It‘s start of the year and time of dreaming about big goals we want to achieve this year. I tend to give myself too many, or too ambitious, goals. Then I either drive myself crazy to reach them, or the regular life gets to me and I get a bad feeling in the stomach because of „my failure“.
This year I‘ll just aim for consistency in healthy habits and things that give me joy, e.g. if my goal is regular running then I‘ll aim to go like 3 times a week but do not care about the speed or distance, or I’ll try to go fishing once a week even if it’s just a couple of hours etc.
I often read about people „living“ in their ToDo list, meaning everything that comes to mind, is seen on the net, needs to be done someday (maybe), … gets jotted down in the ToDo list or processed thru their productivity toolchain. The purpose of this is to not forget anything and to live a quantified but relaxed life, because everything is recorded and nothing is forgotten.
Although I can relate to the „nothing gets forgotten“ part, because I need this to ease my mind, having everything I need to do in a day, week, … added to my ToDo list, makes me feel like a machine and I actually feel psychological pressure to „get those tasks done“. I do not like it.
Every once in a while I fall down that rabbit hole and start filling my main.org with everything possible. But then at some point the list gets too long and I start feeling that pressure of still having „so many open tasks“ when the day is done. The only thing that helps then is to radically go thru the list and delete all the junk that is not 100% a real task, that has to get done, or a note which has value and shall be kept.
Everywhere we look, be it blogs, articles, TV, printed media, books ... everyone is talking about increasing productivity, self-improvement, the best health plan we have to try, next gadget that will make our life easier ...
Isn't all of this there just to further fuel the modern capitalist consumerist machine?
Are we setting the wrong goals and priorities in life?
This is it. Final post of the series, as I think the transition is now over.
In this post I will try to recapitulate what I achieved, learned and messed up in the last 48 months.
So it's about 30 months now since I took over building and leading an engineering team.
Building is the right word, as on the first day I started there was no team. There were just 2-3 engineers in India, that started doing some testing in the last sprint and had absolutely no clue what they are doing. (Somebody told them they are the test team and that the software to test is in Artifactory …)
Something over 18 months ago a big change happened in my work life. After years of trying, learning, searching for ways forward, changing jobs on the same level … I was appointed team leader in my company and tasked with building up a team completely from scratch. I already wrote on the topic several times, this is a follow up.
Now it has been a bit over 12 weeks since I took up new responsibilities, so time to give you an update what went on since the last post on this topic.
What I can already reveal is that it became easier to master a day at work and also some stuff started to fall in place :)!
6 weeks ago I took over my first job in management as a team lead in a big OEM car manufacturing company.
I worked for the last 14 years in different positions in testing, development and project management within the same company and did some 2 more years before that as an external HiL and In-Car tester for a different OEM. So I think it's safe to say, that I was a techie and now I became a boss.
I decided to write a blog post about my first 6 weeks into the transition, because I hope this will help me reflect on my experiences and sort the stuff in my head … and there is a lot :).