeah…

Lilisonna:                              [01:00:46] So hot….

Kevin:                                       [01:00:49] That’s—that’s—

Lilisonna:                              [01:00:50] And no one wants to clean the garage when it’s hot.

Kevin:                                       [01:00:52] I will honestly say, you know, one of the things Ursula would like me to get done in this particular spate of unemployment, if possible, is get the garage cleaned out, and you know, I’ve done all the research on how much the dumpster will cost to bring to the house and how to have it hauled away and all of that, and I’ve been a little reluctant to do it, because yeah, it’s so flipping hot out there.

Lilisonna:                              [01:01:15] It was like 90 fucking degrees the other day.

Kevin:                                       [01:01:17] Yeah, no.

Lilisonna:                              [01:01:17] It’s October!

Kevin:                                       [01:01:19] What the hell?

Lilisonna:                              [01:01:19] And I’m not—I know. So, I’m not—we’re not gonna clean out the garage until it’s at least reasonable temperature. But it is causing us stress, it is a thing that needs to be done. I suspect that it is climbing rapidly in the priority list.

Kevin:                                       [01:01:34] Well, it is sort of top of the priority list after we get through—you know, it’s the same reason she’s not putting plants in the ground right now or buying new plants, because it’s just too damn hot.

Lilisonna:                              [01:01:48] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [01:01:48] And we have post-storm mosquitoes like whoa.

Lilisonna:                              [01:01:52] Oh yeah, I bet you all do.

Kevin:                                       [01:01:53] Mm-hmm.

Lilisonna:                              [01:01:54] Yeah, I have bulbs that have arrived. They’re like you should plant them in the fall. I’m like, it doesn’t feel like fall yet. I’m not planting my bulbs yet. Sorry.

Kevin:                                       [01:02:01] Yeah, let’s talk about when it’s actually fall, right?

Lilisonna:                              [01:02:04] Yes. When it actually like, I feel okay in a sweater at least in the morning hours.

Kevin:                                       [01:02:10] Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [01:02:10] We’l go with that.

Kevin:                                       [01:02:10] We had a week of that and then it stopped and it’s just been terrible.

Lilisonna:                              [01:02:16] Yeah.

Kevin:                                       [01:02:18] So, okay. Let’s see, so that’s five out of seven. Do you want the, what I’ve come to understand is the easy but not happy question first or do you want the hard but happy question first?

Lilisonna:                              [01:02:35] Let’s leave the happy question for the last one, even recognizing htat it is the hard one.

Kevin:                                       [01:02:41] Yes. Okay. So. How do you deal with failure or when you miss a goal.

Lilisonna:                              [01:02:48] Um, so for me, I am incredibly fortunate that failure is not particularly fatal. Like, I had this conversation with my mother who is a nurse and—

Kevin:                                       [01:03:00] Right.

Lilisonna:                              [01:03:00] —she’s like, I can’t fail. If I fail, people die. I’m like, I understand that is applicable to your job. It may not necessarily be applicable to the rest of your life, but I do see how that happens. You know, I am very fortunate, I’m very privileged, my husband and I both have very good jobs. My job is very understanding in terms of, hey, if you get it wrong, you get it wrong. And I still have a horrible deep-seated fear of failure—

Kevin:                                       [01:03:37] Right.

Lilisonna:                              [01:03:37] —buried down there and I have been working very hard over the past, really, five years to get better at that. And to sort of embrace that failure. So one of the things that I try to do because my job is test and quality, is figure out why it failed. Like, what went wrong? What happened?

Kevin:                                       [01:03:59] Take it apart.

Lilisonna:                              [01:04:01] Take it apart. Why did it break? There is a reason for failure and I’m also trying to recast failure from this failed to this prototype didn’t work. Or, this experiment was not a success. Or, you know, whatever. So I made my daughter a cake for her birthday and before I did that, I did a number of test runs of like, how does this work. And one of them did not work. And it was like, well. I have learned a thing today. And the thing I learned was this is not right.

Kevin:                                       [01:04:42] Oh, darn! And that the nice thing about experimenting like that with baking or icing or any sort of cooking is, even if—unless it’s really really bad, you eat your mistakes and oh well.

Lilisonna:                              [01:04:57] Yes! Like, it didn’t decorate the way that I thought it would decorate, but that doesn’t mean that buttercream frosting is not a good thing. Like…

Kevin:                                       [01:05:06] Yeah… buttercream frosting is one of my weaknesses, yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [01:05:10] You know, for big failures, the time where I get fired because that just didn’t work. I go into a little hole and I don’t come out for three days. And I’m trying to get better at that. I’m trying to have fewer really big failures because if you experiment first then you control that level of failure. And so, that’s one of the ways that I try and deal with it is mitigate it. Do something to make it smaller than it’s going to be if you just leapt into the big thing.

