librarypunk - 061 - Toxic Productivity feat. Kevin Sonney

Episode Date: July 25, 2022

This week we're talking about toxic productivity, bad bosses, and horror novels.    About – Productivity Alchemy What Is Toxic Productivity? 5 Tips To Overcome It | Trello Donate | Trans Lifeline�� Find Your Local Food Bank | Feeding America    Media mentioned Episode 257 – Off to AnthroCon, Jay Colbert – Productivity Alchemy  Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves ‘A bigger paycheck? I’d rather watch the sunset!’: is this the end of ambition? | Work-life balance | The Guardian  Mary Robinette Kowal https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/book FlyLady.net Time Management for System Administrators [Book]  What Moves the Dead The Twisted Ones | Book by T. Kingfisher | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster 

I'm Justin. I'm a Skullcom librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library and my pronouns are they them. I'm Jay. I'm a music library director and my pronouns are he him. And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Kevin Sonny. My pronouns are he him. I am a site reliability engineer for a very large company in my day job and a productivity podcaster by whatever is left. I think that's accurate. welcome. Thank you.

Thank you. So, Jay, I think you're probably going to take the lead on a lot of stuff. So why don't you lead us in? Are we not going to do a fun bot or not? I didn't put one together. But yeah, so I met Kevin when I did that whole building a second brain thing back in, God, was that April already? Yeah, it was April.

April and May. Yeah. And I thought Kevin was really cool. And I wanted to be friends with him. And then I got to be on his podcast. And I wanted him to be on ours because something we talk a lot on this show is a couple of things. We talk about this concept of vocational awe a lot where basically you start regarding your profession. And this is particular to like service professions, but it was created by a scholar of Favazi Atar about librarianship,

about where you start to like regard the profession. as like almost like a religion where it becomes you hold it to such high esteem and it's so important that you stop criticizing it and like you'll like sacrifice yourself for it and whatnot. You'll do like everything for it. And it's very easy to fall into that trap as librarians because like we want to help people. Right. And things like vocational all least all sorts of things like job creep and burnout and no work life balance, all sorts of stuff.

and that's just like the minor stuff. And so that plus the fact that like in technical services, at least what I'm familiar with, but this might also be true in other areas of librarianship, we get gutted and gutted and gutted. And so it'll be like a person doing the job of like six people. And then so you're having to like prove your worth of you're there and you're doing the job of about a million people.

And so like you're supposed to like, okay, how the hell do I actually stay productive and like manage my time and my work? And it does the whole thing of, like we're going to do a mindfulness seminar and encourage your employees to be mindful. It's like that kind of mindset of like, oh, well, if you just learn this method and we all adopt this method or if we do a reorg or something, that'll solve the larger problem. So since I know you're like a productivity nerd, like just like I am too, like I feel like a bad

like little anarchist for that. But I'm like, oh, it's fun. It's all a bunch of toys. I thought you would probably have a lot of interesting things to say about like the role of like productivity in a workplace on like the individual level fixing problems and it's like a toxic productivity when it's really like a should be a systemic thing and whatnot. And that's the episode, folks. Right. So let's start, let me just start out by saying you're not alone, right? This is not specific to just your field. I see it all the time in my field of just like pure strain.

IT service provider. We're writing software. We're providing software as a service. And if it is not uncommon in this field, in other fields, your field for people to end up taking on, you know, we're short. Someone needs to do a thing. The responsible person steps up. Now the responsible person finds out they own that thing and everything else they were doing and it piles and it builds. The responsible person sometimes self-selects. Sometimes they're voluntold. I love that term, that they need to take care of X, and by extension, that means now they own X, whether they wanted to or not. That is just a toxic attitude in general. And then there are the two parts of toxic productivity, right? The individual where we are fed slamming down on us

all the time that if you're not doing something, it's not worthwhile and you need to be doing something that will do something. Maybe it ends up being busy work, maybe it's whatever, but if you're not doing something, and this is a societal thing, not just a workplace thing, then you're not being productive. You're not being a good member of society. On the corporate side, it's been more interesting watching the shift from in-person workplaces to virtual workplaces back to in-person, because in-person workplaces is really easy to build that toxic productivity of, you're here you will be working.

Whether you're providing value or not, it doesn't matter. as long as you look busy. Looking busy is huge in the corporate environments I live in. Then it's okay. As long as you're physically there, you must be providing value. You must be being productive. That shifted drastically in the last two years.

To the, you know, you have to be online. You have to be doing something, providing some value. You know, and then the line starts to blur because you're home. This is a trap I fell into when I first started remote work.

Let's not talk about how long ago it was. But, you know, your home, you're bored. You should be doing something with your family, but it's really easy to check a thing for work. Or you don't feel like you got enough done. So you just keep working. Or you finish dinner. And the kids are in bed and, oh, I'll just go back to work instead of letting yourself relax and recharge. And a lot of people had to redefine those boundaries in the last two years.

So, I mean, that's really the two sides of it, as it were, the corporate driven and then the societal driven. And I saw, I believe Justin had something to say. I don't want to hold that up. Yeah, well, I mean, you're fine. I'm writing notes so I won't forget, hopefully. I'm writing my hand, though, so I don't know if I can remember long enough to finish writing out by hand. Because I'll probably forget. Because I started one bullet point, started writing the next bullet point, had to go finish the first bullet point before I forgot.

And I was also trying to listen to you. So we'll probably talk about note-taking styles. By the way, all three of us have ADD. Okay, cool. Yeah. I actually had to get rid of my fidget because it was consuming my life. Yeah, I was clicking it all day. For me, it's the, I hate to say it, it's the vape.

I think I'm self-regulating minor ADHD with nicotine and coffee, right? Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I don't have a formal diagnosis, but I'm starting to notice when I don't have enough, some of the same things my wife who has severe ADHD exhibit. it's probably brought on by one, all of this the world, and I suspect it may be a side effect of I just got over COVID, which is an interesting thing to think about, right? Hey, toxic productivity, it's a thing. And I also wanted to smack that person who tweeted out or TikTok or whatever the hell it was

back at the beginning of the pandemic that if you don't come out of this with three new products and two new side-posses, this, that, and the other, I wanted to do. to strangle them because it's not healthy. It's just pushing yourself. If you haven't written infinite jest. Right. What I was thinking about was when you're talking about societal changes,

I was reading this article, I think it was in The Guardian, I know it was a UK thing, where someone who is about my age was talking about learning about work-life balance for the first time. And they were interviewing like all of these sort of upper-level white-collar workers about

which I thought was a weird selection and kind of like showing your ass a little bit that you don't know anyone who works in other industries, but about how they've like all taken on consulting gigs and quit their jobs and how they don't like the rat race anymore. But I was, it always makes me think because I was really lucky to have like one of the worst years in my life when I was 17. So I was like working 48 hours a week. I got laid off. I had a new car payment. So I had to get a night job at Walmart.

almost didn't go to college because of all that. And it was a, so I had like all the Protestant work ethic that was drilled in my head my whole life, just got like knocked loose really quick. So I was lucky that happened when I was younger. I can't imagine the existential crisis you would have if that happened at 50. Like that would really fuck you up if you realize at 50, oh, they don't care about me and they can't care about me

because that's not the prerogative of this business or any job. I'm also just realizing that we didn't have you introduce what your podcast is or talk about. Oh, we didn't. Yeah, well, so the whole idea. Unless you want to finish your thought first. No, no, I can go back to the thought, probably. I mean, it may just be bouncing off into the distance, and all I see is it's a little bunny thought tail now. But, no, productivity alchemy is about normal people being productive.

I want to talk to everybody, and I've talked to stay-at-home parents. I've talked to corporate leaders, business founders, bestselling authors. You had Kristen on and we had Kristen on here. Yeah, I had Kristen on. Last episode before the COVID, I had Mary Robinette Kowal on, who is an award-winning author. Mary Robinette's awesome if you haven't listened to her or read her stuff. But I want to talk to people in as many different places in their lives and industries as I can. I've talked to retirees.

I've talked to lovely person who has a day job and then is basically home health care for their aging grandparents, parents and grandparents after hours. And so has to balance that as well. You know, it's trying to break down past the productivity guru magic bullet of if you just do this one thing, your life will magically get better and you'll get everything done. That's bullshit. The moment someone tells you that they have the one single. solution that will solve all of your problems. They're selling you something. And it's not going to solve your problems. I mean, it does for some people, but it's not a magic bullet that can be applied to everybody. And so that's one of the things, is trying to find all the different balances in ways

different people do it so that other people can apply it and maybe find what's right for them instead of paying large sums of money only to have something that didn't work. And systems like you and I took the building a second brain. I'm still digesting, but I'm also adapting. Like, it's not a strict thing. You have to take every system apart. And also, as I'm fond of saying, keep what works and throw the rest out.

And, you know, anyone whose attitude is, well, if it isn't working for you, it's your fault, again, that's toxic and bullshit. So, yeah, and that's about where that thought starts to wrap up. Say to you, you had something?

Yeah, I just wanted to say the take what works and throw the rest out. I feel like a lot. of the library world could really do better with that. One of the things. We love our frameworks. We love our frameworks, but we, and it's an interesting combination of,

like Jay was saying, like we want to be helpful and we want to serve our communities, which ends up with us being, you know, doing the jobs of what other community services should be doing. so I feel like that feeds into it as well you know and and and Fobazi yeah and Fobazi's point that like there is this almost like religious element to that vocational awe as well like it's coming from a deeply Protestant work ethic culture but then it almost comes as to like we are serving the profession and so we sacrifice ourselves for it it's like this noble good thing yeah and I have I see that in my industry as well as especially if you are the on-call engineer, at which point, you know, yes, you're responsible

if the thing goes down. Yes, you're responsible for if a customer is being impacted with an outage or something like that. But so often it's treated like it should be, it's a vocation and a religion and not a job. The number of jobs where I've been on 24-hour, 24-7 call for months on end, because there's no one else to do it. And, hey, you're the system. administrator, you know, we don't care if you're on vacation. We don't care. This is, this is what you're here for kind of thing. It's horrible and it destroys so many talented young people, both in, in this industry, but in other industries. I mean, the toxicness of the, you're an essential worker now and you have to go above and beyond and risk your life to deliver

packages or in the case of my oldest son who was working as a technician at an industrial plant, like, yeah, no, they didn't necessarily need him, but he was classified as an essential worker. And so it was, you know, we were happy he was able to have work. But on the other hand, you know, it's like, yeah, he has to go out every day and work. Third shift to make sure the place is cleaned and the maintenance is done. his sections. I can't remember exactly what that job was. I have a friend who works at a place that like prints on like vinyl and stuff. And he was classified as an essential worker because the his like the company he works at also

makes body bags. And so he wasn't doing like anything important at all. But because that company did a certain thing that he didn't work on at all, he was classified an essential worker and had to like go in and got the special parking pass and everything. thing. Yeah, but I mean, even then, you know, what was it, fast food workers were being classified, and that's, that's terrible. Like, no, that's not essential. That's, frankly, capitalism grinding people down and having them put themselves at risk when, okay, yeah, it's important they have jobs in this society, in this structure. It's important they have money coming in, but there were so much, there were much better ways than saying, yeah, we know you just fry fries, but you are the most

important being. And that starts when still, again, that same feeling of a religiosity over what you're doing and that you are called to do it and therefore driven, even if it's not healthy, to continue doing things. And people have already gone back to shitting on fast food workers and grocery workers and stuff, which, you know, I remember, what was it? Someone was saying something about someone was shitting on fast food workers. Someone was like, make your own fucking burger. problem. I saw someone say that the Starbucks union workers or the bourgeoisie. That guy's a fucking insane person.

For some reason, like three of his most insane takes ended up on my feed on the same day. He was like arguing that like Carl Marx was like a Christian socialist. Like this guy was, no, I don't know why he went viral in other places, but this guy is a crazy person. I was driven insane by him. He was following me around all day. as a as a former fast food worker i will like i will go to the mat for them every single time i was

in fact just talking to like a barista yesterday i was like because it's been really hot here like you have air conditioning in there right as i'm like sitting in the drive-through so yeah i and i i how is how how do i phrase this without sounding whatever i worked in fast food when i was a teenager and appreciate the stress and the whatever you have to put up with, not just of the customers, which are obviously the most stressful part, but also, you know, the dinging, the timing, the, in my case, I was at a Mrs. Fields cookies. It doesn't sound, it sounds like sort of a cushy gig, but then there's the, there's a drive to you have to have so many cookies out. You have to be prepping and baking and doing all of these things and serving customers at the same time. And

you know, it's, it is grueling and then somebody comes up all entitled and gets mad because you're, it's going to be five minutes until the chocolate chip cookies come out of the oven. And you just want to say, go, go, go fuck yourself and shove your chocolate chip cookie up your ass. But you can't, you can't. And I think the same is the same is true for, for other service oriented jobs. The, I, in moving up the ranks in IT, I worked in customer service, technical support. And you would get somebody on the line who was really, really mad that their email wasn't flowing. It was a company that did email before we had the internet. Yeah, I'm an old. And, you know, first you'd have to talk them down because while no one is going to literally

keel over dead because they can't get their internet, their email from corporate saying that, you know, there's a new treat in the break room. We had a couple of hospitals, different stories. Different story for those customers. When they called up, it was like, oh, yes, of course. There may literally be life sounds like, but 99% of the time, it wasn't. Is somebody literally dying and cool your jets? Be nice to people. It's not worth it to get yourself worked up over something, A, you can't control, and B, that is not literally, like, is not a literal life or death situation. So, and that's another toxic problem we have is our problem is important and nobody else's, and nobody else. is whether it deals with productivity systems, whether it deals with customer service,

whether it deals with whether email is getting delivered or not. There's part of the Protestant work ethic or the work culture is that if something is in my way to getting my work done, it is now a reason to panic, fight, and abuse people until it gets fixed, which is, again, bullshit. So I'm probably going to be using the word bullshit a lot, just saying right now. There's a lot of bullshit. There's a lot of bullshit. Yeah, and it's like, so in librarianship, depending on what kind of work you do,

and whether you're public or academic or whether or not you're a library worker versus someone who maybe provides like reference services or is classified as a quote librarian, there are, I mean, under capitalism, we are. all alienated and isolated, but there are degrees of like literal, are you kind of siloed and like doing your own thing? Like a lot of tech service workers are getting this way because there might just be one left versus maybe in a, again, depending on the size of your library and, you know, what have you. People who work in forward facing public services tend to interact with each other more, I feel, and this may be just my own experience. And so I'm curious as to,

with all of us, like, our experiences of like, because even the people at the front end are experiencing the like, there aren't enough people to do the job that like the two or three of us is, is doing. We're not being given enough resources to do the amount of work we're being asked to do. I mean, we saw this a lot at the beginning of the, you know, with the pandemic. workers in public libraries, that morning would be told, by the way, you're handing out, like, tests, like COVID tests today, like, without any warning and all of a sudden that's their job that day. And they don't have the resources for that, right? And so I was wondering what we all think, and Kevin, in your experience as well, like, the sort of like productivity, I have to

manage all my own shit and I have to be on top of this and I have to do everything and whatnot in a sort of more siloed solo position versus when you, are working more directly with other people. So not just emailing back and forth, but being directly interacting and almost like a team, if that makes sense. Like reference desk folks versus like the person in tech services who is everybody. Yeah, I want to start by saying that again,

industries are often siloed. It doesn't matter. It's almost like a caste system. Like in my own industry, there is, if you are, there can be. And in many places there is a culture of, well, if you're a programmer, you're a real engineer.

And if you're the one of the people operationally making, you know, servers go were that you are not as good as the programmer, as the developer, not realizing that, you know, the two of you depend on each other. And I think some environments actually foster that culture specifically to try to get them competing against each other to get better. results because if I'm constantly trying to prove that I am a real engineer, I'm going to be, you know, as an operations person, I'm going to be pushing myself harder, I'm going to be working harder, trying to prove that I am just as good as the guy with the comp side degree who wrote the code that's blowing up on my servers in the first place. And you see that not just in my industry. You see that across all sorts of industries, which is yet another sort of symptom of toxic productivity is that rather than saying you should collaborate, you should work together,

they start pitching or pitting people against each other or departments against each other or even entire divisions against each other in sort of a competitive game over who can, you know, perform best and fastest. But the answer is always collaboration, right? The moment people start talking to each other, the moment people start building those bridges so that they can work across those divides, immediately everybody gets uplifted, right? And I'm very fortunate that I have a very supportive management structure right now that is like, no, our stuff touches many teams, so we need to talk to and work with as many of these teams as we need to, which I, like I said, very privileged, but I wish more environments did, because without the communication, it's just,

again, it's a recipe for burnout because you're trying to do the job of three people, and you may not even be the appropriate person to be doing one or two of them and the person who is appropriate is, you know, just cut off from you because of how things are structured or built. Do you think that workplaces are maybe cultivating imposter syndrome as a management technique in terms of not really giving people the satisfaction that they're doing their job properly? For the listeners at home, both me and Sadie just like turned into like the double eyes emoji as soon as Justice said that.

