learning
I spent today noticing how I spend my energy and, notably, what drains me. And, not surprisingly, - lot of what drains me is human interaction. HA HA HA,IM IN MIDDLE/UPPER MANAGEMENT AND DEALING WITH PEOPLE MAKES ME TIRED, isn't it ironic.
So what I'm trying to do is differentiate which interactions I can't avoid, and which ones I could try better to delegate to other people. What I've learned so far:
people coming to my door every 5 minutes when I'm clearly working on something and either asking me questions or giving me updates -- sadly that's part of the job, although I can try to get ppl not in my department better trained so they're not always asking me questions and/or asking my department to consider whether I really need to be updated -- but a certain part of this is inherent in the job and will never go away.
visitors, vendor meetings, or other forced interpersonal interactions overtaking the usual workday -- there really is a small portion of this that's required. However. I could work to develop my engineering staff so that they could be the contact point for, say, people who visit from the plants to work on a project. Which leads me to:
working intensely on something with other people -- this is actually the serial killer of my energy. So, this week we had a visitor from the plants to help us re-develop our MOC process and move to new software. She's incredibly knowledgeable and the whole three day visit was entirely amazingly productive. However, this sort of intense interpersonal work for hours at a time is an incredible drain on my reserves and accounts for a lot of the overcharging to my energy credit card. I put my brain into a very highly-functional state and generate incredible amounts of work, looking at big picture as well as small details - the forest and the trees - and I also watch the people I'm working with to figure out what their weaknesses are so that I know we're covering everything we need to. I'm always the one recording because I know for a fact I take the kind of notes we need to capture everything, and then I'm the one compiling what our results were and what conclusions we're going forward with. This constant, intense operation of my super smart*, psychasthenic brain leads to mental exhaustion, which translates into sapping my physical energy just to get through the day, which triggers the fibro feedback as well as the brain fog.
So -- I'm still collecting the data I need, but I'm trying to think of ways I can lessen the amount of my work time spent doing things like that. Technically managers should be leading and directing rather than doing the intense work -- not that I want to avoid doing it, but it's that kind of work ON TOP OF managerial responsibilities that's incompatible. So I obviously need a crew I can trust to do the same level of thinking. I do, so that they can conduct these development-type work meetings on their own and I just review final results.
But that's a lot to implement and I have to figure out other ways to reduce that kind of intensity -- so more thinking.
Also, this is just the first mental evaluation; I'm sure there are more serial killers to identify.
- not being arrogant -- I'm highly intelligent in many of the areas in which I work
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