Kevin:                                       [01:05:56] Right.

Lilisonna:                              [01:05:57] And then, deep breaths and meditation. That’s awesome.

Kevin:                                       [01:06:02] Mm-hmm, oh yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [01:06:03] Reminding myself that it’s not fatal. It’s really not. I still have a house. I still have a family who loves me. The world will move on and I will move on with it. All that sort of helps.

Kevin:                                       [01:06:20] Oh yeah. I mean, as, you know, I recently lost my job and I understand, exactly. You know, I—at first there was the gut punch. Oh, crap, you’ve just lost your job, and then there was the all right, let’s figure out based on discussion I had with my CTO as our exit interview and reviewing the last couple months to figure out exactly where—it was very much of, we—I wasn’t a good fit for the culture they were trying to build. Right?

Lilisonna:                              [01:06:54] Okay.

Kevin:                                       [01:06:54] I mean, there were maybe 15 of us. Right? And so that means culture’s a big deal—

Lilisonna:                              [01:07:03] It’s important!

Kevin:                                       [01:07:03] —and if they’re trying to make a tectonic shift in how they’re dealing with things and I’m not contributing in the way they want to move, then yeah, so—that at least helped because it wasn’t a personal thing. It was very much a business decision. And so, I had to repeat that to myself for a couple days, not gonna lie. But—

Lilisonna:                              [01:07:30] Sure!

Kevin:                                       [01:07:30] —you know, it certainly made it easier than like, the one where they’re like. Now, we just decided we don’t like you anymore and so we’re firing you because no matter how hard you try, we’re just gonna fire you anyway. That was a long time ago and that was possibly one of the worst ones because that was the one where the company literally was like, tore down my self-esteem to say, yeah, we just don’t want you here anymore and there’s nothing you can do to change that.

Lilisonna:                              [01:07:58] Yeah, I had one of those… which was, you know, all of my one-on-ones were fine. Everything was okay. Everything’s good, meeting regularly with my manager, how am I doing? Well, you know, you can work on this a little bit, but you know, everything’s fine. You’re fired. I was like, wait, what?

Kevin:                                       [01:08:19] Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [01:08:19] And it has informed my life as a manager, like, I have told all of my team. I am like, I will never blindside you. I will always be certain that if something’s not right I will let you know well before we are in any sort of even like, pre-firing mode. Like, I’m not ever gonna do that.

Kevin:                                       [01:08:46] Well, one of the best managers I’ve had to date who I had on about this time—okay about this time being fall, because I think this—early October, because I think this probably won’t be live until November.

Lilisonna:                              [01:08:46] Sure.

Kevin:                                       [01:09:02] Was Eugene Yaacobi who I interviewed, I want to say September 2017?

Lilisonna:                              [01:09:10] I remember the interview, yeah.

Kevin:                                      [01:09:10] Yeah. He was one of the best managers I had and he was very clear on if there’s a problem, you will know way before it becomes and issue. He would give you all of that opportunity to try and correct or change course or whatever it was unless you didn’t want to and you were ready to leave.

Lilisonna:                              [01:09:30] Move on.

Kevin:                                       [01:09:30] Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [01:09:31] Yeah. And, I’ve had people in my team where I’ve been like, “This is not working.” The job that you are doing is not the job that we need done, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are a—you are incapable of doing the job that needs to be done, but the job that you are doing right now is not what we need. And I need you to align that and make it work. And the person did. And like, that was a super happy ending, and they are now a super successful person on my team but you have to have that conversation of this doesn’t work for what I need. And I think that goes back to failure somewhat. You know, failure is a thin that did not work for the need that you were trying for.

Kevin:                                       [01:10:20] Right.

Lilisonna:                              [01:10:22] Figure out in that failure, was it something you did? Did you misdefine your terms? Because I have found out things and been like, oh, well, the reason this failed is because I had no idea what I actually really wanted.

Kevin:                                       [01:10:37] Right, yeah? Oh, I’m familiar with that one.

Lilisonna:                              [01:10:40] We refer to that as the bring me a rock problem. Not that rock, a different rock. No, no not that rock, a different rock. You’re like, there’s so many rocks out there, which rock—

Kevin:                                       [01:10:48] Can you clarify? Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [01:10:49] —do you want?

Kevin:                                       [01:10:51] Yeah. Clarify the rock.

Lilisonna:                              [01:10:53] Do you want a pretty rock? Do you want a heavy rock? Do you want a boulder?

Kevin:                                       [01:10:59] And pretty is relative, so can we be specific on what you believe makes a rock pretty? And this is all QA.

Lilisonna:                              [01:11:06] Yes. It is all QA, and it’s all, tell me what happens when this breaks. Does it break well, and when this system fails, because I try to make things fail. Like, that’s also a fun thing. I actively want things in my job life to fail because that’s where I have pointed out a problem.