So it isn't that they're starting to. They always have. They always have by sitting there and telling you, well, your work's pretty good, but you know, if you were, if it were better, or the culturing that you constantly have to prove yourself as a programmer, as an operations

person, as a reference librarian, as an archivist, as or is that help desk person who is being judged on the number of calls, they have to take in a day. Another toxic workplace trait of, you know, we are going to give hard metrics as to how you're doing your job. And then the metric itself is actually bullshit and easily gameed. I've watched people game that system so hard so many times. So we had an episode about

what was it like demonstrating value learning, library value metrics, whatever the title was. The library value agenda. Library value agenda. Aligning everything. everything with the strategic plan. Yeah. So, and like by aligning things with the strategic plan, it's about like, okay, how many reference interactions did you have? How many students came in? Where it's like all very, at least an academic library, it's all very student focused,

which isn't bad, but the workers are only valuable in so much as they're helping students and not on their own merit. And so it turns into this like, again, like using metrics and like demonstrating value is a thing you hear. You have to demonstrate value. You have to demonstrate value. And even like, oh, we have to demonstrate our value to the outside world because no one knows what libraries do. They don't know how important we are or anything. And we're not going to self-advocate or anything.

We're not going to refuse to let our labor be invisible. We have to demonstrate our value. so that they'll keep giving us money, which they're not. And, you know, so like using these metrics of, well, how many students did you help? How many chats did you answer? How many questions did your discovery librarian get about why the thing wasn't working? Oh, wait, those don't count because they don't involve students. Oh, okay, never mind.

You know, Sadie, I'm curious if you were about to bring up the same thing. I wasn't actually. I was going to say that a lot of that sounds like, you know, when you're not a librarian, but you work in libraries, you hear a lot of, so have you thought about going to library school? Which is a lot of the times it's, yeah, it's kind of one of those like, well, why isn't the work that I'm doing now? Like, I'm shelving books and I'm really good at it and I really like it. why do I need to go to library school to be valuable here? And in a lot of ways, at least in my experience having worked like public service in a library without being a librarian, it does kind of start to feel, you start to feel a little bit pitted. Like, you know, the people who are going to library school

and are putting that extra effort in, you know, and going to library school at night, working full time during the day, like you know that they're going to, they're more likely to get promotions and raises and that kind of stuff too. But what you are saying, Jay, like, it's all about the students. In IT, at least in my experience, having worked only in libraries in IT, so I haven't worked any corporate library or corporate IT stuff. So much of the work is also invisible. People don't understand, like, especially like you say you're in operative,

you work in operations, Kevin. Like, people don't understand exactly how much maintenance goes. goes into keeping, you know, able to log in every day, your email, how many vulnerabilities are coming at you every day that you have to make sure that all of your patches are applied and nothing is breaking. And like at my new job, I, like, there is a lot of emphasis on business value versus technical debt and how like being, being the most mature IT organization you can be, you have like, I think it's 40% business value, which is when you're adding new things or improving things that already exist versus technical debt, which is basically that

maintenance work of making sure your servers are getting patched and making sure that, you know, you're upgrading what you need to upgrade and all of that kind of thing. And in a lot of ways, I just don't really get it because it's that it seems to me like that capitalism idea of you always have to be earning more money to be valuable. And it's like, why do we always have to be doing something new or adding more business value to be seen as doing our jobs? And in a lot of ways, it really does work because it helps you quantify, at least in the department. At least at the library I'm in now, a lot of that is to make it more visible. So we can say, listen, like, I know that we have a big department that, you know,

soaks up a lot of money, but 60% of what we're doing is just maintaining. And this is how we can basically document. This is what we do all of the time. This is what we do every day. So when people come down the pike and are like, well, why can't we all buy 3D printers and why can't you support us? You're not, that hasn't happened to me, thank God. But you guys just sit at your computers all day. You don't do anything. And you're getting paid more than a lot of the people here. And it's like, well, no, we are doing stuff even if it's not necessarily like visible. So, you know, I think about that kind of balance a lot because like, yeah, business value like blah. I'm not here. I don't work in libraries to bring monetary. Well, and it's not necessarily monetary value, but I don't do it to bring

monetary value to anybody. But at the same time, it is important that people be able to actually see the labor that we're doing. Yeah. And it shows the creep of business talk. and like business mindsets into librarianship, which should not have that. And I agree. The thing I'm noticing through all of this is something we've learned really hard on the corporate side, right? There was a big thing about a couple years ago, I think it came out of Etsy. Etsy is like the shop, one of the flagship shops for running an online service, right?

And their thing was measure everything, take metrics on everything, collect as much as many data points as you can, so that you can take all of that apart and figure out what's going on or what went wrong or what's going right. And that's fantastic when you're talking about machines and a service. When we start applying those same principles to people, it becomes a different story because what you have to,

collecting all of the data points and then arbitrarily deciding what is a valuable metric and what isn't is where it gets really difficult. It's making sure you're having the right, kinds of interactions, the right kinds of, as we would say in customer service, or when I was, I was a sales engineer, so I was doing corporate sales support for a while. I was supporting our salespeople, having the pardon the phrasing, right touch at the right time in order to move things forward. Now, Sadie, to your point, I agree that a lot of what happens on the operational

side, and I'm not in that position anymore, I work on our capacity now, which means I'm part of the team responsible for making sure there's enough resources for our customers to do things, which is almost a different world from when I was doing patch updates. And do we have a new service to bring online? How do we bring a service online? At that point, you know, measuring, it's important to measure not just the work you're having to deal with technical debt, right? But how that's impacting the new efforts that people want. I want to do new things. I want to be deploying new services. I want to be creating new things or helping create new things for the end user, right? But I can't do that if I'm spending 60% of my time, 70% of my time applying patches, right?

On a purely technical IT side, let's talk. I want to talk to you about automation and open source tools that start to take the toil. And that's what it is toil out of these jobs, because when we talk about technical debt that's generating toil, that means that there's something that you have to fix that is outside of your area of responsibility or even outside of your control to be able to fix. And you need to be able to pull in the people who can. I like to tell a story about two jobs ago. I was probably about a year in. And through a series of circumstances, I was the only operations person for this company bringing on other people. And there was a lot of main labor involved because of technical debt. And we were having in all hands, we had just released

a new product, this is in front of the entire engineering division in front of my VP, who until I got a director I was reporting directly to, and the person who was managing the release came up was showing off these new features, these great things were going to the customer, and look how awesome we are. And I used my metrics, right, except they were very specifically targeted. Here's all the things that I have to do manually, broken down by type, and how much time they take, and how much effort it's taking away from our team. And I stand up there after this guy has gone up to look how awesome we are. And I pointed at this and say, so this is how much shit we are. 50% of my time is dealing with these two problems that should

have been fixed. That, you know, there are, I think I hit one where it was five years from the time the item was opened until it actually became a pain point for the developers and they actually fixed it. It was a pain point for me for five years. I'm hammering on that for five years, but because it wasn't affecting them, it wasn't. But that was exactly what happened. I stood up and I said, here's the pain points. And with having the, you know, our VP right there, he said, okay, so we're going to fix this, right? So using metrics as a hammer in appropriate situations is a glorious thing. Because if people are up there saying, look at how awesome we are and you have receipts on how shit it is and how much they're dragging you down, and it's not

because of you, even though obviously they're going to blame you. Well, why didn't this get done sooner. Well, because I was dealing with X, Y, and Z. Well, that shouldn't be that bad. No, let me, let me give you statistics on that. And when we get into, when we talk about as a capitalist thing, there's actually a culture against removing that toil, right? People who get into that religiosity about their job, I'm the person who pushes the button that fixes it once a day, right? That's my job security is pushing that button. I mean, there's, you know, it may be a lot more complicated than that, But there are people who build into the, as long as I'm necessary, they can't remove me, which is a whole other toxic attitude, because then you get roadblocks, you can't move forward

because there is someone who's literally holding back progress, whether that progress is a technical solution, a cultural solution inside your business or your library or your organization. You know, a person who believes they are necessary, who believes religiously that they have to do this one thing is going to drag everybody. down. I've seen code solutions that were absolute shit to work around that one person or that one responsibility that they absolutely refuse to let go of or automate or whatever. Yeah, I've probably talked about it a lot on the show, but Sadie and Jay know that the IT at my work is particularly toxic. And the problem is the roadblock person is the person at the very

top. And so their whole management style is extremely toxic and it puts up roadblocks that are just completely unnecessary. I think they churn through people because no one can remember how they helped us with something. And I feel almost bad whenever I have to like say, look, because usually the person I'm working with is not the problem. But I have to be like, okay, this is not working. And I recently just had to stop doing, we had an automated backup, an automated backup. It went straight to an AWS bucket. Simplest thing in the world to learn. And it just needed a configuration to go from our vendor to our bucket.

