Weekend Reading: Things I Liked Edition

I'm in the eye of the storm at work... Pumpkin is doing much better with school. (No more tears! Kindergarten is fun!) We completed specification on one project (phew) and have finished preparations for the big vendor visit to install customizations they did for us (major phew).

But the vendors arrive on Monday and are here all week with a very busy schedule, and then the following week we release version 2.0 for another project. Oh, and next Tuesday is Petunia's birthday, Wednesday is our "back to school" night where we get to actually speak to her teacher in English, and next Sunday is her party.

All of which is my excuse for why the links I have for you this week are just a random mishmash of things I've liked recently. In no particular order (except maybe the order in which I found these things... and I wouldn't swear to that):

First, I really liked this review of Redshirts, even though I am completely non-religious. Warning, though- there is a GIANT spoiler in the first comment.

Second, how cool is it that Google has implemented an algorithm to calculate an actor's Bacon number?

Third, I love this post from Bad Mom Good Mom, which I just find wonderfully eclectic. It also makes me want to read Little Brother.

Fourth, Oil and Garlic had an awesome mini-rant about useless financial advice and the fundamental wrongness of expecting people to bargain hunt on health care in a crisis situation.

Fifth, Hush had a thought-provoking post about whether or not yelling at your kids is really the terrible thing it is sometimes made out to be. As I say over there, I remember getting yelled at from time to time as a child, and do not think it did me any harm whatsoever. Which is a good thing, because, uh, there's been some yelling here lately while all members of the family try to find their way back to equilibrium in the new routine.

Sixth, my friend Steve had a great post about being a Taker. If only there were more Takers like him out there. Really, go read his post.

Seventh, The Mama Bee has a post decrying the lack of working mother mentors out in the public sphere. I agree that there is a dearth of specific advice out there. But I wonder if part of that is because getting specific gets you backlash, and seems to open up your life and your advice to be scrutinized for evidence of imperfection. I have at various times been told that my career isn't "big" enough to make my advice useful, that my husband is too unusually involved to make my advice relevant, and that my life is so overscheduled that I must be miserable and be lying when I say I am happy. And that is just writing on a little personal blog. Imagine if I published my advice on a larger stage!

I'll also own up to finding things I liked in the Slaughter piece about not being able to have it all and in the piece The Mama Bee links to about not trying to be perfect. They're neither of them perfect, but then maybe that is part of the point. I guess I can live with imperfect writing about being a working mother, although I really like The Mama Bee's point about how these pieces are all coming from women who have already reached the top of their professions, which lends a certain oddness to their words.

I also can't help thinking as I read these pieces about how limited the various solutions on offer are, and how much better we could make things if we could really shake off the constraints imposed on our imaginations by centuries of patriarchal culture. Reading Mother Nature gave me some ideas about what we could do differently if we started from a more inclusive place. I really should get around to writing up my thoughts about that... but not until things calm down a little bit on either the work or home front!

Finally, my husband is on a quest to keep me up on the latest memes... and the best parodies of said memes.

Enjoy! Posting may be light to non-existent next week while I wait for the second half of the storm to blow through.

Luring Me Physical

A good friend of mine from college came through town last weekend, which was awesome- and not just because we accidentally double-booked the weekend and Mr. Snarky resolved the problem by taking the girls on the promised camping trip with our day care buddies while I got to stay home and hang out with my friend. (That was pretty awesome, though.)

My friend is an expert in commercial real estate, and at one point, we ended up discussing what it takes to get people like me to go to physical stores. Apparently, relatively wealthy mothers like myself are a much sought-after demographic. I laughed and said that I spent much more time in stores back in my single days, but she pointed out that one of the things we did with my kid-and-husband free time was run an errand at Target. Fair point. We'd gone to Target because I needed to get things for Petunia's upcoming birthday party and a gift for one of her friends' birthdays. I could probably have found the party plates and favors online, but I like to get kids' gifts at a physical store, for the ease of returns. I don't know what the other kid likes, already has, etc., etc., and I don't want to hand some other family the chore of packaging up my gift and shipping it back to Amazon.