Kevin:                                       [01:11:30] Right. Right right right.

Lilisonna:                              [01:11:30] And that means we can then go fix that problem. And as a manager, it’s slightly different because I’m looking at systems that fail as opposed to code that fails. But it’s still, when something fails, cool! I have found a problem that can now be fixed so it never does that again.

Kevin:                                       [01:11:49] Yeah, I was talking to a release manager last night. For those of you at home, you heard it last week. For you, on the other hand.

Lilisonna:                              [01:12:00] I haven’t heard it yet!

Kevin:                                       [01:12:00] Yeah, for you, Christy, you don’t get to hear it for like a month and a half.

Lilisonna:                              [01:12:04] That’s fine.

Kevin:                                       [01:12:06] But, one of the things we talked a lot about was how, one, you have to let people fail because that’s the only way they learn, and that often times it’s not a person, at least in a professional capacity, often it’s not a person failure, it’s a system failure. In that the system didn’t set them up to succeed or the system, or the company didn’t make it clear what they needed the person to be doing. But even then, you still have to sometimes let them fail, because it’s the only way they’re going to learn. And especially when you’re dealing with QA, when the idea is, “We are here to break things because if we break it then you have the opportunity to fix it.”

Lilisonna:                              [01:12:55] Before the customer breaks it, and I promise you, they’re going to be much more annoyed than we are.

Kevin:                                       [01:13:00] Oh yeah. And annoying.

Lilisonna:                              [01:13:02] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [01:13:04] Yeah, you know.

Lilisonna:                              [01:13:07] Speaking as a parent, one of the things that I have tried to do is model to my child how to fail.

Kevin:                                       [01:13:13] Yes.

Lilisonna:                              [01:13:13] Because I’m actually much better at doing the right thing when I’m doing it for my kid than I am for myself. I can get 20 flu shots all the time if my child is with me to be like, “I am getting a flu shot, and I am a grown up adult and this does not bother me at all.” But if I’m walking into there, into the office by myself. I am freaking out because I don’t like shots. But, you know, you model it—

Kevin:                                       [01:13:42] I got over it, yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [01:13:44] Ugh, yeah, I can imagine.

Kevin:                                       [01:13:44] Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [01:13:45] But modeling it for my daughter is very important to me and so, one of the things that I remember is like, ah it hurts. That I consider a really terrible failure as a parent. This was six or seven years ago. We were attempting to study math and, you know, she’s like six years old and math at this point is well, one plus one equals two. It’s really basic. But I am not a teacher. I’m not.

Kevin:                                       [01:14:13] No…

Lilisonna:                              [01:14:13] It’s not who I am. And so, we were working on it and she wasn’t getting it. And was failing to communicate it correctly and I was getting frustrated. I’m like, okay. I need to stop. I need to go away. Mom is frustrated, let’s quit. And she was like, “No no no no no I really—I’m close. I want to get it.” I’m like, okay. So we did this several times and I eventually just lost my shit.

Kevin:                                       [01:14:40] Right?

Lilisonna:                              [01:14:40] Totally just lost it and there was yelling and screaming and I stalked into my room and I slammed the door shut, and I’m like, I’m behaving like a five year old but I don’t care because I’ve lost my shit and like… took some deep breaths and then I went and apologized. And I was like, “That was wrong. I should not have done that. It would be helpful if when I say it’s time to stop, you listen to me. But I’m still the grown up. It’s on me.” But like, accepting that, yeah, I did that because I’m human. Like, we’re all human. Apologizing for it, modeling it, and being like, this is how to deal with when things go catastrophically wrong. Okay, like, not catastrophically wrong, but things go wrong.

Kevin:                                       [01:15:30] Oh yeah. All the time.

Lilisonna:                              [01:15:30] And you [crosstalk]. Yeah, and you’re like. I’m sorry. I fucked that up. How do we fix it? How do we make it better? Okay in this case we fix it by waiting until your dad gets home because he’s much better at this than I am. And we’re going to go read a book. Awesome. And, fine. But, you know, that modeling of how to fail is, I think, one of the important parts of being a parent, to me. And being like, this is—you’re gonna screw up, kid, and it’s okay. And the world will not end and your life will not end, and we’ll figure it out. So, that’s failure.

Kevin:                                       [01:16:11] We’ve done the easy/sad one. Let’s try the difficult but fun one. How do you celebrate your success if you do, and if so, how?

Lilisonna:                              [01:16:25] Fucked if I know. I am so bad at this and I—

Kevin:                                       [01:16:32] Aren’t we all?

Lilisonna:                              [01:16:32] Well, and actually, while I was considering this question because I did try and consider these questions beforehand, I realized why and it’s because I assume success is the default.

Kevin:                                       [01:16:47] Okay.