They wouldn't let us control our AWS bucket. It took fucking forever to set up. And then our vendor contacts us and says, hey, the data is not pushing. Can you check the code? And I said, well, I can't check the code. I can't even download anything in the fucking bucket because they routed it through Microsoft. And so back and forth, back and forth.

And eventually I have to say, because of the billing, because I can't download anything because of all this, we're just shutting this down because you are clearly being deliberately incompetent. Not you, but your management is in order to not do anything that they don't want to do. And like, okay, it worked because you broke it. It's not working and you can't fix it.

So, I mean, yeah, that's when it's at the very top that becomes a huge management culture problem and everyone I work with in that IT department seems miserable. But on the metrics thing, I was thinking, we have a strategic plan in the library that requires certain metrics that I have to fill out. My team has to fill out. And I always think we never use these. So I'm always budding heads with our assessment librarian because I'm like, well, what do we need this for because we don't use it? Like how many professional development have you done?

How many presentations have you done? And our reference stats. And I was like, well, we're not the reference department. Why do we have to keep reference stats? It's like, well, you still work with people, so you have to keep reference stats. And it's all has to be done manually. None of it can be tracked because we don't go through like a help desk. So none of these stats, this is all we have to go in and put a checkbox, fill out of form every time.

Extremely tedious. Hate doing it. But they don't, I guess my question is what, why do we, from my dean down, we're assigning ourselves these metrics that we don't even need. We're not even assessed on them. But we create these metrics just for no real reason, just to have something to measure. even though we're not judged against them. Like, if I could game it by, like, getting more reference questions, I would just send out emails so that I would get one back from the person

with a question. And I could log that. And if that got me a raise, that'd be fine. But it doesn't. It doesn't do anything for me. So I just wonder why people do that if you have a theory. I do. That theory is funding.

It always comes back to money. If I don't have statistics to prove we're doing something, obviously we're not doing anything. And if the statistics someone is measuring, and maybe it's a, you know, somebody outside of your control, outside of your organization is X, then everybody has to measure X, whether it makes sense for their job or not. That actually goes back sort of to the same thing with the toxic management. And one of the reasons I soured on working in working directly for governments, right?

I've worked with for a contract on a federal agency. I've worked on a contract for a city. And in both cases, there were people at the top who, this is how they did things. this is how they've done things for 30 years. They're not going to change how they do things. And the only way change happens is when they die or retire. It's much like watching Congress people trying to move up the ranks is you have to wait for someone to die or retire and leave their seat

so that you get your turn, which is a whole other bullshit thing that I could go for hours on, but I'm not going to. A little off topic there. But there's a, at least in government, and libraries are so often civil institutions. You get a lot of that. Your head librarian has been worked their way up for the last 40 years, and they're going to retire in five,

and they do everything on paper, so everyone does it on paper. Because that's how they do things, and the only way it's going to change is when they leave, and when they're forced to retire, which I know in academia is a whole other thing, at least in civil service, there's often a, well, I have hit mandatory retirement age and my pension is, my government pension is good. See you, wouldn't want to be you. Like, they're just waiting out the clock. You will occasionally get people who are passionate about improving things

and improving systems. There are a lot of people out there who feel it, especially if they've been in a position for a long time. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And by if it ain't broke, don't fix it, They mean if it isn't causing me a pain point, then I don't care if it causes everybody else pain points. It doesn't cause me pain points, so there's no reason to change, right? The lack of empathy that trickles down, again, this is a societal problem because you see it in management, you see it in civil service, you see it in just customer interactions, the lack of empathy for the person who may be doing the job that you need services from or you need. data from is is astounding and is again a cultural thing and very toxic that I hope or at least

I am trying to fight somewhat in my own ways. Yeah and all of you bring up this sort of so I know I mentioned earlier about like being isolated and siloed versus working with other people but like regardless of if you're working with you know someone sitting right next to to you at the reference desk versus a remote worker at home. You're still interacting with people most of the time. I'm sure there are some people out there who work in jobs with this. Don't talk to me. But in libraries at least, even if you are like back end, back end,

you're still working with people. It is an inherently collaborative field. But y'all, especially Justin, with your point, like there's this, they feel like forced antagonism, especially in academia. I don't know if this is true in public libraries based on, on like, well, I have this project too and I'm working on this and I have this deadline and this person is expecting this from me, but you won't answer my email. And that person is not answering your email because they have a project and a deadline as

someone is expecting something from them. Or maybe they're like me and I was like having a really bad mental health crisis for like a few years. And it was affecting my ability to like be on top of my work to the point that I had to take a medical leave and then left my job over. how I was treated because of it. Like, am I aware that I was slowing things down and people were doing it to be? Yeah, like, I'm not an idiot. But, like, I still catch myself then getting frustrated at people when they aren't answering my emails.

And I'm like, wait a minute. And so it's like, but sometimes you do need to be like, hey, I actually, you have to do this thing. Can you please work with me? And so there's this, like, culture of like antagonism and like narking on each other, even though we're supposed to be working together, all because we all have different styles of managing our work. We all have different expectations on how quickly our work should go. And even though we're all working together, a lot of our work and overlapping work is

uncoordinated. So it's like at the individual level, it's at the team level, it's at the upper management level, all different ideas and standards of when should things happen and what is the style. And then we all just turn into cops. It turns into a panopticon, like a fucco mode. I don't know if you have like a Foucault mode alarm, Justin, or something. Foucault mode, like, it's all just, it's, it's, you mean it's punishment has been the whole time. It's all prison. And that is, that is a cultural problem and that is a management problem, right? Say, do you talked about having, you know, a corporate alignment or, you know, a goal alignment.

And that's, that's where it starts to get complicated and it's about leadership, right? And when the proletariat revolution comes, there will still be leaders. And they are the ones who are going to be setting those directions, right? But they also have to be keenly aware of the abilities and the styles of everybody who is underneath them. This comes to management styles just in general and leadership styles. If a leader or a manager doesn't understand how their people work or how their people get things done, they don't have to know the intricacies of the job, right? A good leader should not. be so micro-focused that they can't see the big picture anymore because they're worried about what Justin has to do and how Justin's doing it. And that shouldn't be their focus. The focus should be on Justin does things this way. How do we make that mesh with the other people? How do we get them working in Sympatico? There is a ancient concept in leadership training that sort of differentiates a boss from a leader. And that is that a leader tells, or no,

a leader does and a boss tells, right? A leader will show that they are, you know, that they are doing things by making sure their people are taken care of, by making sure their people's styles mesh with each other, and that they're communicating. A boss will say, do it my way or hit the highway. And there are far too many bosses and not enough leaders. There's another concept that a lot of management misses when they talk about teams.

And this is Leadership 101. And I am appalled every time this has tried to force on people. But it's the four stages of team development, right? Forming, storming, norming, and performing, right? Forming is when you're bringing people in and when you're building. Tag yourself. That's our new drag names. I want norming.

Yeah. But I mean, that's just it, right? So forming, everybody's coming together. There's a shared goal or whatever. Storming. Everybody's arguing or working at cross purposes. We're trying to get the same done. But, I mean, it sounds like, you know, it should be violent arguments and yelling. It's, it doesn't have to be.

It's just, you know, you're working at cross purposes. You're not communicating effectively. Norming is when the teams start to, align and maybe it's two or three people start to line in one direction, four or five, you know, the next three are in, you know, doing it another way, but you're starting to gel, you're starting to work together. And then performing is when the team is all focused on what the actual goal is and collaborating and working together. Anything, anything, anything can throw that can shift from performing back to norming from, I've seen teams drop from, you know,

they're performing all the way back to the storming stage because they brought in someone new who has a completely different way and throws the whole thing into disarray. The purpose of the leader in those cases of the leadership is not to enforce, force people through the stages, it's to guide them through the stages. And if your leadership isn't doing those check-ins to say, Okay, is it constant chaos industry? Things are getting done, but there's no flow to it. And just going, well, I guess that's fine because everything's getting done and walking away. That's not leader.

That's not leadership. And that's not developing a team or fostering a collaborative environment. And I just, I lost train of the thought fostering collaborative environment. Anyway, yeah, but that's management tends to get hung up on storming. If everybody is at odds, but everything's getting done. then everything's fine. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. There's no focus on how can we smooth this out, where are the points where people are, where are the friction points so that we can start removing those so that people can start aligning, right? And yeah, and so that becomes a leadership

problem and a cultural leadership problem. And even though, you know, it can start small, you might have a small team that's doing really, really well. And they're like, well, this team is doing really, really well, let's promote the manager. That throws the whole thing into disarray. Or this team is doing really, really well. So let's give them a new manager and take their old manager and put them in this other trouble spot. The trouble spot gets better. But the team, then everybody's like, well, why is this team falling apart? It's because you, you change the dynamic. And it has to re-reelign. I've worked for bad managers. I've worked for fantastic managers. I have a list of like three managers over a 30-year career now that I'm just like, I would work for them.