And that started us talking about what it takes to get someone like me into a physical store. Here is my list of things I prefer to buy at a physical store, along with my reasons:

• Gifts for other people's kids (so that they can have easy returns)
• Clothes for me (so that I can try them on)
• Shoes for me (same thing)
• Groceries (no idea why- I guess because of the delivery timing problem
• Technical books (I like to scan through these before I buy- but with the advent of things like StackOverflow and other online tech resources, and with my transition into management, I buy very few tech books these days.)
• Furniture (so I can see it and examine the quality)

And that's about it. I do sometimes buy other things in a physical store, but only if that works out to be more convenient than ordering online. I suspect my days of just ordering things for Pumpkin are going to come to an end relatively soon- she is starting to have some strong opinions about what sort of clothes she wants. So far, though, I haven't seen a need to try her clothes on before we buy them, so we can still order online, I just need to have her sitting next to me when I'm browsing.

My friend and I talked some more about my idea clothing store, too. I would love to find a store that stocked an invariant core of staple clothing (I guess the industry calls these "classics"), and just had a varying range of fashionable things around that core. I hate how hard it is to find a shirt that fits right, and that even if a shirt from one store fit one year, I can't count on it having the same cut the next year. And don't get me started about finding pants that fit!

After thinking some more, I thought that a store that had some clothes for me, some clothes for my kids, and a train table and a bunch of books to distract my kids while I shopped would get a lot of return business from me, particularly if they also had the core staples I want. I could see going in to pick up a new pair of black pants, for instance, and letting the kids play for a short time while I browsed through the fashionable tops. Somehow, I never have enough tops. I'd probably end up buying whatever the kids needed at the time, too, rather than ordering it online. (This only works if the prices aren't outrageous- they don't have to be cheaper than the discount places, but they can't be in the "only for the independently wealthy" range, either. Maybe $10-$20 for kids items, and Nordstrom level pricing for me.)

Of course, no such store exists, at least not here in San Diego. Old Navy is the closest, and their clothes just don't work for me. Also, the store is too big and chaotic for me to shop while letting my kids play. So I'll stick with my current infrequent clothes shopping schedule- and I'll probably continue to try to buy some of my clothes online, even though I have a pretty poor success rate with that approach. I'd say that about half the time I'm really happy with what I ordered, and half the time I'm not. I am rarely unhappy enough to bother with the return, though, so I guess the online retailers are winning- except that I do eventually learn and give up on a particular store/brand.

What about you? What things do you prefer to buy in a physical store? And why? What would a store need to do to compete with the online retailers and get your business on merit? I'm less interested in people choosing to shop local on principle- that's cool, but there are a lot of principles competing for my time, if you know what I mean. You can, of course, argue with me about that in the comments, too!

Project Managing Happiness

A while back, Gretchen Rubin offered me an advance copy of her new book, Happier at Home. I'd read her original Happiness Project, and found it interesting, so I said "sure, send me a copy."

Like the earlier book, Happier at Home is a quick and easy read. And like the earlier book, it made me think about what I could do to increase my happiness.  I think happiness is worth working for, so I enjoy the parts of her books where she argues that happiness is an important goal, and that we can make a conscious decision to do things that will actually increase our happiness. This seems so obvious to me, but I know that a lot of people disagree.

To a certain extent, the naysayers have science on their side- there are studies that show that people have differing baseline levels of happiness, and generally happy people will stay generally happy even when bad things happen, while generally unhappy people will stay generally unhappy even when good things happen. But I also think that we can change our baseline happiness level, at least to a certain extent. I once read an article in a yoga magazine that argued that you could get in mental ruts, and meditation could help you break out of them. I thought all of the mechanisms proposed in that article were complete bunk, but it made me think about the fact that in my experience, I could get into emotional ruts. I thought about what we know about how we learn and form memories, and how the brain has mechanisms that are basically set up to strengthen the memories we use most often. And I ended up deciding that I do actually believe that we can get in unhealthy emotional ruts, and that making a consicious effort to break out of a rut would actually have a good chance of being successful, because doing so would help weaken the synapses that encode the unhelpful memories that form the "rut" while strengthening synapses that encode better memories. (If you want to know more about the mechanism I'm talking about, search for information on brain plasticity. I also want to emphasize that this assumes a healthy starting state- I'm not talking about depression, which involves changes in how the brain functions. )

So anyway, that is a long-winded way of saying that I am sympathetic to Gretchen's basic premise. As I read Happier at Home, I realized that a lot of her techniques to improve her happiness and keep herself on track are classic project management techniques- break down the larger goal (being happier) into smaller component tasks, track progress, recognize and reward intermediate milestones, etc. When I think about it, I use a lot of project management techniques in my non-work life, too. There's to do lists, of course, which are really the same thing as an action item list. But I also define projects, and break them down into smaller tasks, and track progress against those tasks- even for things as amorphous as "enjoy the summer more". (I should write a post about our "fun to do list for summer 2012" sometime- we made a pretty good showing at crossing things off that list, and it did make us enjoy our summer more.)