Lilisonna:                              [01:16:46] And it when something is the default, you don’t need to celebrate it. I don’t know if this’ll lead to a change in my behavior, but that is why I don’t celebrate.

Kevin:                                       [01:17:00] Right, right.

Lilisonna:                              [01:17:02] So, recognizing those occasions when it’s important to celebrate your success, and again, I’m not a creator. I break things. And admittedly, I do sometimes do the happy dance in my chair when one of my testers comes up with a really cool way to break something. But, I don’t—so, I’m not gonna celebrate, or I’m not going to have an occasion to celebrate, like, finishing a particularly complicated project or something like that. A lot of my successes are small in degree but large in magnitude. So, you know, celebrating the fact that all of my testers got together and actually talked to one another for once, oh my God, why can we not communicate?

Kevin:                                       [01:17:54] Ah, yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [01:17:54] It’s hard to recognize that as a success because it happens and you’re like, yeah, cool. This is what’s supposed to happen. But I actually have worked really hard to get that to come to fruition. And so when I’m seeing that as the default of like, well, I’m working towards this thing and of course, that’s the thing that I’m working towards, when it happens, it happens and I move on toward the next thing. I don’t actually realize that I have succeeded there and I should take the time to be like, yeah, hey, I did a cool thing. Go me.

Kevin:                                       [01:18:34] And, you know, I think that’s interesting. We actually had a culture shift, and it was a forced upon us culture shift at a prior job. And that was the exec VP of Engineering was like, we’re not going to do release parties anymore.

Lilisonna:                              [01:18:51] Okay.

Kevin:                                       [01:18:51] We are going to have—we want—we’re trying to move to a more Agile and Rapid release cycle and so we will have an annual celebration of everything we got done in the last year, but we want these releases to be happening much more frequently and so having to stop, having a break point to stop and say, hey we got it out the door. No, getting it out the door on the regular is the default, and that’s where we want to be.

Lilisonna:                              [01:19:24] That’s actually—that would be lovely.

Kevin:                                       [01:19:27] Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [01:19:27] I work on a very old, cranky legacy product and we are moving ever so slowly to more continuous delivery and rapid release cycles but man, it’s like shoving on a boulder.

Kevin:                                       [01:19:39] And it’s—it’s not an easy transition to make it really isn’t.

Lilisonna:                              [01:19:43] It’s not.

Kevin:                                       [01:19:44] But, but then it’s—when you get there, again, it doesn’t feel like that’s a victory that should be celebrated when you get there because you’re just pushing along to, oh, hey, now we’re actually doing it right. And, do you stop and make recognition of the fact that oh, hey, we’re finally doing what we said we were going to do. Or is it so ingrained that this is just how it works now that it doesn’t feel like a victory anymore?

Lilisonna:                              [01:20:13] Right. And, you know, things like projects around the house. They’re just—they’re things that have to happen and when we get the deck completely repainted and done, that is a success and I should be, like, Woohoo! We did this thing. And instead, I suspect is what will happen, I’ll be like, oh thank God that’s done, now I have to go do something else. And I should pause and be like, no, we did a big project and it’s—we finished it and go us, and even just a celebratory high five with my family would at least mark it as a thing to be marked.

Kevin:                                       [01:20:50] Yeah, no no no.

Lilisonna:                              [01:20:50] [crosstalk].

Kevin:                                       [01:20:54] And I—so, I keep a stash of the ultra dark chocolate around. Because you know, one piece of ultra dark chocolate has about the same amount of sugar as, I don’t know, walking by and sniffing a krispy kreme donut.

Lilisonna:                              [01:21:11] Uh, yeah.

Kevin:                                       [01:21:11] Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [01:21:12] Ooh.

Kevin:                                       [01:21:13] Krispy Kremes I save for very special occasions.

Lilisonna:                              [01:21:18] There is nothing like a hot Krispy Kreme donut. But yeah. [crosstalk]

Kevin:                                       [01:21:21] You are preaching to the choir. I knew that before the rest of the country because I grew up in Raleigh when there were only two Krispy Kremes in the world. The original in Winston-Salem and the other one in Raleigh. So, yeah, no.

Lilisonna:                              [01:21:37] Oh, wow.

Kevin:                                       [01:21:37] When that Hot Donut Now sign was on it really meant something because it wasn’t like there were Hot Donuts Now all over the world. No. Two places where you could get them, right.

Lilisonna:                              [01:21:49] Yeah. So. I have a long-standing argument with one of my good friends who is—he is a jelly-filled donut fan.

Kevin:                                       [01:21:56] Ah yes.

Lilisonna:                              [01:21:58] And he is marginally correct that Dunkin Donuts’ jelly-filled may be slightly better than Krispy Kreme’s but I’m like, but Krispy Kreme’s glazed donut is the best donut ever. He’s like, but it doesn’t have jelly in it.