One, you know, one I've tried repeatedly to hire into my current company away from his, from like, we're both like two jobs or whatever away from when I worked for him. I've been heavily saying, hey, you know, come over here. We could use your skills, trying to actively, you know, entice him to come over and be management for me again. Because, you know, it was a, we'll work for again even better if I can bring them in so that I can work for them again. And, you know, thumbs up. I'm fortunate. I've, in the last two, three reorgs, I've had two amazing managers, three amazing managers. And so I've been very fortunate in that. But each has their own style. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses. And every single time it shifts, there is a moment of disarray because, you know, a new variable has been introduced into the

equation while we're getting deep. We're getting deep now into, past just base productivity and toxicity, but into the full, here's what you want from leadership. Here's what you want to be doing as a leader. And not just, you know, oftentimes when we think about productivity, it's like, well, if I start a bullet journal, your bullet journal may be great for you, but it may not help in a team setting, right? Because the guy person sitting next to you, sorry, may be using an online tool and doesn't have the visibility into your bullet journal. and you're not looking at their online tools, so you don't know if you're aligning. You've got to stop and talk to each other.

It all comes back to communication. It just reminds me I was supposed to keep my Slack on today and I didn't. Because it wouldn't open when I tried to open it earlier today and I forgot to go fix it. For whatever reason. I will admit to being the worst to forgetting to set myself as here versus away on Slack some days. It's just like, I get log on, start in on whatever it was I've left over from yesterday, and completely forget that I need to, you know, go in and say good morning on Slack. Not because we're required to, but because I like to.

And, you know, if somebody has something for me, you know, it'll usually show up there. Which actually reminds me of another point. Back to Jay's point about email and urgency. I'm privileged to work in an organization that's remote first. And so is worldwide, right? So we understand async communications. We know that if we send somebody in email or we send, an email out for comment to a bunch of people. It may be as many as 24 hours, sometimes 48,

depending, before we have all the responses to like an initial query. If we want something more immediate, we know Slack, right? Use something that's immediate to communicate immediately. If it isn't necessarily time sensitive, send an email and say, you know, if there's a deadline, say there's a deadline on it. If it's Slack and it doesn't need to be immediate, you know, we are sort of culturally ingrained to say, don't rush, I don't stop your dinner, get to this when you can get to it, but here's something, you know, I need to discuss with you or that needs your attention or whatever. There's a whole lot in that culture building that makes a big difference in productivity and how you interact with other members of your team and people outside

your team. Again, fostered by, you know, in our case, the founders culture. We were just We've been distributed since the beginning. We came out of an open source project. All right, full details. I work for this little company called Elastic or the search engine that everybody uses and nobody knows. They're using it, as it were, Elasticsearch and things like that. You're all sort of smiling. I think you've all probably used it, or at least heard of us.

It's in Combine, and Combine breaks all the time for all of us DPLA persons who have ever done things. Elastic's probably not the thing that's breaking it. Or it's not your fault. Right, right. I mean, I'm on our cloud services side. So I know where it's, I know where things are breaking, but it's usually not the sort of thing

that you would necessarily see. But the whole idea around is. Because combine is six servers in a trench coat all trying to talk to each other. That's what the problem is. Oh, dear God. Yeah. Yeah.

But the whole idea is we came out of the open source community, right? We came out of an open source project where it would not be uncommon for someone to make a, you know, a code. suggestion, a patch, you know, a Git commit, a pull request at, you know, 2 a.m., my time, because they're in Australia, and they, you know, I'm in the U.S. and so, yeah, no, it may be, you know, he'll get to it when he wakes up kind of thing. That's one of the best things I think

that has come out of many, much of the free software and open source community, other than the toxic problems that are a whole other ball of shit and hell. But one of the good things that came out of it other than some amazing projects that are completely driven in by the community, but is that sense of community and sort of that, that idea that unless there's like a security problem that needs to go out right now, now, now, that, you know, take time, consider, talk about it, communicate, communicate, communicate. I keep saying communicate because that is almost, that is like one of the most important things, whether you're a solopreneur, whether you're a librarian, and whether you're, you know, like me,

verifying that we have enough AWS instances for Black Friday, capitalist hellscape that it is, but is talking to people and communicating not just your needs, but asking them what their needs are as well, right? I can't be productive if you don't know what I need to be productive and you can't help me be productive or if I don't know what I need to provide to you. It's all about communication. There's a difference in, well, I guess,

guess it's more about like genuine communication versus the appearance of communication because when the pandemic started and we moved more to remote work and I've not really left remote work all that much. I go to the office a couple times a week usually. My manager and I had already been budding heads, but he had no clue what to do once things went remote. And it was, it got pretty bad in terms of micromanaging, but not really micromanaging. It was just sort of a, and eventually it turned into these weekly meetings

that were just like weird interrogations. And so it was finally at the point where I was supervising someone who was going to move into a librarian position and they were going to report to my old manager. And I said, that can't happen. You would just ruin all this training I've just done for this person because they'll quit. And so basically we had this.

really bad meeting and during the middle of it, I texted the dean and I was like, this can't keep happening. So that switched us over. So now I reported the dean and basically I have like more or less complete autonomy for what I do, which is lucky because otherwise I would have left. But it was, it was those weekly meetings that were really got it, were things that really got bad. And also in terms of just the email process, you know, it had to be copied on everything that wasn't within the team. And then I got yelled at if I missed something or. or if the dean talked to me, even if I didn't reach out to the dean. So it was a lot of really weird shit going on there.

The things I like to do are that like planning on moving a team remote was weird because I'm supervising more people than I ever have before. I'm actually kind of in charge of them. And so it's, it's whereas before I would like supervise student workers, but I didn't like do their pay stubs or anything. But now I had like, you know, a team of professionals that I was managing. And so we would do like check-ins. and things to make sure that remote work is going fine.

And the difficulty I've had back and forth is what kind of information has to be in like a shared space? So like do we need teams for this? Do we need a Slack for this? Do we need to put this in a lib guide or Google Drive? Like we use Google Drive quite a bit. We've actually moved away from it because we don't really need to communicate in those ways anymore because it turns out like I can just keep my own, you know, obsidian instance. And that's got all the information I need.

And we really don't have these overlapping Google drives or instances anymore because we don't really need them. Our communication has just gotten to a point where it's like, okay, everyone kind of knows what they're doing. So no one's really stressing out about where all the information has to beat all the time. You know, the only thing I do now is like, oh, I'll write up documentation and like that's it. Yeah, that, Justin, that reminds me. I had a couple of managers ago who was probably one of probably the worst manager I have ever had working IT. every Wednesday would take one person out to lunch. So are there these like forced lunches?

And there it was like so it was like every four weeks you would spend a painful hour with your manager who you didn't like while he buys you like an overpriced salad trying to make conversation to not be like I hate you and you're making my life miserable. And like I like left that job basically because of that manager. But yeah. Because he wasn't he was buying you salads. That was his first mistake. You don't win friends with salad. You don't win friends with salad. No, but yeah, that's sort of like we have to communicate no matter what instead of like,

kind of like Kevin, what you say, like finding how to make it like gel. Because that approach isn't going to work for everybody. I had one coworker there who clashed with the manager a lot who said that they literally just sat there in silence for an hour and he would grunt response. to the manager. And that was their lunch. And instead of just going, okay, maybe I shouldn't take him out to lunch every week.

Maybe that's not within his like work life sort of space. He just kept making him do it. But yeah, it just reminded me of that. And then you get to the point where like texting under the table, like please God, somebody get me out of here. It all boils down to control. And I don't know if that's what Jay, you were going to say.

