Pocket Revolutionary

(via Phil Cooke)

I write status reports. At times, I write great status reports. My status reports inspire envy, and I send a new one out every single week. Unfortunately, my well-thought-out, expository reports only appease my bosses for 2-3 days. At some point during the week, at the most inopportune time available, I’ll hear “what’s the status on… ?” Sometimes it’s right after lunch or a 9am wake-up call after coding until 3am. Either way, it’s not when I have trusty notes at hand and my mind draws a blank. It doesn’t matter how current the information on Basecamp is (Basecamp is 37 Signal’s project management webapp), because that’s for the team. My bosses don’t check Basecamp for status (or need to); they ask their managers (like me) what is going on.

Okay, so I have to give a quick status report, and that should be no big deal. The problem is I unwittingly run a “black box” operation. I’m borrowing this term from Merlin Mann (see the slide), but the idea is that my job is viewed from the outside as thus: requests, deadlines, emails and other stuff people understand go in, I do whatever I’m paid to do, and results come out. Whatever I’m actually doing between the request and the result is in the “black box” where nobody really wants to see exactly what I’m doing or how, they’re just patiently waiting at the other end for the results. This means I can’t just spit out the last thing I was working on (e.g. Refactoring the Authorize.net component to abstract response handling into the main order controller) or give a thirty-minute diatribe on PHP frameworks. I need to say something concise (my boss is busy), meaningful (no jargon), and not over-simplified (he’s not stupid, either).

So, I have created the Elevator Pitch Status Report. The “elevator pitch” is what entrepreneurs like to talk about. It’s what you can say about your current idea in the span of an elevator ride (maybe 30 seconds). For the purpose of my status report, though, that’s about as much information I can instantly recall without Basecamp, OmniFocus, or Moleskine in hand, and it keeps me from ad-libbing into techno-babble.Throwing around technical jargon may work to get me out of a question I don’t want to answer, but it doesn’t make my boss know that everything is under control and all is right with the world. At the same time, I try not talk down to anybody and give the anti-social geek answer: “Fixing stuff”. So, after each major task, I try to update my mental 30-second status report. I just ask myself the four secret questions that are all really behind the status request and memorize the answers.

• What is the current sub-project? (Designing the pages, creating shipping calculations, etc.)
• What is the last task I actually did?
• How did that move us along the timeline?
• Has the timeline changed?

I’m still recovering from my second major brush with burnout, and this last one (quietly) almost took me out completely. Scott Boms has put together a well-researched (and lived) article at A List Apart that I recommend for anyone working in “the industry”. Even if the phases outlined below don’t sound familiar, that just means you can read up on preventing burnout before it’s too late.

The identified phases [of burnout - not in a particular order], several of which I bet sound familiar, are:

• A compulsion to prove oneself
• Working harder
• Neglecting one’s own needs
• Displacement of conflict (the person does not realize the root cause of the distress)
• Revision of values (friends, family, hobbies, etc., are dismissed)
• Denial of emerging problems (cynicism, aggression, and frustration become apparent)
• Withdrawal from social contexts, potential for alcohol or drug abuse
• Behavioral changes become more visible to others
• Inner emptiness
• Depression
• Burnout syndrome (including suicidal thoughts and complete mental and physical collapse)

A List Apart – Burnout