Kevin:                                       [01:22:11] See, and in high school, they actually brought in like two packs of jelly donuts to my school, and this explains a lot about why I have diabetes now. But I think for the majority of my high school career my lunch was fruit punch and a package of Krispy Kreme jelly donuts.

Lilisonna:                              [01:22:32] Wow, yeah. That’s a lot of sugar.

Kevin:                                       [01:22:34] Yeah. It’s a wonder that it only took until I was almost 40 to get Type 2 Diabetes, right?

Lilisonna:                              [01:22:45] Wow. That’s a lot. Yes.

Kevin:                                       [01:22:48] Yeah. But hey when I was 15, I needed all the calories I could get, apparently.

Lilisonna:                              [01:22:55] It’s true. Lots of growing to do.

Kevin:                                       [01:22:57] Lots of movement.

Lilisonna:                              [01:23:00] Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Teenagers need so many calories, it’s amazing.

Kevin:                                       [01:23:04] I believe it is that a teenage boy needs something like 8,000 calories a day not to die.

Lilisonna:                              [01:23:09] I watched one of my daughter’s friend like… he went from not fat, but he was clearly chunky, and then like overnight you blinked and he shot up three inches and was skeletal. I was like. Oh dear God. Go eat more. And that’s just how growth cycles work. But I was like, oh my God, you just like…that must have hurt.

Kevin:                                       [01:23:34] Yeah, no. What was it? I saw a woman in the grocery store and she was buying five gallon of milk, and I’m like, that’s an awful lot of milk. She’s like I have five teenage boys.

Lilisonna:                              [01:23:45] Oh my God…

Kevin:                                       [01:23:47] I’ll be back day after tomorrow for five more. I’m like, holy shitmonkeys.

Lilisonna:                              [01:23:55] That’s a lot…

Kevin:                                       [01:23:57] I think they were also football players, and that doesn’t

Lilisonna:                              [01:23:59] Oh dear God. So, my daughter is a black belt in taekwondo—

Kevin:                                       [01:24:05] Go her! You celebrated that, right?

Lilisonna:                              [01:24:07] Oh yeah, we totally celebrated that one. And that was actually a fun one for failure, because the first time she tried it, she didn’t make it. Which was appropriate. Nothing wrong with that, but we did have a conversation about. You know, you weren’t ready. And you know you tried, and that was cool, but now you know what you need to work on for the next time and, oh yeah. We totally celebrated that one.

Kevin:                                       [01:24:34] Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [01:24:36] Which was awesome. But, you know, she goes to martial arts classes three times a week and they’re an hour and fifteen minutes of wrestling or bouncing or something like that, and that’s a lot of calories burned, you know.

Kevin:                                       [01:24:51] And I’m guessing at this point she’s teaching, too?

Lilisonna:                              [01:24:56] Yes. She is teaching.

Kevin:                                       [01:24:58] Yeah, which—

Lilisonna:                              [01:24:58] Which is fascinating because she’s young. She’s 13. But the amount of control that she has over a classroom has been really fun to watch as she’s developing her style and figuring out how she’s working with people and how each person responds differently to different instructional methods. That’s been fun to watch.

Kevin:                                       [01:25:27] You have a born leader, then.

Lilisonna:                              [01:25:31] Maybe, we’ll see.

Kevin:                                       [01:25:31] Maybe, we’ll see. Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [01:25:33] She also has incredible social anxiety, so one of the best things that her teacher did for her black belt test, which I think is actually worthwhile in talking about productivity, since we’re way off on tangents. But, that’s fine. So, everyone has to write an essay for each test. And it’s what does this belt mean to me, what is that, all that sort of thing.

Kevin:                                       [01:26:04] Interesting, yeah. Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [01:26:05] And, you know, you have to think about it and it’s basically a meditation on a particular discipline of the martial art and why this belt is important. And so for the black belt she had to write an essay and he’s like, all right, you have to now read it out loud to the class. And she was like, oh no. No no no no no. And he was like, oh yeah. Yeah you do. And so she did. Clearly very nervous. But she read it, she did it. She got her black belt, and he was like. I have to make you do something hard because if I don’t—he’s like. You know the kicks. You know the forms. You know all of that. That actually was—not easy for you, but it was something you were ready and prepared for and totally handled. And I have to push you somewhat in things that are difficult for you so that you feel like you earned it. Because this is a big deal and this is important and this is a thing that you earned and sometimes you only recognize that you’ve earned something because it was hard.

Kevin:                                       [01:27:16] Yes. Oh yeah, absolutely.

Lilisonna:                              [01:27:18] And so, pushing ourselves to, okay, maybe we are gonna fail, and pushing ourselves to cool, we did a hard thing and now we succeeded and now let’s actually recognize that and go celebrate that, I think is really—it’s valuable.