Sorry about stepping on you on. that one. But there is there is that aspect of you're not a leader or a manager. You are an overseer. And the mindset of an overseer, a prison guard, a penopticon, right? Like you're saying, narc on each other because that makes every, it makes you look good, is so prevalent in so many different industries. I have so many examples on that. But I want to hear what Jay had to say first. This whole dynamic between the individual worker and the team and then the manager, boss, leader, terrible prison card person who shouldn't be in that position. And like, when you said, like, oh, you know, your co-worker isn't seeing your bullet journal and you're not seeing whatever online system they have. And it reminded me of, so a quote tweeted Tiago Forte, I think it was yes.

today. And Tiago, for those who don't know, is the person who came up with, like, the building, a second brain thing. The book just came out, and I find the system very helpful if people are very interested. But there is this thing that he said where it's like a pipeline, but like things can go back and forth everywhere pipeline, like capturing, organizing, distilling, and expressing. And Tiago tweeted that, like, the more that you can outsource and delegate capturing or organizing and distilling, it leaves you more time and like mental space to do the expressing you want to do. And I was like, Tiago, you know better. You're better than this. I didn't say that. I didn't get on to him. But I said, we need to be having a discussion as like, who is all of this

for? Is this for the manager? Is this for the solo puspreneur or however you say it? Is this for the white collar worker who can say, I'm only going to work four days a week, right? Is this for the person who has that amount of economic, like, power and control over their productivity systems and their workflows, that they can tell other people to do things for them. And even if people go, like, oh, but automation, it's like, yeah, and you have to have the time and the money to learn how to set that stuff up for yourself and to buy it or have someone else do it for you, either at work or at home. And so, like, all of these, like, productivity methods and systems out there that, like, you know, like at a team level, it's like agile at scrum is like a project management thing, right?

And on the individual level, that's like, oh, there's the bullet journal, there's getting things done. And then there's all of these tools. And there's building a second brain, which is more knowledge management and not project and task management, but it's still productivity. And all of this stuff. And it's like, who the fuck is this for? Because I don't think it's for me, right? That's not who these people are thinking of when they're like, oh, just delegate this thing.

just tell someone else to do it for you. You have control over your schedule and when you can say no to things, right? Like in the Eisenhower matrix, when it's like, oh, if it's not important and it's not immediate, just get rid of it. If it's important but not immediate, delegate it. And it's like, who are you? Right. And like I heard the other day or something that getting things done by David Allen, The first edition was for like domestic work and like housewives and housekeepers who like, you know, just like wanted to be able to manage their day and not have their whole day kept to just like cleaning toilets at their house. Right. They wanted to be able to have lives as well. But then it was like CEOs and executives who really dug it.

And so then now all this productivity culture is just like business people rant over. No, no, that's that's fair. you go all the way back to who I consider probably like the founder of modern productivity culture. The point that started it was David Covey

and seven habits of highly effective people and then the Covey system which included the Franklin Covey system when the two basically merged with teaching the Eisenhower Matrix, teaching prioritization and focusing

I'm appalled right now because every time I look at their tools, it's so very sales-focused, so very corporate-focused, because that's where they're making their money. That's where they're seeing the most values focusing in that environment. David Allen, same thing. Tiago, we're seeing a shift. Now, I think with second brain as it's gaining more traction and more, he's having to change his thinking. I believe in one of the mentor sessions, this was touched upon. It's going from, he is the only person running, doing an organization by himself and doing all of these things. Now he has employees.

He has all these other things. So his perspective is changing, right? The one that I always go back to as one of the, and domestic work reminded me of, when you want to talk about like being productive for the, for just like the housekeeper or just, you know, a single person who works a full-time job. I don't know if you ever, ever saw her, but a person who called herself the fly lady. And in terms of productivity, she was focused specifically on that domestic market and still is. But her whole thing was, okay, you want to be able to do more things than just clean your house.

She built a system around, here's how I keep my house clean and tidy and get all of those things done so that I can do other things and not stress about it. I mean, it's very structured like Monday is kitchen day. Tuesday is, you know, here are the maintenance tasks you do every day, the little things. God help us. I don't think I've dusted here in, you know, a dog's age. But, you know, if you have things that need to be dusted like every day, just go through, wipe them, done. The principle I adopted is you are not done until the, you know, your day isn't done until your sink is clean, right? If there's one thing I can accomplish every day, it's making sure that my dishes are done and my sink is clean. She's an invaluable resource for that. And finding the system that works for you and is targeted for you is a journey. And again, keep what works and throw out the rest. I'm showing off my vacuum gun that I keep so that I'm so bad at dusting. And dust accumulates like crazy because I have three bunnies. So yeah, this has like been invaluable because like I don't, I would try and keep like,

I bought like a ton of microfiber dusters, which since I moved, I haven't laid them around strategically enough for me to be like pick them up and like start using them. But this I have always sitting next to me so that I just see like oh the computer's dusty and I just I thought you were signaling that it was time to stop

and you were going to shoot me with that thing over the internet. There you go. It was time to wrap it up. I have a dust devil for the same thing and dear God when the seasons change and the dog or the cat

are blowing out their coats. Yeah. Yeah, you know, they're cat for tumbleweeds running through the house and it doesn't matter how many times you clean them up, they're going to be more, like within the hour. One thing that's tangibly related to this and I think is relevant to at least Jay and Justin because of the ADHD thing. I saw something phrased as pay the ADHD tax at front and the sort of example they gave was buying pre-cut broccoli florets instead of a head of broccoli because you know that head of broccoli is just going to sit in the drawer and get rotten instead of just being able to pull it out and use it immediately. And I found at least for myself, once I started that kind of shift in thinking, like,

I'm not doing this because I'm lazy. I'm not doing this because, you know, all of the sort of self-aggrandizing things that people, especially ADHD, people will get on themselves. for, you know, it was, it became less like, less about privilege and more about, yeah, just sort of keeping what works and getting rid of what doesn't. Like, I can buy the more expensive pre-cut broccoli and then, you know, I buy, you know, I do all of my clothes shopping at Goodwill. So those kind of things, kind of like you figure out where you're going to make those compromises, at least especially when it comes to money. But yeah, I think of that a lot. Pay the ADHD tax up front.

yeah I put my condiments at least not the ones that I use like all the time in my crisper drawer because I know if I put vegetables in the crisper drawer they will not be vegetables for very long and they will turn it to goo so at least like now it's barbice barbecue sauce turning into goo and not like you know potatoes do the weird shit that works yeah yeah yeah and I have if you if you look at productivity and you look for the ADHD tag some of it will be talking about some of those episodes will be talking about in 2020 when Ursula finally got her diagnosis. By the way, the flaw in the ADHD diagnosis as an adult is they give you a form to fill out and return to them. And what's the last thing

an adult with ADHD is going to find themselves motivated to do? Fill out a form. I had to keep up with her and it still took several months. But there are also, over the last year or so, two years. I've talked to a lot of people with ADHD, and they have all sorts, yeah, Jay, you're, you're included in that. And they've all have these coping strategies. Danny Bruflot, who does, has these amazing planner pages that help you track your hydration as well as your daily tasks. Everybody's suddenly like, yep, got to take a drink. Hale hydrate. You know, she has her strategies. I was talking to, and now I can't remember her name, but she designed, LARPS as a hobby, live-action role-play games in Europe, and not just going out with boffers,

but like immersive sort of story experiences. But she keeps a box of, here are the things that need to get done around the house in front of her with index cards. And so there's always sort of one right there in front to, you know, you get your spacey thing. Oh, look, here's the thing. Oh, here's something I could. Yeah, there you go. Justin is showing off his cards. But it's like, here is, you know, vacuum.

Okay, great. I'll go vacuum, move the card to the back, right? And cycle through it that way. Of course, she's also the one who said that object permanences for other people. Yeah, yeah. I was late to work today because I couldn't find my wallet because they didn't put it where I normally put it. Oh, my God. Moving was chaos because nothing has a place.

Oh, God. So I had to put everything basically next to the door. I'm getting nightmares thinking about it. Because otherwise, I don't, I think I had several panic. before even anything was like moved in here, but I kept like putting shit in the wrong place. And so just everything is by the door now, so I can't possibly lose keys wallet phone,

a couple knives, box cutters, hammer. I lost my hammer for like a week. Couldn't find it. Now it's hanging by the door on my coat rack. That's where the hammer lives. I've got my tool stuff set up now. It's fine. But I have an episode coming up probably,

it looks like towards the end of August, where I have a conversation with my returning guest, Dino Sarma, who also has some of the ADHD, but we always have fascinating talks. I think we recorded for five hours. We were talking about, we were actually talking about moving. So we've got an episode about here's coming up about, here's things you should know when you're moving, here are things you should plan for, here are things, you know, to plan in advance and things like that. I think it's a fascinating conversation. But again, five hours. I may have to break it into two episodes. But the object permanence thing, you know, keep it where you'll find it. I have probably five pairs of scissors because I put it in a place.

This is where I expect to find the scissors. My wife will grab them to use them. These are the good kitchen shears, right? Grab them to use them in gardening and leave them in the garage. And then I can't find them because they're not where I left them. They're where she was using them last. And when she goes out to garden, if I take them, where are the scissors? I left them right here, right?

That sort of thing. So we just have some things we have multiples of because it's just easier to have three sets of kitchen shears and one that so help me if it moves away from where it is, I have told her that I will be very, very upset, but strategically placed over where I can reach for them or where she needs them. She also keeps her car keys and her wallet on her kitchen table constantly. It drives me crazy, but then I realize that's where she expects to find them. That's where she won't forget them. If she takes her car keys upstairs, leaves them in her pants. The next day, she'll get all the way to her truck going out to, you know, write for the day and then come in and so I should have my keys or I should have my wallet because it's not in that mental place, right?

