Calendar year, fiscal year, broadcast year. These days it seems more convenient to count time as sprints between intermittent trips to the Islands. San Juans up north, British Virgins down south, I’ve made it a yearly habit to hit one hot spot or the other, both if it’s a particularly banner year.
Seventeen months since the last trip, and the time’s come around again. In a little over 60 hours, I’ll be boarding a plane bound for the tropics, to relax with Alicia and eight of our closest friends aboard Voyage’s finest 440 catamaran. They’re going to be a great crew: sharp, eager, cohesive. I’ve missed the usual suspects of the island-hopping lifestyle, of course. The sunshine, the saltwater, the rig-whistle under sail.
Evolution
I have another, more recent appreciation for the art of sailing that’s come from an examination of my daily life in this last sprint. You saw that duct-taped PM email system I penned to pull my information management out of a nosedive. You’ve seen me come up for air in bursts on Twitter and Facebook to bemoan my fate of being eaten alive by Excel and PowerPoint.
I’ve never spent so much condensed time in a constant swirl of prototypes, presentation, deliberation and expert judgment as I have in the last year and a half. I’ve served on more committees, sat in more meetings, sent more prioritization emails, scheduled more sync-ups, and designed more presentations and worksheets in the last year than I have in the previous nine years of my career in this business.
The greatest psychological and social shakeup is the move from the hard track to the soft; management, instead of line-level execution. And at the end of each working day, I can’t even point at a widget that makes it off the factory floor, because we don’t do that sort of thing. It’s soft science to support software.
Even my own projects this sprint:
They’re all soft, all deliberative, all made to be chewed on, commented on, feedback’d into near oblivion.
I’ve reached my quota. I’ve done enough, I’ve asked to be judged enough, I’ve For-Your-Consideration’d until I’m blue in the face.
And if that’s not enough, it’s Annual Review time here at Microsoft.
It’d drive me mad if I kept thinking about it.
The Antithesis
Touch a canvas sail. Dip your finger in engine coolant. Strap on the fins and jump off the sugar scoop. Crank up the propane and grill.
There’s no committee. No council. No feedback but the molecules singing an ancient tone against your skin.
I’ve hit my quota, seventeen months without a boat is my limit.
I’m going sailing.
When I look back at the difference between my professional projects and my personal projects, the gap is always in the planning.