Kevin:                                       [01:27:35] It’s very important, you know? Because if you don’t—if you do something big like that and you don’t get a positive recognition, like, great, what are you doing for me next, it’s terrible.

Lilisonna:                              [01:27:46] Exactly.

Kevin:                                       [01:27:48] That’s why I had to get out of sales.

Lilisonna:                              [01:27:52] Oh. Oh no.

Kevin:                                       [01:27:54] I was a sales engineer for a couple years and it was never—the great, we had a good quarter, thank you very much for your work, here’s your money, now… would last about 12 hours. And then it was, all right, so here’s your goal for next quarter, why aren’t you on the phone working on it. You know? And it’s hard. It’s really hard.

Lilisonna:                              [01:28:20] Sales people are aliens. It is so odd to me because I know myself fairly well, and I am an introvert. I fundamentally like to not be around people. I particularly like to not be around people I don’t know. And I have very different mental responses to things that a lot of sales people respond very positively to. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with them, nothing wrong with me. But it’s fascinating when I’m at a sales event and I’m just like, you are not speaking a language I understand at all.

Kevin:                                       [01:28:59] Right.

Lilisonna:                              [01:29:00] And so, figuring out how to motivate people as a manager has been really interesting because I’m very honest to my team about here are the things that motivate me. I am motivated by problems. I’m motivated by interesting things. I’m motivated by how do I break it. Some people are motivated by money. Some people are motivated by praise. And I was like, you have to help me figure out what your motivation is so that I can help you be more productive, so that I can give you that motivation to make you want to get better at your job, do that thing. And it’s been fascinating having some of those conversations because some people are like, I don’t know what motivates me. Okay. Let’s figure it out.

Kevin:                                       [01:29:46] Yeah. Okay. So, this is going to be an awkward part because we’ve gotten through all the questions and this would be the point where I’d say, hey do you want to share things with us, and also there appears to be people walking up my driveway, so…

Lilisonna:                              [01:30:04] Oh dear!

Kevin:                                       [01:30:04] Uh yeah… we might… have to take a quick break while I deal with that, because—

Lilisonna:                              [01:30:10] Okay!

Kevin:                                       [01:30:10] —I fully expect it’s either kids selling something or missionaries. So. I’m actually going to push stop on recording because if it takes a couple minutes, you know.

[01:30:22] So this was apparently some young people selling mattresses as a fundraiser. This is a new one by me.

Lilisonna:                              [01:30:28] [crosstalk]

Kevin:                                       [01:30:31] Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [01:30:32] That is distinctly weird.

Kevin:                                       [01:30:35] Yeah. And now Dotson is out there crowing his head off because there were strangers in his yard. And the dogs are upset because there was a strange thing. I don’t know if you can hear him.

Lilisonna:                              [01:30:48] I heard both Dotson and what I presume was either Lacey or Ernie.

Kevin:                                       [01:30:52] That was Lacey.

Lilisonna:                              [01:30:52] Or both…

Kevin:                                       [01:30:54] Or, possibly both, yeah. And he’s still going out there. Like, because I took the time to find out why roosters crow earlier today and it’s—and most of it is around territory.

Lilisonna:                              [01:31:07] Huh, okay. Makes sense.

Kevin:                                       [01:31:10] So, he’s gonna go until he’s sure everyone understands that these are his hens in his yard.

Lilisonna:                              [01:31:17] That’s important.

Kevin:                                       [01:31:18] Yes. But apparently, you know, traffic can set them off, cars going by. Strange people in the yard. If he hears—

Lilisonna:                              [01:31:27] Selling you mattresses.

Kevin:                                       [01:31:29] I’m still confused—a fundraiser by selling mattresses. I don’t. I’m confused.

Lilisonna:                              [01:31:34] That’s… I’ll look that up later. I’m betting it’s a scam, but maybe not? Like?

Kevin:                                       [01:31:42] I don’t know… oh hey buddy.

Lilisonna:                              [01:31:44] Fascinating.

Kevin:                                       [01:31:44] Yeah, he’s on the porch right now. Okay, he’s. All right, I believe he is secure in his territory now.

Lilisonna:                              [01:31:53] Good job.

Kevin:                                       [01:31:55] Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [01:31:57] Scare the scary mattress selling people away.

Kevin:                                       [01:31:59] They were very young. They were teenagers.

Lilisonna:                              [01:32:03] Oh.

Kevin:                                       [01:32:02] So, no… it was still. I’ve—this is a new one by me. Magazines, candy…

Lilisonna:                              [01:32:10] Magazines… wrapping paper.

Kevin:                                       [01:32:11] Wrapping paper.

Lilisonna:                              [01:32:11] Actually, I like the wrapping paper ones.

Kevin:                                       [01:32:12] Yeah, it is about that time of year. So, but… mattresses.

