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spring cleaning
My house is twenty years old next month, and with any time one lives somewhere for two decades there comes the inevitable accumulation of clutter in the basement.
As with many people, we have that room downstairs where reside archeological grade relics from our days passed. Boxes sit where they were packed a dozen years ago and never since opened. There is a corner devoted to baby and toddler kit that we just couldn’t bear to discard or sell. And of course we saved all those scraps of surplus carpet and boxes of extra laminate flooring and spare ceiling tiles, all from when we renovated and… you never know what you might need later.
The internet as a common public platform for business has been around for longer than twenty years and like my house, some folks have been occupying their digital real estate for decades.
Likewise, I suspect there are a lot of business websites out there with more digital clutter in their metaphorical server basements than most would care to admit. Most of this might be packed tightly away in boxes and spare rooms which will never see the light of day, but unlike my basement it may only take an unscrupulous visitor mere minutes to pack themselves up a copy of all that clutter and disappear into the dark corners of the web.
And I don’t need to tell you that your old business information may be much more valuable on the black market than my box of old charging cables and power adapters. We probably all could spend the weekend doing some spring cleaning.
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dusty memory
Arguably, I have spent many years taking my experience for granted.
As I set out into the world of contracting this year, I have found myself in the interesting postion of suddenly and very quickly needing to do a lot of professional self-reflection and inventory work. Specificially, I’ve needed to spend a couple weeks digging through my decades of experience and compiling a professional portfolio for submissions.
Logistically this has been tough because as an employee of any organization one does not routinely stop to do the two things one needs to do in order to compile a well-designed and robust portfolio. One does not routinely stop in the middle of work, lift oneself up to the metaphorical fifty-thousand foot view, and evaluate ones role in that moment. Also, and ethically, one does not take screenshots of work in progress and save them as a kind of professional photo album of one’s adventures through a business process.
In other words, not only did I need to think creatively about demonstrating examples of the same without access to years worth of files and screenshots, I also had to sit down and open my mental memory banks up to those days spent doing in-the-weeds collaboration and organizing user research sessions and aggregating workshop data, and then put it all into a kind of logical and reflective inventory of all those years of experience I had previously taken for granted.
And now that I’ve done it, I think I’d decided my next important step on this contracting journey: I need to go back into those memory banks and take better care of those experiences. Curate. Hone. Highlight. And cherish. Letting that stuff gather dust was possibly not my smartest move.
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multitaskable
I think a lot of us out there would like to think that we are superb multitaskers. I like to think that of myself. Or maybe you don’t. But we are out there and I know a lot of people who would fit that description: I can do everything, anything, as much as I want.
Now…
I have been doing this thing I’ve been calling a “career shift” —well, I mean, it stopped being a career break over a year ago when I started picking up odd jobs and part time work and going back to school. None of that is a so-called break anymore. It’s just a different kind of work, after all. My end goal is something different from where I was, but I am moving towards it with a careful, deliberate effort. So I’m calling it a shift. And in taking this approach I have been doing a lot—no, really, a lot—of multitasking. Or trying to, at least.
I’ve been working jobs, volunteering, parenting, re-educating myself, writing, job hunting, trying to keep fit, coding, playing video games, reading more, socializing with friends, squeezing in a bit of travel—aaaaand, well… that’s the thing isn’t it?
As much as I’ve been doing all this stuff, I think I’ve become saturated.
Maxed out. Capacity reached.
I am officially at the point where doing anything new seems to push something else out the back—and off the list.
I started blogging more and my coding efforts suffered.
I upped the number of shifts I did each week at my part time job and suddenly I realize that I’m not making art.
I’ve been reading more books, but almost simultaneously my progress on my novel ground to a halt.
It’s not something I’m formally tracking, of course, but just trends I’ve noticed. Start one thing new, something old vanishes from my life.
And yet I don’t view this as a weakness. My ability to multitask, something that I’ve long viewed without context or care or introspection is something that I’ve also long thought was nigh limitless. But actually it isn’t. And that’s okay.
Understanding that the mind has limits, time is strict, that multitasking ones life and projects is finite, and that getting the most from ones efforts is a work of good and strategic choices—this is a kind of self-awareness that, for me at least, has been hard to come by. Knowing that taking on something new will take away something existing, or alternatively, giving up something existing will leave space for something new: this is a variable to help me understand my ultimate potential to create, learn, and contribute.
And it sounds all-to-obvious to write that, but I think if more people could consciously articulate that variable about themselves they would not only make better decisions about their lives and careers, they’d probably find a kind of comfort in knowing that limits are nothing to fear and the very idea of multitasking should be evaluated with a unique and personal lens.