Graham Chastney

Another day, another conference call, another set of instant messages, some SMS messages and lots of rudeness.

I would like to confess that today I have:

• Joined a conference call without introducing myself.
• Had an Instant Message conversation with someone I have never met and not even said “hello”.
• Looked at my BlackBerry while talking to someone, to check an email.
• Left a conference call to speak to someone else, while the call was still running, and not said anything. I just walked away.
• Created a slide deck while on the same call – for a completely different project. I nearly had to confess to this rudeness and say “I’m sorry, can you say that again”.
• Sent an SMS text message to someone without any pleasantries at all.
• Ignored a phone call – because I knew who was phoning.
• Stopped listening to someone sat next too me, because I was giving more attention to the PC screen in front of me.
• Turned up late to a conference call and didn’t apologised for my lateness. These calls never start on time, do they?
• Ignored a whole set of Instant Message conversations that people are wanting to have with me.

In short – very rude, but very normal.

You might argue that some of this is not really rudeness at all, but that would be putting a gloss onto something that is becoming an endemic issue.

Anyone else like to confess?

I try to put together a well constructed post with something meaty to it at least once a week, but this week hasn’t been one of those weeks, so here are some random thoughts and stories:

• After spending most of a day in a room with no light and very poor air-conditioning I again realised how destructive the working environment can be to productivity.
• Team dynamics are constantly in play. Just because you’re “performing” in one place doesn’t mean you aren’t “storming” in another.
• After sitting in a freezing cold office with the desk that backs onto a window I again realised how destructive the working environment can be to productivity.
• Power and heating are still huge issues for IT. Many a fancy gadget is ruined by the need to carry around a power supply.
• There are still far too many places without good mobile network coverage. It cannot be assumed that everyone, everywhere has, or can have network access. And in some of them you can’t even make a phone call.
• The topics I think are going to be contentious – often aren’t. It’s the things I think are simple and straight forward that always catch me out.
• Some things have annoyed me for more than 20 years.
• After starting a group on Facebook for a reunion I realised the power of visual memories once I posted some old, old pictures.
• I still hit ; when I mean ‘ far too many times.
• Twitter is good for simple responses, but terrible for a conversation. This was made evident when two conversations overlapped with hilarious consequences – were we talking about underpants or Chrome?
• It’s very difficult to type on a BlackBerry when your thumb is bandaged.
• After reading a set of documents that didn’t answer a single one of the questions that we being asked I realised that people will spend days and weeks doing anything, rather than go through the agony of asking for help.
• Having been misquoted by a number of people I was reminded, again, that people don’t always hear what is being said.
• When being asked for my advice I know that on many occasions people are really asking me to take a decision for them, even when it’s their responsibility to answer the question.
• One of my many faults is that I always expect people to know what I know. It’s irrational, I know, but it’s something that I do.
• And finally for today, here’s a little experiment for you. If you draw the capital letter Q on your forehead leaving you finger where you finished. The side of your forehead where your finger ended up tells you something about how you see the world – I’ll let other explain.

A few years ago I went away for the weekend. This wasn’t one of those weekends when you sit around all of the time, it was one where you get the delights of cooking for a load of people so that they can have a good time.

On the Friday evening I started to feel a bit of a headache coming on, this wasn’t an unusual thing, what was unusual was that it didn’t go away. I took a few paracetamol as pain killers, but the pain carried on. It carried on all of the way through Saturday, but I wasn’t going to stop, I had things to do, meals to cook, menus to organise – and more painkillers.

I was reasonably late to bed Saturday night and then up early on Sunday to get breakfast ready. At this point I would have been quite happy with anyone who had offered to remove my head and replace it with something that actually fitted.

By Sunday mid-morning on Sunday I was worse than ever. My head felt like someone had put a vice on it and was squeezing it tighter and tighter. My eyes became blurry, and my nose started to run. Just before lunch I wave of nausea turned into vomiting. I took some more pain killers and took to my bed leaving everything in something of a muddle.

A few hours later and after chaos had ensued in the kitchen I awoke with a felling I can only describe as being punch drunk.

Being a rational and intelligent human being I went to see the doctor – except I didn’t. I figured that this was a one off, it was probably a virus or something. This wasn’t a fear-of-doctors thing, I just didn’t want to make a fuss.

A while later it happened again and this time I decided upon some self diagnosis. This must be a migraine I thought, so went to the chemist and bought some painkillers suitable for migraines. Migraines, after all, can’t be cured, so I just need to make sure I know where I can get some medication.

That’s it sort I thought, but if anything, the number of occurrences just increased. The medication would take away the symptoms, but I was never comfortable with the amount of times I would have to resort to them. I’d even get a bit neurotic about having something with me.