And that is a long-winded way of saying that I'm also sympathetic to Gretchen's approach. Given that, it isn't really surprising that I enjoyed reading the book. I picked up some concrete ideas of things to try, like the after school adventures I may try with the kids and the decorating for breakfast idea that I tried to cheer up Pumpkin. It also made me think about what little tweaks I could make to our household processes that would boost happiness, and what larger projects I might try to do the same. It has also made me think about the idea of project managing my own happiness, and I suspect that I'll get some useful ideas from that line of thought. So far, I'm thinking that maybe I should try identifying some intermediate milestones for some of my own happiness-related projects, but I need to let the idea rattle around in my brain for awhile longer before I settle on any concrete actions.

A few people have asked me whether they should read this book if they'd already read The Happiness Project. My answer is that it depends. If you disliked The Happiness Project, you'll dislike this book, too. If you liked the Happiness Project, you'll probably like this one, and the question becomes whether it has enough new insights and ideas to be worth your time. I didn't think there were any big new insights, but second book had more specific ideas that seemed directly useful to me, and the fact that it made me think about the subject again was actually pretty useful- it arrived at a hectic time, and I'd lost sight of how to keep myself feeling happy. I appreciated the reminder, and you might, too.

Weekend Reading: The Work and Productivity Edition

As I've mentioned before, I'm in the midst of a crunch time at work. I've been dutifully tracking my time through it, and when I get a chance to sit down and analyze the results, I may have some interesting things to say about work and productivity. (Spoiler alert: even in this crunch time, my total hours of actual work per week has hovered at about 40.) But for right now, I will instead give you links to other people saying interesting things about work and productivity:

First, here's a nice article from Inc that agrees with what I argued in my post about a project manager's view on long hours: that long hours are counterproductive, and something a good manager should try to avoid, not demand from his or her team.

 Next, it turns out that my proclivity for wearing a "uniform" and eating the same breakfast and lunch most days is a good thing, at least from the standpoint of allowing me to make good decisions in other areas.

Having recently watched a couple of people spectacularly fail at The Second Test, I find Rands' post on the second test new members of a team face to be completely spot on.

I really like this idea from Cal Newport about the productivity benefit of working in a novel place. I wish I could try it out more often in my life! Sadly, my current job does not easily accommodate this approach, although we do have developers who do something similar, and it generally works well for them.

I found this article about the importance of feeling stupid via nicoleandmaggie's links post last week. I don't do research anymore, but there are analogous situations in the tech space I occupy now. Sometimes, feeling stupid is a necessary first step to understanding and solving a problem. It took me a while, but I finally realized that the panicky "I don't know how I'm going to get this project done" feeling doesn't mean I'm not qualified to do the project. It is the necessary first step to tackling a really novel problem.

And also via Nicoleandmaggie, I've been hearing a lot about Boice and his research into productivity, specifically writing productivity. I looked into buying the books they recommend, but they are either not available for Kindle (my preferred reading method these days) or are clearly priced for people buying on grant money (it was the first time I've seen a Kindle edition priced at $85). I did a little googling, and found this re-analysis of some of Boice's data, which I thought had some interesting ideas about writing and the generation of creative ideas.

Laura Vanderkam has a good post about the benefits of making slow and steady progress on large projects. I'm generally quite comfortable with this technique- I even advocate explicitly breaking big projects down into smaller tasks on your to do lists. But I have a project I need to apply this approach to right now. I want to do it, and it is stalled out because I keep telling myself the fiction that I need a big chunk of uninterrupted time to make any progress. That just isn't true. Unfortunately, I'm so swamped with other stuff that I haven't found even the small amounts of time it would take. Soon, soon.

I'll be taking most of the weekend off- I have a good friend in town and that trumps work. It even trumps blogging. Have a happy weekend everyone!

Building a Life

Laura Vanderkam and Anandi at House of Peanut both had posts up last week about working and parenting, and the way this plays out in couples. The posts got me thinking about why I work, and I realized that I couldn't easily articulate my reasons. Sure, I work to help support my family, and the fact that I work means that my husband doesn't ever have to feel trapped by his job, just like they discuss. And I have been known to use the fact that I make more money than my husband to shutdown questions about why I don't stay home with the kids. If I'm completely honest, though, none of that really explains why I work. If I didn't want to work, we could arrange our lives to make that possible.

