Being laid off has been weird, and has actually got me thinking a lot about grief. Both can arrive suddenly, unbidden, and you have very little control over either of them.

Also, both can be paired with an odd sort of limbo period, where you’re pretty certain what’s going to happen, but it hasn’t happened yet, and so you end up trying to get on with things even though there’s this ominous cloud over everything.

And then it happens, and the actual happening is surprisingly brief.

And then comes the rest of your life. And actually, for me, one of the hardest bits of that, in all cases, has been just telling people. Because when you tell people something like this, they almost all pour on the empathy.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it. I’m not sure I’d know what else to suggest you do. But the net result is that I end up being the one doing the reassuring, almost helping the other person through my own grief.

Yes, the family are doing okay. No, there’s no urgency yet to sort out what happens next (whether clearing the house or finding a job).

And ultimately, yes, I’m fine. Actually, honestly, better now than I was in the lead up to everything. There’s a huge amount of relief in finally knowing, rather than it just being a pending thing.

So yes, I’m fine.

But sometimes I’m not fine with being fine.

How can I be fine with the world how it is right now? How can things be okay when I’ve just lost my job and am in no rush to get another just yet?

How can I be fine?

How can I not feel guilty that I’m not using my time to make the world a better place? How can I just be content with what I have and not worried about what happens when the money runs out?

How can I be okay when there’s so much that’s not okay? How can I accept that I’m a flawed human when so many people rely on me not being flawed? People that I love, that I want to support and care for. How can I be okay with being anything less than perfect for them?

How is “fine” anything other than very not fine?

And the reality is that, until I’m fine with all that, I won’t be fine.

But I’m fine. And that’s how I can start the work of addressing all that.

If I wasn’t fine, I’d have no hope of even starting.

So yeah, I’m fine thanks. How are you?

One of the best things about publishing stuff online is that you get feedback. It can also be one of the worst things, but let’s focus on the positive for the moment.

A particularly resonant piece of feedback that I have received more than once is that I write the way I talk. I’m never sure if this is a backhanded compliment, to be honest, but I do like to think that I have a strong tone of voice on here. Certainly, when reviewing some old articles recently, it’s clear that my older articles sound very much like a younger me.

Anyway, on the train back from London last week, it occurred to me that I could add something new to the site: audio versions of the articles. Not some crazy AI generated voice version, but actually me, speaking into a mic. Having tried this out on a few articles on the site over the weekend, I can see that while my writing might sound like me, there’s definitely some nuance in how I want to say things that doesn’t quite make it from the voice in my head to the words on the screen.

Maybe speaking things out loud will help to bridge that gap.

So I’ve bought a fancy mic, and all things going according to plan, you should see a simple “play” button at the top of this page. I intend to go back and add audio to a bunch of recent articles, and once there’s a few there, will perhaps push the audio feed into some of the podcast platforms.

Yes, maybe this means I can say “I have a podcast”, but please don’t hold it against me.

And if you want to provide feedback of your own, (on this, or anything else, really), please see the about page for ways to get in touch.

I recently updated the articles list, and added a counter to the link at the bottom. Which, as I draft this post, shows a count of 99.

So this is the 100th post on this site. Big news!

Except of course it’s not. Not really. Not all my writing is on this site. I still have a bunch of “imported” articles sitting in the wings, retrieved from older versions of this site, some dating back longer than I care to admit. Many more are more dated than old, if you know what I mean.

I read recently that if you’re not embarrassed by your old work, you haven’t really grown, which in many ways means I must have grown quite a lot in the last couple of decades. I mentioned on my updated about page that I have been writing online since the last century, and it’s true. My first website was published back in 1998, on some free space that came along with my first dial up connection from Freeserve. I can’t even remember how I put it together, likely on some bootleg copy of Dreamweaver, which would have been brand new software at the time.

That original site was named after the first four letters of our family car’s registration plate - about the only thing that came to mind when we were asked for a username and found out that Barrett had already been taken. Turns out there’s still some remnants of it on the Wayback Machine, albeit from a couple of years later.

Having had a quick revisit of that site, some of it is definitely, toe-curlingly cringe (as I believe the kids call it). Some of it is familiar, though: Links to my first few commercial web projects (sites for local bed and breakfasts, and one for a local hip hop label), some essays that I had written, and a page of “rantings” that was clearly a blog before that term had been invented.

Halting, blustering, simultaneously full of my own importance and crushingly shy. Some things change, some things remain the same.

And so here I am, still bashing keys and making marks on a screen, hoping someone is reading and taking some sort of enjoyment from all this. Even if it turns out to just be me, some twenty plus years later.

I have written before about how critical it is to be clear on what we mean when we say certain things. Today, I would like to be clear on what I mean when I say “productivity”.

Productivity is often discussed in terms of business or commercial contexts: how to squeeze those extra drops of productivity out of your day so you can ace those TPS reports while also landing your own personal best on your marathon time. While that can certainly be an example of productivity, it can also be a path to burnout.

See, “productivity” is really just the name of a measurement. Taken literally (and I love taking things literally when looking to find clarity), it is simply a measure of “productive activity”.

Activity seems easy enough to understand: it’s the sum of actions taken in a particular time. Hopefully nothing controversial there.

But what does it mean for activity to be “productive”? Again, be literal: what is being produced?

In your boss’s mind, it may well be “value for the company”, specifically those TPS reports, or a new feature, or some bug fixes, or a strategy document. Those are all “products”. And so in a work perspective, those could be good examples of intended products.

There are also unintended products. You might be producing conflict with your activity. Or bugs. Or GDPR nightmares. These are also products, but it would be hard to argue that you’ve been “productive” by introducing a security hole that leaked your entire customer database.

So let’s refine this: we care about measuring activity that leads to intended products.

Is that enough to give us a definition? Let’s see if it fits:

Productivity is a measure of how successful our activities have been in outputting intended products.

There’s still something not quite right about this. I like being literal, but “product” feels off here. When I think about “product” I think about little packaged things. This is a very commercial definition, and actually quite limiting. There are so many things we “produce”, and some aren’t even really “things” at all. Can we broaden our thinking here to make this more universally applicable?

I like to reach into the world of stage magic, here: magicians often talk of producing an “effect”, like make a card disappear, or making a rabbit appear from a hat. In these cases, what is being produced is the “effect” on the audience, as much as it is the rabbit.

I prefer this idea of thinking of our productions in terms of the “effect” we have on the world around us. To channel Steve Jobs, what we’re really producing is our “dent in the universe”.

So let’s revise the definition:

Productivity is a measure of how successful our activities have been in producing intended effects.

This feels much more workable. It absolutely satisfies those TPS reports and that marathon personal best as being “high productivity”, but it also introduces one critical consideration: Intention.

Presumably your boss’s intentions at least somewhat align with yours (they want those TPS reports, you want to get paid). But the marathon? Are you doing that because you intended to? Or because you were trying to live up to someone else’s expectations?

Conversely, if your intention is to produce a completed series rewatch of Stranger Things, then binging on Netflix over the weekend absolutely counts as being productive. And this is not a bug, this is a feature.

See, all these “productivity” tools are just that, tools. You might watch a bunch of YouTube videos about being super efficient with a hammer, or read some articles about getting really skilled at wielding a to-do list, but none of these can really tell you what you intend to do with those tools.

So the really key part of all of this, and without which “productivity” becomes just another treadmill, is to put in the work to get really clear on your intentions.

Because you have more control over that to-do list than you think. Sure, you might not be able to say “no” to those TPS reports that you’re stuck with compiling, but you (hopefully) don’t live at work. And the tools that work on your to-do list in your job also work on your to-do list for the rest of your life too.

And no, that doesn’t mean you have to treat your downtime like “work”. That’s why the admission of that Stranger Things binge to the definition of “productivity” is absolutely a feature. However, if we’re not able to be intentional with our lives, just like at work, you can guarantee there are plenty of people who are ready to fill up our to-do lists with their intentions. As Hank Green points out, nobody is bragging about starting their second hour on TikTok.

But start our second hour we do. And even if you feel like you have very little time in your life that you truly have control over, have any say over, I can almost guarantee that that first hour on TikTok was something you seemed to have complete control over.

Except you didn’t. TikTok did. It took control and convinced you that you were treating yourself to choose to do that for you. It felt like a well earned “break”. And that’s where the “productivity” tools can help us avoid this trap of spending our break times working on someone else’s farm.

What if we spent some time to come up with a few things we actually want to do, whether it’s finishing that book, writing that article, painting that picture, going for that hike, lying in bed, whatever it is. Just took five minutes and wrote a list.

Then what if we reviewed all that “productivity” stuff and applied it to our list, instead of someone else’s.

Because there’s my definition, what I mean when I talk about productivity: taking a few minutes to decide what you want, right now, and then applying some activity to produce it.

There’s a story I love to tell when I’m talking about enabling autonomy in teams. It was the first time I remember consciously letting the team plot their own course without either abdicating my role as the lead, or trying to “Jedi mind trick” them into thinking they had plotted their own course.