Eventually I did the rational thing – I went to see the doctor. Over two years later after the first big episode.

As with much self diagnosis I was wrong; these weren’t migraines at all. The characteristic of a migraine are very different to the symptoms I was experiencing. My problem, it turns out, were tension headaches, or tension-type headaches.

So what causes tension-type headaches – well it’s muscle tension tightening around the head. This tightening is precipitated by a number of things, all of which are part of my day-to-day existence: stress, poor posture, late nights, early mornings, lack of exercise, irregular eating.

The vice feeling I had been experiencing was exactly what was happening – the muscles in my head where emanating from my neck were putting head into a vice-like grip.

My problems, being muscular, meant that although the medication had been masking the symptoms, I was taking the wrong stuff and also there were things that could be done to prevent them from occurring. I needed to take medication that would alleviate this tension in the muscles not just reduce the pain.

It’s been a couple of months since I first went to see the doctor and since then I’ve been taking a muscle relaxant before going to bed. This has, in general, significantly improved the volume of severe headaches that I’ve been experiencing. I still get them occasionally and still have a bit of a way to go before I think I’m really there. This medication isn’t meant to be a long term answer and I need to do something about the precipitating factors too.

So why am I telling you this? Well, recently I’ve been in conversation with a number of people who are suffering similar things to me. I’m not trying to diagnose their situation because I’m not qualified, but I did want to share my experience.

I read an interesting definition of occupational stress yesterday which was in a summary of a book called Brain Rules:

Three things matter in determining whether a workplace
is stressful: the type of stress, a balance between
occupational stimulation and boredom, and the condition
of the employee’s home life. The perfect storm of
occupational stress appears to be a combination of two
malignant facts: a) a great deal is expected of you and b)
you have no control over whether you will perform
well.

I suspect that, to some extent, information addiction is born out of people wanting to control stress by trying to stay one-step-ahead. But if you look at the definition for perfect storm for occupational stress it’s more likely that information addiction will cause stress rather than alleviate it.

Let me explain what I mean.

Stress results from high expectations with no control over outcomes.

I’m sitting at my desk and checking my email every few minutes and every few minutes another email comes in and gives me something to deal with. Each one of these emails represents an expectation.

I’m available on my IM client and it keep flashing with another new message. Each flashing message is a another expectation.

I’ve now got more than enough expectation for anyone to deal with.

Here’s where the definition comes in.

My behaviour towards the messages means that I am far less likely to deal with the expectations in an effective way and soon I will have lost any control over the outcome.

It’s a bit like trying to move water by filling a bucket from running tap. The most efficient way of moving the water is to turn the tap on, fill a whole bucket, turn the tap off and then transport the bucket to the place where it’s going. The least efficient way of moving the water is to put the bucket under the tap and then to keep turning it on and off; transporting little bits between the turns. Following the little bits method we will soon feel out of control.

All of us know how to deal with the water, so why don’t we do it with the messages.

We all know that messing about with the bucket just leads to stress.

(Incidentally, the extract was from “Rule #8: Stressed Brains Don’t Learn the Same Way” which outlines how bad stress is.)

(Through a scheme at work I have access to the summaries from www.summary.com, it’s a great way of understanding the essence of a document without having to read the whole thing.)

Once upon a time office workers would go to work on Monday morning, do their hours in a set pattern each day ( to 5) through to Friday. On a set time on Friday the weekend would begin and no work would be done until the appropriate time on Monday morning.

For myself and many others  this is no longer the case. 9 to 5 is dead and Friday is no longer the end of the working week.

The problem with this situation is that for many people there is no break at all – work just carries on.  With the office no longer working as the barrier to work, work can carry on anywhere, work creeps into every corner of our lives.

Whether we like it, or not, we each have the responsibility for creating the boundaries that all of us need to allow us to live a healthy and fulfilling life. Very few employers are going to do that for us, they’ve moved that responsibility down to the individual.

So I’ve decided that I am going to reinforce some boundaries to keep the work at bay.

As part of my own boundary creation I’ve recently set my BlackBerry to turn off in the early evening, and I’ve been trying my hardest to leave it turned off. I’m about to invest in a personal mobile phone to make it even less likely for me to need to turn it on.

I’ve also made it a rule that unless absolutely necessary I will not work on a Saturday or Sunday. “Absolutely necessary” is not something I have defined in too much detail, but I think I know what it is. I know that other colleagues work weekends, because they send me emails. Sometimes they expect a response, but they are learning that it’s not likely to come from me unless they manage to get my attention and communicate it as “absolutely necessary”. Sometimes I worry that I might be regarded in some way as not pulling my weight, but I remind myself that it’s about quality and quantity of output, it’s not about the hours spent on the job.

My next boundary creation project is to define what my evening demarcation is.