Lilisonna:                              [01:32:20] Okay. That’s weird.

Kevin:                                       [01:32:23] All right. Yeah, I miss the days when they would just hand them a box of candy and just say, “Go sell this.” And then the parents would end up buying it.

Lilisonna:                              [01:32:31] So, eventually what I just did was I convinced my daughter’s school, when she was in public school, to just set up a GoFundMe. I said. I will just give you money because I don’t want to buy your candy. I want to buy your candles. I hate smelly candles.

Kevin:                                       [01:32:50] Yes.

Lilisonna:                              [01:32:51] I don’t want to buy any more wrapping paper than I need, please just let me hand you a check. And they were like… you would do that? And I was like, YES. Please. And so I just handed them a check and it was better.

Kevin:                                       [01:33:04] And that—that makes me. Now I want to talk to the school about—because they don’t really do fundraisers, but they’re constantly saying, “Hey, we’re trying to hit our goal for this year and yadda yadda.” And I’m like. My God, a GoFundMe. It’s so easy. Yeah.

Lilisonna:                              [01:33:20] Make it online, like… even if you want to like, hit up a couple of friends and be like, hey, my school is having this fundraiser, do you want to contribute, that’d be great. But, no one needs more tchotchkes around their house. We really don’t. And… you know, I will happily chip in five or ten or fifty bucks depending on your level of ability just to get you to go away. I support my public schools, I want them to do well, I want them to thrive. I don’t mind giving you money. But, again, this goes back to, I am an introvert. I don’t want to sell stuff. That is terrible. My daughter’s an introvert. She doesn’t want to sell stuff. Just let me give you a check and it’ll all be better. So, yeah.

Kevin:                                       [01:34:06] So, all right. Try this again…

Lilisonna:                              [01:34:14] We’re almost done. This is good.

Kevin:                                       [01:34:16] Yeah, I know, I know, I know. So, we’re through all the questions. Is there anything you want to promote, or where can people find you online, or…

Lilisonna:                              [01:34:28] I exist online under Cyllan, C-Y-L-L-A-N or Lilisonna, L-I-L-I-S-O-N-N-A. Mostly in obscure corners of the internet although I do visit Twitter far too often for my own mental health. It’s a thing. No, I don’t really have a blog or anything that really needs promoting. I, as I said earlier, possibly before we were recording, I am an internet old and part of being an internet old is being an internet obscure. And I actually try very hard to exist in that space because the internet is a weird and scary place and it’s only weirder and scarier.

Kevin:                                       [01:35:17] And it’s—it’s strange because I went the opposite. I am internet old, but I am internet out there.

Lilisonna:                              [01:35:24] You’re also male.

Kevin:                                       [01:35:25] There’s that. And, I didn’t—honestly, I didn’t want to be. I actively avoided it and then I sort of fell in with this artist and didn’t have a choice, so.

Lilisonna:                              [01:35:40] That’s fair.

Kevin:                                       [01:35:41] But yeah, I’m also male and that makes a big difference, that really does. And we could—I could do a whole thing about how big a difference that makes, but for those of you listening at home who happen to be white males, consider how lucky you are that you don’t have to put up with all the bullshit that is out there. And, go tell your friends to get their shit together.

Lilisonna:                              [01:36:02] Yes, please. Yeah. And, you know, I am also in a privileged position, because I am, you know, also white and cis and you know, I am very grateful that because dear God, it gets so much worse as you move down the privilege scale. But, even so, I was like, nope. I am very happy in my internet obscurity.

Kevin:                                       [01:36:29] So, thank you so much for—

Lilisonna:                              [01:36:33] Oh, you’re so welcome. This was fun.

Kevin:                                       [01:36:35] Yeah, no, it was great and I really enjoyed talking to you and I hope everybody got a lot out of it and for the people at home, we’ll be right back.

[01:36:43] [Productivity Alchemy segment change music plays. Jaunty, pleasant, jazzy piano with accompanying bass.]

Kevin:                                       [01:37:23] And we’re back.

Ursula:                                     [01:37:24] Woo!

Kevin:                                       [01:37:25] Thank you for taking the time out to be interviewed, Lilisonna. It was absolutely fantastic talking to you. Thank you Al Mog for writing in. I hope we managed to help in our own special way.

Ursula:                                     [01:37:38] And, I wish we could help more. I wish there was something—

Kevin:                                       [01:37:41] Really, I do. I do.

Ursula:                                     [01:37:42] —like, you know. Yeah.

Kevin:                                       [01:37:46] So, it is—

Ursula:                                     [01:37:47] But it is a universal misery, at least, if that helps.

Kevin:                                       [01:37:49] Oh, God, yeah. Oh yeah. So, it is time to talk about our badge code for the week.