Ooh, taking it full loop, that mental place that we talked about, like with you keep yours in the bullet journal and he keeps his online. Sorry for not using gender neutral on that one. I'm learning. That's part of it is you know to look in your book, not on the online tool. And so you have to be able to communicate or sync or something on that because where your object permanence lives and where their objects, permanence lives are two different things. If you don't talk, you're not going to, you know, that's that you're going to start working across purposes. Yeah, I think, especially with one of the people I supervised, because their job is like

mine where it's highly complicated and there's always all these moving parts with tons of faculty members. You know, we've worked with hundreds of faculty members. So we've had to build our own database of like every interaction we have with them because we can't because we're two people. So the only things that we actually do have to share anymore is this database, which saves us actually tons of time that we've built, the CRM, plus. plus like a budget tracking thing.

But it's all like an air table. So it's in the air table. So we've built all these and it works. And then just a department calendar simply because there were too many things that like, when are we going to work on this? And like when does this come up? And it's annual stuff. It's stuff that happens every,

it's going to keep happening every year or every semester. And so those are really the only two things we have to share anymore. And everything else is sort of, you know, she's got her calendar, her physical calendar in her office. I used my obsidian for everything. I've used my outlook. I don't even need to look at anyone else's personal calendar anymore to figure out what's going on,

except my supervisor when I need to schedule a meeting with him. But that's actually part of the collaboration. I mean, one of the things that we do that I find just astounding is it is not uncommon if you're in a conversation with someone on Slack from them to say, hey, why don't we just have a quick Zoom, right? And discuss it like real time because, you know, are you free right now? Yes, I'm free. Or no, I have to go to a meeting.

Well, can we do it after? That level of communication is game-changing. When your team is aligning past norming but into the performing stage. And you know, like, you know what the other person is doing. That is probably going to get thrown off kilter when you have a third person, right? but once you get over the hump and you can start distributing things and things get redistributed and you start to sink again, it'll be, you know, it'll be glorious. There will be bumps. It will be painful. And that's any part of team development.

I would like to recommend a book at this point that I think all three of you will find value of and hopefully some of the listeners. It's an old one. It's called time management for system administrators. And it falls, it is sort of old school, it does take a lot of sort of the, the, some of the GTT methodology because of when it was written. On the other hand, one of the, I always go back to a quote from, oh God, now I can't remember his name, wrote Patriot Games, wrote Hunt for Red Soxober, Founded Red Storm Software. Clancy, yes, a quote from Clancy, if it's not written down, it doesn't exist, right? in time management for system administrators, it's if there isn't a ticket, it's not going to get done. So the first question is always, okay, you need me to do X.

Is there a ticket for it? It's something that I have started to, you know, I've tried over my career since the book came out to incorporate in, okay, let's get this in so that we can track it, so that we can see progress on it. The same sort of like your air table, you know, so that there is, yeah, so that there is a record of, what is going on where things stand and that becomes measurable and a good kind of metric.

Because then you can say, we got X number of requests. We answered Y number of requests. Here's the delta. And here is why we need a third person. Or here is why your project didn't get done. And it rolls into that whole sort of communication loop. I could point to my scrum master's certification. No one can read it.

But in the spirit of, you know, keep what. works and get rid of the rest. For some teams, that daily stand-up where it's a 15-minute, you roll in, you say, here's what I'm working, here's what I did yesterday, here's what I'm doing today, here's what's in my way. That is the purest form of a stand-up that should be happening, and any time a stand-up turns into a mini-team meeting every single day, you're doing it wrong, right? Also, anytime agile methodologies or scrum methodologies become a religion, and, you know, you're doing it wrong. I'm going to quote Andrew Hunt, who was one of the signers of the Agile Manifesto and one of the creators of the Pragmatic Programmer. Great guy. He's here in North Carolina.

I see him at conferences every soften. But he said the biggest disappointment he had with the Agile Manifesto is people treated it like a holy document and weren't actually agile with it. You were supposed to adapt it and not accept it as Holy Rit. And in his business, he has had to go in and start disabusing people of that notion. He tells a story of going into consult for a company and help them with their processes. And they would start every standup with a reading from the Agile Manifesto and a brief discussion. And I'm standing there with my jaw on the ground. And he's like, I couldn't believe it. That is absolutely not how it's supposed to be treated. That is absolutely not how any of these of the methodologies or formats are supposed to be treated.

They're not the gospel of productivity. They are guidebooks on your journey. I'm not surprised. I took a class on project management and they were saying that the book on project management is now so long that there's no reason to even ever read it. because unless you're going to get your certification, which is almost impossible unless project management is your full-time job anyway, which is weird. So you can't get project management certified

unless you have so many thousands of hours doing it so that you can get the certification to get the high-paid project management job. Yeah. No, I looked at that's the PMP certification. Yeah. From the PMI Institute. And yeah, it is reaching a point where it is prohibitively expensive and you have to have so much work experience doing in addition to the classes that it is nearly

unattainable. It's like, I want to do project management, but all of the jobs that are for project management require a PMP certification, but I can't get a PMP certification unless I have a job in project management. It's, and again, it's where- It sounds like entry-level library jobs. But, yeah, it's moved to a point where now project management, at least at that level, has become a religion with the priest of the PMP and their grand tome of the project management certification, you know, it is no wonder that other more efficient things have come up because they are more efficient and they're not the doctrine of project management. Would you recommend people do a

scrum master certification if that was how they wanted to tip their telling? Because I know we have a lot of students who listen. So reading up on it, I found the class valuable. The class I have, I have the Scrum Study, Scrum Master Certification or Certified Scrum Master Certified, which it taught me a lot. And I was kind of grateful that the instructor was like, if the rituals, the rituals are there for purposes, but if they aren't serving that purpose, don't do them, right? But, you know, a lot of the principles are in there like, talk to your. stakeholders. Talk to, you know, your job is to facilitate communication and to streamline, you know, the flow of things. It's not all about burned down charts and did, you know, did 15 people get their 15

tickets done in their two weeks. Yes, that's valuable, but is that actually providing something to the stakeholders? And when we talk about stakeholders, that could be your library director. It could be your dean. It could be the five students who use the one service. You know, it could be, you know, a representation of students. But knowing who you're providing the services for and why is something that is often overlooked in PMP and is focused on some of the, and I'm going to say little A agile philosophy. The capital A agile, where it is now an industry of we will come in and we will make sure your organization is running in an agile manner top to bottom, right up there with the Six Sigma methods, which I haven't studied, or lean is becoming popular again, do as much

with as little as you can, which is great for startups and terrible for multinational corporations, which is great for small businesses, but terrible for civic institutions or educational institutions. The whole idea that, let me rebuild. Okay, there it is. Yeah, the whole idea is that you need to know who you're delivering a service. or a product for and why? And it's so often overlooked. Oh, hey,

my, Ursula Vernon, the famous author who I'm also married to, just walked in probably to ask me if I'd put my chickens away, and yes, I have. Okay. Yeah, so. Her new book, under the name T, Kingfisher,

What Moves the Dead, just came out this last week. It is a retelling of Po's fall of the house of usher with a... Actually, Sadie just got excited. with an amazing... Is the protagonist non-binary? The protagonist is non-binary because they have three genders, so I guess...

Yeah, the protagonist has three genders, so yeah, we guess. Or the protagonist culture has three genders. Yeah. So it's a romp, it's a fun read. It only made me want to put the book in the freezer twice, which is, I think, a new low for one of her horror novels. I'm still a little wigged out by, she's got a fantasy novel coming out in,

I don't know, I think she just turned it into her editor, and that one had me like literally yelling what was wrong, what is wrong with you at one of the light drafts. Oh, no, wait, it was actually, I yelled out inadvertently what the actual fuck, and she is so proud of that. Better out of my brain. Yeah, that's a gold star moment.

Yeah, yeah. Or as she likes to say, better out of her brain than in. So as long as she's putting it on putting words on paper, air quotes, it's not coming out in her dreams or in her sleep. And I have to sleep next to her. So, you know, it's all good. I'm pretty certain that I can't remember the name of it now,

but I'm pretty certain that she wrote a book that haunted my wife for weeks, which considering my wife saying that is high praise. So the dark one. Twisted ones. The twisted ones. The twisted ones. Yeah. That's why I made that face,

because I heard the whole plot of that as she was reading it and was like, saying what the fuck allowed to myself. Yeah. The twisted ones is notable because she managed to get a jump scare into a text novel, and even knowing it's in there, it still gets you. And there is a scene in her second horror novel, The Hollow Places, that still haunts me. And that one, I think I read the final draft two years ago at this point.