So I work because I want to. By why do I want to? I work because working is necessary to my vision of what I want my life to be. In fact, the money part is not actually necessary to that vision- I aspire to arrange my finances such that I do not feel that my choices about what work to do are quite so constrained by my need to bring in money to help support my family.

As I rocked Petunia toward sleep tonight, I thought more about my life and what I want it to be. Like most people, my life is a mishmash of different pieces, which I try to arrange in a meaningful way. I think my building blocks fall into three main categories:
Relationships. It is important to me that I do right by the other people in my life. Unsurprisingly, this is an area that has gathered a lot more blocks since I've had kids, but it was always an important area to me. I was never going to be someone who subordinated her personal relationships to some grand enterprise, even if that enterprise would do wonderful things for the rest of the world.

Joy. I really do think that being happy is one of the most important things I can aim for in my life. If I am not enjoying my life, I think about why and try to fix it. I've recently realized that for me, a big part of feeling happy is feeling free, and I'm still working through what I think that means to me and the life I've built.

If I'm honest, this aspect of my life has taken a bit of a hit since having kids, even though the kids themselves bring a lot of joy to me. I think the reason for that is that we have allowed the kids to constrain some of the other things, big and small, that bring me joy: travel, eating out, reading. I'm working to fix that, to the extent that we can, and I have made peace with the fact that I need to do that work. Having kids was a major change to my life and to my sense of identity. It shouldn't really be surprising that it has taken me a few years to find my equilibrium again.

Meaning. This is where work comes in. I want to leave the world a little better than I found it. I want to create things that touch other people. If I didn't try to do these things, I would feel a big hole in my life.

I've written about my struggles to find the "right" work for me and how I've been feeling restless in my career. The more I've thought about it, the more I realize that this isn't because I am fundamentally unhappy with the work I am doing now. It is because I am having a hard time figuring out in which way I can best contribute. Here is a list of the things I care about, in no particular order:

1. Improving the way other scientists organize their data, with the idea that doing so will help them get more value from that data and the information it provides. This is a major component of my current job, and I still care about it. It bothers me that we do so much better at organizing our shopping data than our scientific data.
2. Contributing to drug discovery. There are so many unmet medical needs out there- too many cancer diagnoses are essentially death sentences, we have so little to offer people with mental illnesses, infectious diseases still kill people, etc., etc. I know that a lot of people disparage the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, and believe me, I do not think my industry is perfect. But we are still the ones trying to meet those unmet needs. I like being a part of that.
3. Getting more women and minorities into science and technology. I think these are the fields that find solutions to a lot of problems, and I want as much diversity in these fields as possible, to increase the odds that we solve the most important problems. Also, there are some great and rewarding jobs in these fields (see point 2), and I want those jobs to be open to everyone.
4. Convincing people that you can have a meaningful and successful career without subsuming your entire life to it- even in science and technology. I think this is closely related to the diversity problem. I also think that getting rid of the "real scientists and engineers will do whatever the work requires" stereotype would lead to more productivity and creativity, not less. Not to mention happier scientists and engineers.
5. Providing equal education to all kids, regardless of income and location. In my view, education is the path to a happier life, because it is a path to a life with more choices (or freedom, if you will). It is the path out of poverty, and it is so, so unfair of us to propagate a narrative in which "anyone" can succeed while at the same time stacking the deck against the kids whose parents don't make enough money to buy their way to a good education. I know that the solution to poverty and the achievement gap is not as simple as just providing equal education... but I still think it would be a great start.

I'm probably not going to build something this grand

There are probably other things I'm forgetting now, but the fact that those came to mind first indicates that they may be what matter most to me. But I haven't figured out how to best allocate my energy. Should I focus on 1 and 2, hope that I make some small impact on 3 and 4 by example, and just throw my spare money at 5? This is my current configuration. Or should I try to change my focus to something else- maybe 3 or 4?- throw money at 2 as well as 5, and figure I've made as much contribution as I'm going to make towards 1? And if I did that, what would be the most effective way to make an impact?

I don't know the answers. I haven't even figured out how to try to find them. I've been reading various books (and I have some more on my list to read), and doing a lot of thinking, but I'm not making much progress. I feel like I have dumped out all my blocks and divided them up by color, but haven't figured out what I want to build. All I know for certain is that I can't build something that pleases me without using my full range of blocks. So I won't be giving up work anytime soon- if I ever do.