Ursula:                                     [01:37:56] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [01:37:57] I don’t. I didn’t write anything specific down for Lilisonna, like I have with some of the other people as I’m putting things on the list of while I’m talking to them, oh this would be a good badge code. So, we’re just gonna go with TURKEYDAY.

Ursula:                                     [01:38:14] Turkey.

Kevin:                                       [01:38:15] TURKEYDAY.

Ursula:                                     [01:38:16] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [01:38:16] Yes. Is our badge code. For those of you who haven’t been listening very long, we issue Open Badges following the Mozilla Open Badge standard. You can go to the website. You can log in and enter a code in a little box that says, “Put the badge code here.” It’s TURKEYDAY and you will get a badge saying you listened to this episode that you can share on websites and things like that. At the moment it requires the desktop site. I’ve been revamping the mobile site and it doesn’t like the login form right now. Working on that. I’ve had a couple people write in to say. So, that’s—that’s a thing we do here and it’s kind of fun, and I give out badges to people who meet me. There were people who were excited at Windycon to get the card with the code saying “I Met Kevin.” I give out—there are badges specifically for the people who are interviewed and last week, talking to D and Megan they were so excited because they’ve been collecting badges and were really excited to be on the show.

Ursula:                                     [01:39:18] We should probably wrap it up, because I just noticed the little orange cat is on top of the door with that, “I’m thinking of launching myself into space” look.

Kevin:                                       [01:39:26] Yeah, she does that. That’s normal. That’s… this is not. No, I’m used to that happening. It’s like Sergei climbing on the desk behind me or into his cat bed over there and falling asleep.

Ursula:                                     [01:39:34] I’m just saying the most convenient landing point from her position is your head.

Kevin:                                       [01:39:39] She usually doesn’t aim for that, but it happens sometimes. Hey, sweetie. So, that’s really it for this week. [Thumping] Told you she wouldn’t hit my head.

Ursula:                                     [01:39:49] No, she hit the back of Kevin’s chair.

Kevin:                                       [01:39:53] And just kept going, like she does. Sometimes she’ll stop on the chair and then climb and lick my head but not this time. Anyway… for those of you who are having a holiday, for those of you in the US who are having a holiday this weekend. I hope you enjoy it.

Ursula:                                     [01:40:07] And for those of you who are just having Thursday, I hope it’s a killer Thursday.

Kevin:                                       [01:40:11] Yeah, no, have an absolutely killer Thursday. For this week, normally we talk about here’s ways you can support us. Please take any money you would give to us this week and donate it to a—

Ursula:                                     [01:40:23] Local food bank might be good this time of year.

Kevin:                                       [01:40:25] —That was exactly what I was gonna say. A food bank. Anyone dealing with food insecurity. We don’t need it, they do. And—

Ursula:                                     [01:40:32] We’ll tell you when the job hunt has gone on so long that we’re like, “Please give us more money.” But, at the moment we—buy a square meal for some people who need it.

Kevin:                                       [01:40:41] Absolutely.

Ursula:                                     [01:40:41] And if you’re not sure locally what to do with that, I know that there are some charities for the Camp Wildfire and again, cash is usually the best to give because food pantries have wholesale buying power—

Kevin:                                       [01:40:58] They do.

Ursula:                                     [01:40:58] —and so a pound of beans or whatever that you pay full price for, they can get like five meals buying wholesale, so, send them cash and that would be good people to support right now.

Kevin:                                       [01:41:11] Yeah, the Cora food bank here in Pittsboro, North Carolina, we’re a regular giver because they need it, and there’s a lot of that going around.

Ursula:                                     [01:41:21] And they’re doing good work.

Kevin:                                       [01:41:22] They are.

Ursula:                                     [01:41:22] And they—lord knows they are fighting the good fight as many food banks are very little resources and vastly increasing need.

Kevin:                                       [01:41:35] Yes. And, uh, an increasing attitude as has been happening for the last 140 years of being poor and hungry is a moral failing not a societal failing. So.

Ursula:                                     [01:41:46] Yeah.

Kevin:                                       [01:41:46] Anyway, they—I could go for another hour on that.

Ursula:                                     [01:41:49] Let’s not.

Kevin:                                       [01:41:49] Let’s not. You can find us on Facebook. You can like us there. If you really want to, and you can donate to our Patreon, the Kofi, Patreon.com/UrsulaV, Kofi.com/ksonney. But still, give to your local food bank, they need it more than we do.

Ursula:                                     [01:42:05] And, if you really want to help us out or something and you’re not a Patreon sponsor, I have a book coming out Tuesday called Swordheart that—that way at least you get a book.

Kevin:                                       [01:42:17] The other thing is of course, you can help by sharing this podcast with your friends who you think might like it. On social media, on Twitter and Facebook and Mastadon and all that good stuff. So, that’s that. I hope you guys have a good week and stay productive.

Ursula:                                     [01:42:33] Woo!