It was pretty early on in my management career, possibly the first major project I had been involved in from the start. It was time for the team to sit down, look at the problem, and start to formulate a solution. I was terrified, and had spent the previous week doing nothing other than running through the context, the current implementation, various bits of tech debt and bugs: effectively running a dress rehearsal on the whole planning session ahead of time, myself.

Why was I terrified? Despite having been at the company for five years before moving to management, this particular team worked in a domain that I had very little knowledge about. How was I supposed to lead them unless I knew as much as they did about everything? I didn’t want to let them down by being clueless.

I knew exactly how this project needed to go, exactly how it needed to be broken down. I even had a good idea who should work on what, based on skills, experience, upcoming holidays, even what kind of growth the team members had on their career maps.

All I needed to do was present it to the team. I was prepped, they would feel properly looked after, it would be great.

But as I walked into the meeting room to get the projector set up ahead of the start, something buzzed in the back of my brain: something my predecessor had said. Our job isn’t to stop them driving off the cliff, rather it’s to be there to roll up the sleeves, help them pick up the pieces, and figure out what went wrong. There was a nagging feeling that despite all my prep, this was going to be a disaster.

Still, I had my documents all ready to present. Work breakdowns, maps of the code, Gantt charts, the full thing. I couldn’t just abandon that, could I?

People started to file in. We had one remote engineer to dial in, made sure they were able to see everything (we had a dedicated in-room buddy for every remote team member, so they were on an iPad that their buddy could move around to better see what was going on), and so we began.

I pulled up the brief document which outlined the problem we were trying to solve, the constraints, how we were going to measure success, who the stakeholders were. All the starting points for the planning I had done.

I read through it, let them ask some questions, and was all ready to skip to the next tab: the one I had lovingly called “The Plan”.

And I paused. This was where the disaster would start. My gut told me to ask a question.

“So,” I turned to the room rather than talking to the projector. “Where should we start?”.

There was a brief pause before our remote engineer spoke up. “Well, we obviously need to chat with our contacts management team: this is going to bump into a bunch of code they manage.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. This was exactly on my plan, and so this might work. They were going to reinvent the plan I had for them. I wouldn’t need to be a dictator, the Jedi Mind Trick had worked.

“Hang on”, another voice jumped in. “No we don’t. The problem we’re actually solving for has nothing to do with contacts. That’s just in the success metrics. I can see why it’s there: it’s the easiest thing for us to measure. But it’s not actually needed to solve the actual business problem”.

I stopped. Wasn’t it? I skimmed the problem statement again. No, we could bypass the contacts altogether. I had completely missed that, as had our stakeholder. We had veered off course. I fought the panic for a moment.

“Okay,” I started, terrified that I’d fucked up but also genuinely curious. “Say we bypass touching contacts. How do we measure the impact?”.

More silence. Then “those are just a proxy for usage of this new feature. We could measure directly if we added in some telemetry here and here. Hang on, let me show you.”

The projector switched to another laptop screen and up came some code I had seen but not fully understood. “Look”.

The next ten minutes saw the team fully engage on this new idea. Code was pulled up, a quick diagram was sketched on our remote whiteboard, and suddenly we were starting to form a plan. I kept on asking insightful questions (only insightful because I was genuinely curious why things were different from my plan, but they didn’t know that), and the conversation flowed for a further hour.

Some of my plan (just over half of it) ended up being reinvented, but what we landed on in the end added up to about 60% the effort I had originally projected to myself, and informally budgeted for in terms of expectation management to stakeholders.

We had just manufactured four weeks of time. And all because I had the sense to keep my damn mouth shut.

See, what I realised later was that it wasn’t that I’d made a mistake doing the planning, but that it had been essential to help me be the best possible coach in the moment. Having an idea of how to solve the problem, but not sharing it, helped give me something concrete to compare to. I could ask helpful questions, not just dumb manager ones. But the shock of having a blind spot revealed to me so early helped me avoid poisoning the well by trying to steer them back to my plan.

I had context, useful knowledge, curiosity, and a genuine incentive to defer to their superior understanding of the existing implementations.

And by trusting that, the team now had a plan that they owned, that they felt genuinely invested in, that they understood and could adapt to changes, because it was their plan. Oh, and we had also managed to buy a month of refactoring at the end of the project.

It was at that point I resolved to avoid sharing my ideas till as late as possible in any conversation. I still fall into this trap too often, but it’s a powerful technique when managing a team that has been deep in the code for long enough, and is more in need of being guided in processes or business context.

In short, do your homework so you can ask good questions, rather than give good answers. Ask the questions. And then shut the fuck up.