Like, you know, like I literally was trying to back through the couch, through the wall to get away from the words on the, you know, on the page. And oh, oh, oh, oh, she's giving me the I'm so proud look now. Cameras on. You're so kind. So, yeah. But anyway, yeah, distractions, distractions. Yeah, productivity. And a part of my productivity is taking breaks.

And one of those breaks is often every evening after I'm done with work. And I've eaten my dinner. I go out and I sit with my chickens and make sure everybody goes to bed and read my book. And that's just like a brain cleansing break. And that is part of being productive. Taking those breaks, taking care of yourself, walking away from it, put it down, walk away. What is it? Healing.

I have to remind people and remind myself that, you know, when you're sick, healing is productivity. Don't feel guilty that you can't get out of bed. To answer that email, don't do it. You're healing. Healing is being productive, just not in what we consider the traditional sense under capitalism. Yeah, there's that thing of like, eventually your body will take the rest it needs, and it probably won't be when it's convenient for you. I spent, you know, I spent a week and a half with COVID, right?

Antivirals, by the way, fucking miracle. Vaccines, get them all. but, you know, my body was like, no, you're going to sleep for two days. You're going to be awake long enough to go to the bathroom, to rehydrate, and to eat, and then you're going to just fall back down. Sometimes it's necessary. Through a set of circumstances that probably would take too long to exchange, I'm vaccinated against rabies.

Not because I was, you know, I was bitten by something that was rabid, but voluntarily. But then I was bitten by something, and I had to get the booster, and it's time for me to check my tiders to make sure I'm still immune to rabies. rabies. Oh, hell yeah. But I forgot that, you know, you're producing anybody's. Your body is working and you cannot operate under the same idea that, you know, you are, nothing is going on. Your body is being productive in its own way, making antibodies, right? People complain about being knocked down by the, by the COVID vaccine. Well, yeah, your body's working. It's being productive just because it isn't something you could check off your list of, I got my, you know, I got X done today.

and I got Y done today and I processed 18 emails, it's still productivity, right? So we used to do a segment that was the, imagine sort of a socialist. Fully automated luxury gay space communist. Yeah, Fagotsk. I would just write Falgasker at the very end of the notes all the time. So imagining sort of a post-capitalist world, what would productivity mean in there? How do we imagine productivity as a concept? ending or continuing if we were to imagine a society like this?

So it's interesting. I'm reading actually a series of military sci-fi in a post-scarcity world, right? Like Star Trek. And it sort of falls the same thing. In a post-scarcity world, what does productivity look like? Productivity looks like that you're able to do the things that contribute to society and make you happy without being forced to do it. I like talking about productivity. I like helping people. Being able to do that full time would be, you know, a dream. But dear God, I need health insurance, right? There's a joke at conventions I like to make. Hi, my name is Kevin. I'm Ursula Vernon's health insurance. Because that that's the world we live in. But in a post-scarcity society, we would be able to, or in a, that utopian sort of ideal, we would be able to do the things that were skilled at.

and that we love. Because there are people out there who love talking to people and helping them and finding their way. There are people out there who, frankly, love checking things off lists and making sure that, you know, they've got their house perfectly clean or their, you know, or their pencils lined up just right. Great. Follow your fucking bliss, which we're not allowed to do. We're forced to do the things we need to do to survive in an environment. And I keep saying post scarcity because that's really what we end up talking about. Because, you know, there are people who love to farm. Great. More power to them. Capitalist society's ruin farming to a great degree, at least. But, you know, it's necessary to support a population of our size, yada, yada, yada.

But there are people who are passionate about it who love it, who, you know, are all about engineering, whether it's in a lab or whether it's with pollen samples and a brush, you know, guiding the next big breakthrough in, you know, how are we going to feed people? There are people who are passionate about housing, whether it's designing something or just making sure everyone has a house to live in. That would be the world, you know, to live in. And there is nothing that cannot be contributing to society as a whole except someone who's out to destroy that very society, right? And so productivity is doing what you do best and are passionate about that can, that improves, not. only your life, but everybody's life, whether it's in a small way or a grandiose way. Grapes that taste like blueberries, hell, I'd sign up for that. I think that might improve my life. Somebody out there probably wants to do it. Great. Give them the space to do it.

And like you need to be able to like manage what you do, you know, take care if you don't, if you aren't the person who likes cleaning their house and checking up the list, you need to make sure that you can clean your house and whatnot. So then you can go make grapes taste like blueberries. Yeah. I mean, and that's... vice versa. Yeah, and that's, that's, that's talking about the reduction of toil in a lot of modern capitalist society is based around the idea that toil is valuable. Toil is not valuable. Toil is soul crushing. And part of moving towards that next layer of society is removing is, is removing that toil or

automating the toil or way or making that toil superfluous, right? As an SRE, if I have to do it once, okay, if I have to do it twice, I write a script. Because if I have to do it twice, I have to do it three times, five times. Now I've got a script that I might have to run once a day, and I'm filing bugs to say, hey, how do we fix this so that I don't have to run a script once a day? Let's remove toil. Once, if we can remove toil, if we can automate it away, or if there are people who love, there are people who love toil, great, you go toil. That's, you know, more power to you. But productivity, no matter what, is highly personal. It just has to interface with the needs of your community, whether that community is at work, whether it's

your neighbors, who are probably still mad at me over the roosters, but, you know, whether it's, you know, whether it's the, the needs of, of your offspring or your pets or whatever, you know, there's the highly personal bit, and then there's the next layer up, which is you have to interact with people. It doesn't matter what your job is. You have to, interact with people at some point. We are herd animals. We are pack animals. And so being able to mesh and having the freedom to mesh it instead of being at odds over it is possibly one of the greatest things that could happen. Oh, damn, that went deep. That was good a shit. This is why I wanted you on, Kevin. I was like, oh, this is going to be fucking great. I'm like, dude, did I,

Did I eat, you know, philosophy, huevo rancheros for dinner tonight instead of just the regular ones? I don't know, man. I want that recipe. That's what we do here. Wayvos rancheros are so dead simple. Okay, now people are going to ask. So can of black beans,

roughly an equal or greater than amount of salsa. Mix it, bring it to a light boil in a big pan you can cover. Crack eggs just right into it and let them basically poach. Done. And what kind of philosophy? are you putting in? Well, apparently, I am just, I don't know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's sparking. I think it, that may be the, um, uh, chula sauce I added after, you know, because,

oh, okay, you know, you make it, you make it for, you make it mild for everybody and then you spice your own up is how it works. To each according to his own needs and his means. Yes, yeah, it's Marxian, uh, wait a bit about, yeah, yes. Uh, anything you want to. plug before we go. Anything we missed? Okay, so, well, I mean, we talked, you know, productivityalchemy.com is where the podcast lives. One of the things that we started doing in the last year is that we don't need anything. We're in a privilege position right now. We don't need money.

We don't need funding. We take care of ourselves. We help other people. And so at the end of every interview, I ask the people I'm interviewing for a charity. One that has come up, well, two that come up over and over again, our Trans Lifeline, which is a support network run by trans people for trans people, and I think they are doing amazing work, and anything you can do to help out is really appreciated. I am not trans myself, but I know a lot of people who are, and resources like this are so few and far between. It's really important to support them. The second one that seems to be a repeating theme is feed people. Go out there and give money to your local food bank, give it to feeding America, volunteer if you can. The two things they're always short on are money and people.

They're never short of French cut green beans because nobody fucking wants those anyway in the can. And they can buy a hundred pound bags of rice for what you're, you know, for the same price you pay for a five pound bag of rice. Sometimes, you know, less per pound. And it's staples like that that really feed people. So, you know, feeding people, I think is incredibly important. Taking care of each other is incredibly important. And enabling people to take care of themselves, yes, it's very important, but we're all in this together, right? Feed trans people.

Just mesh those two things together. Feed your trans friends. No, I mean, but that's the thing. You don't think about the communities that you just think, oh, they're poor. When you think about your local food bank or whatever, my kid's mom was out of work for an extended period of time, and she had to rely on that, right? There are people who live off the streets and sometimes the only food they get is at a soup kitchen or at the food bank. And given the number of the appalling number, I might add, of young trans people who are in need of not just support mentally, but like a place to live, food to eat, it all intermingles, you know. So yeah, that's that's my plug.

Listen to my podcast. Go out there and take your money earned from, you know, the big evil corporations and gives it back to the people who need it. Redistribute that wealth, you know, doing my best. All right. Hang on the line for one second so we can get your recording. And good night. Absolutely. Yeah.

Thank you. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah.