Working Class Hero

According to the wrapper on my Dove chocolate miniature, I am exactly where I am supposed to be. So much for uplifting maxims. Now I'm feeling fat AND resentful.

Pity Party

For the second time this week, I began my day at 1:00 a.m. Before 8:00 a.m. today, Wednesday, I'll have already worked over 40 hours this week.

I know, I know. I didn't rappel into a gated compound, after experiencing a helicopter mechanical malfunction, and shoot Bin Laden in the eye -- but shouldn't I get some sort of pat on the back? Better yet, a raise?

Lord have mercy on me. Wo(oo)oe is me. 

A Day Without Goals

What a great day to sleep in and read the New York Times: A Day Without Goals. Love the pun. What a cutie.

Read the book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton yesterday. This snippet, about a day in the life of employees at a multinational accountancy, struck me as particularly poignant.

These achievements will no doubt lose some of their significance with the perspective of time. Three years from now, the diary of the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of July will have become almost unintelligible, when it had once been sharply divided into pressing hour-long increments, devoted to appointments with colleagues whose very names and faces will have grown indistinct.

Sad but true. If I try to remember what was so important that I never made it to girls' weekend in the Hamptons late August two summers ago, I cannot for the life of me begin to imagine. But it certainly was seemingly critical at the time.

Ah well, must go to bed on time tonight so I can awaken early, go swimming and be in the office by 7:30 a.m. so I can meet my pressing deadlines, in billable increments, for clients whose very names and faces will grow indistinct soon.

That's life.

In the Right Place

As my boss is considering (nay, planning) a move to CO to be closer to her eldest daughter, I have a year to reinvent myself. Find a new job. Open my own business. Become a rodeo clown. Perhaps move to a new city.

A year of soul searching. Prayer. Divine intervention. Miracles.

The July-August 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review contains an article entitled "How Will You Measure Your Life?" with this golden nugget:

"People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness."

I want to thrive. Professionally. Personally. Help people. Touch people's lives. Make the world a better place. Pollyanna Pittsford. (I just wanna dance.) And I want to be with my family more than I am now.

So how am I going to measure my life?

The Acceleration Trap

This month's issue of the Harvard Business Review has a good article about businesses that consistently take on more than they can handle. We're working on a Strategic Plan for a local firm that falls smack dab into this category. They're a perfect blend of "there's nothing we can't do" bravado coupled with roughly 90% of the senior leadership team actively looking for new jobs (behind the scenes) because they're completely burned out.

We're walking this client through a well-defined process of clarifying their strategy, focusing on key priorities, filtering all new projects and terminating nonessential tasks. It's common sense when looking in from the outside but when you're firmly enmeshed in this type of behavior (i.e., demanding a high level of urgency on a daily basis), it's hard to break the mold.

I know because here, at the best job ever, I would respond in much the same way as the survey data cited in this article. Specifically, >80% of trapped company respondents agree to the statement, "I work under constantly elevated time pressure" and they a) don't see a light at the end of the tunnel of intense working periods or b) regularly get a chance to regenerate.

Because our activities are all client-facing (i.e., we don't assume any nonessential, internal tasks), we cannot terminate projects. We can, however, filter out the time consuming, hand holding projects with needy clients that don't pay well and focus on bigger fish with deeper pockets -- but then we lose sight of the small mom and pops with whom we love to work.

Helping small companies to succeed is often more rewarding than attempting to tackle the pathological dysfunction that's inherent in so many large organizations.

So where does that leave us? Hire more consultants? Maybe but then we have to manage more people and manage the culture. Right now, we're lean and mean and we get along famously. Should we establish more realistic deadlines with our clients? Not a bad idea but we've already set the ridiculous expectations that we're now managing to. "Sure, we can summon the forces of nature. It would be our pleasure."

The most realistic ideas for our company to adopt from this article would be to systematically insert periods of calm in order to recharge our batteries and take a moment to reflect and feel proud of accomplishments.

Yeah, that'll happen.

Hyperactive

Too much work + leaving early two days in a row = coming to work super early and praying to God to accomplish all that I need to accomplish today. I'm praying not only for quantity but also high quality for my clients' sake.

Leaving work at 5:30 p.m. = traffic. Serious traffic. Who knew? Not sure if it's a) normal, b) construction-related, c) Buffalo Bill's camp-related, or d) all of the above. Must never leave at such an early hour again.

Coming to work at 3:00 a.m. = no coffee. Anywhere. Who knew?

Tonight = dinner with mom, sis and Uncle Herb.

And now's the time on Sprockets when we dance: a little tune from the college years to sum up my life.

Mini-washout: haikus

mini-weekend thwart
heaps of data analyzed
workday almost done

eighty-eight worksheets
performance v. importance
gap analysis

revenue decline
profitability down
op costs sloping up

count if cell not blank
vlookup tables galore
i've become a bore

The Drive of Capitalism

Laurie, one of my clients, and I were chatting about how we became uber-career chicks. She was a drama major in college and still loves to sing; now she's a senior VP at a high-end, investment management firm. I was an English major with no direction or any aspirations for that matter.

For me, I had a life-altering capitalist moment. I had been traveling and waitressing in New Zealand and Australia for a number of months when I saw a cute, brown linen suit in a store window. It stopped me in my tracks. Short skirt. Little jacket with (I swear) a tiny brown linen bow on the back. I suddenly wanted to be the ultra-professional woman who had somewhere to wear that suit.

Aren't I lucky? Got what I wanted.

Laurie had what she calls a similar experience when she went out to meet a date. This person took one look at her car and said with distain, "Is that your car?" She said she suddenly put someone else's eyes on her own life and no longer liked what she saw. The life of poverty could no longer be romanticized. She wanted a brand new car.

Thankfully she's extremely good at what she does, her clients and her team love her and she is really happy. And she's in a relationship with someone who doesn't care what kind of car she drives even if it's a 2009 BMW.

Got what she wanted.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

I have a client who typically says at the end of his presentations, "I'm the only thing standing between you and happy hour . . . with that said, does anyone have any questions?"

Today I have to attend a meeting on a sales commission structure that we developed for a manufacturing client, write a terms & conditions document for a new business venture, develop one side-by-side comparison of a boutique client v. their nationwide competitor for a sales pitch, review/edit an RFQ for a website redesign, complete some remaining secondary market research for a client presentation, attend a client meeting to review a software application they're considering, pull together some interview questions to kick-off two strategic planning projects and have a conference call regarding a contract we wrote months ago to support a fledgling business partnership . . .

These are the only things standing between me and my four day weekend in NYC! Yippee!

Depends . . .

Question: What's the worst part about coming to work super early?

Answer: The fact that I can't leave my office to go to the ladies room without tripping the alarm system.

More than you cared to know?

Riddle Me This

Q: What happens when you're too tired to carry your laptop home even though you have heaps o' work to do?

A: Why you freak out, shower and come to work at 3:30 a.m., silly.

Isn't that what everyone does?

My Treasure Chest of Love

My girlfriend Laura was in town recently from Delray Beach. We spent a little time viewing the permanent collection at the Memorial Art Gallery while the kids accompanied us on an animal scavenger hunt—looking for horse carvings, dogs in paintings, etc. We also went to see the hubby’s jazz band, The Steve Greene Trio, play at the Little Café and later saw his Podunk-punk band, The Chinchillas, play at The Cottage Hotel (a fun a little hole-in-the-wall). We inevitably faced the, “What do you want to do?” question for which Rochester has few fabulous options for repeat visitors (especially at this time of year). There are only so many times visiting the Pittsford “mega-Wegs” continues to have allure, the lakes are too cold to swim, the mountains are not yet snow capped for skiing, and the Maid of the Mist is docked for the season so why bother heading to Niagara Falls for the day?

We ended up late Saturday afternoon at Organic Alley, a fabulous local health market, which was having a holistic health fair. My girlfriend had a reading from an “intuitive,” while I sat on the floor praying to God, “Please put your words in this woman’s mouth.” I have a fear of mediums and spiritualists but this lady was spot-on in her dialog with Laura: not only nailing her raison d'etra but also giving her food for thought.

She then turned to me and asked, “Do you like to sing and dance?” and I wasn’t sure how to answer. I love to sing and dance but I’m horrible at both. I actually lip synch in church and, when I do sing aloud, people turn around to see what kind of mutant I am.

She said that my body was dancing and my heart was singing, “I have a treasure chest of love.” Laura and I started laughing. This woman proceeded to tell me that a) I work too hard, b) life doesn’t have to be this hard, and c) I need to focus on my talents—stop challenging myself further—and life will come much easier.

I came to work on Monday and immediately told my boss! Guess what, I’m planning on not working hard anymore . . . you okay with that?

Lucky Me!

My boss just came into my office beaming, "In the 15 years that we've been in business, we've never been this busy!"

Paycheck aside, I have only one thing to say: Jane, stop this crazy thing!

Extreme Leadership

I now have something that historically sounded like an oxymoron to me: a sober boss. Two words I previously thought were mutually exclusive! Couple that with the fact that she's one of the most intelligent people I've ever met, insightful, driven, hardworking and genuinely interested in our clients' welfare, I finally have a solid, professional, work environment. My boss holds integrity at the top of her list of qualifications and, unintentionally but effectively, surrounds herself with Christians.

My boss is, to use Jim Collins' term in his book Good to Great, a "Level 5 leader." She embodies his definition: a mix of professional will and personal humility, ambitious for her clients first and foremost, sets all of us (staff and clients) up for success, is modest and self-effacing, is fanatically driven with an incurable need to produce sustained results and takes full responsibility if anything ever goes poorly (which it rarely does). Unlike many of my other bosses, she is not larger than life. In fact, she's tiny and somewhat unassuming in her cuff linked, Brooks Brothers suits—that is, until she takes control of a room.

One client, who is a black-belt in Karate, likens a day of Strategic Planning with her with "going 10 rounds." As he says, "I know what that feels like." She is intense.

As such, this is, by far, the best environment I've ever experienced. And I believe wholeheartedly that I got this job through divine intervention.

My husband wanted to move back to Rochester; I did not. I sent a million resumes to companies throughout Maine (where I wanted to live) and only one to Rochester—to a company I had never heard of before and one that did not even have a position posted. I simply researched where alums of the U of R were working and this one firm looked interesting. Unbeknownst to me, my counterpart here was praying for her replacement and a suitable candidate could not be found. It was perfectly scripted.

Six years later, it still feels right with one exception (and it's significant): I'm exhausted.

I remain a good fit here because, in a similar vein to cramming for exams and subsequently acing them, I work well under tight deadlines and bend over backwards to ensure everyone is satisfied. However, as a very intuitive girlfriend who I went to college with recently commented, "Sounds like you've been taking finals every day for six years."

It was as if a light bulb went off in my head. I had a Charlie Brown moment: "That's it!" That's why I am so fatigued. I keep telling my boss that she needs to find my replacement, and even have gone so far as to introduce her recently to a candidate, but she claims I simply need a vacation. Perhaps.

I, once again, await divine intervention because, in addition to sobriety, I now want "normalcy" which I'm loosely defining as "more time with my family and a less furrowed brow." Until then, I keep plugging away because I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep.