Self Employment, Meet Family Planning

I have a COBRA letter sitting on my desk, and it’s been there for weeks, pressuring me to decide whether I’m 100% sure I want kids. And if so, like, when?

I quit my job this summer, moved to Chicago, and took contract positions. I’m so glad. The timing was pretty good as far as my skill level, and I’m working plenty. I can definitely afford health insurance, but maybe not health insurance with a pregnancy rider. I’ve got to spend more time comparing the prices to my budget.

So, COBRA seems like it might be a good choice. If I want to get pregnant within the next five months.

18 months of coverage, minus nine months of pregnancy, minus the three months that will have already passed by the time I make this decision, minus a month for whatever I’m not considering.

Five months to figure it out, or else I’ll have to wait a year to be eligible for the coverage I’d be paying out the nose for with a pregnancy rider. I’ll be 32 in December. I want to stay independently employed for a while and maybe launch a company next year.

I’ve been thinking about these things for a month or so, but this weekend, a shit storm erupted online over Penelope Trunk’s TechCrunch post, “Women Don’t Want To Run Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children.”

It’s really a remix of previous posts (I’ve been a reader of hers for a year or so) about how women do not need to put off children for their careers, plus news about her startup’s recent move, wherein she chose to stay put and be with her family.

I tried looking up research to determine how valid Penelope’s assertion is regarding the genetic cliff of age 35, but I didn’t find much. Only a couple articles related directly to the question, one of which contained a grammatical error that would make me want to scrutinize the site a bit more before I would trust anything on it. (Here’s the better one.) I checked Mayo Clinic’s site, and age was mentioned as a factor in fertility.

Look, Penelope’s strengths are not careful use of statistics or diplomatic wording of her ideas. Her strength is juxtaposing career-related trends in innovative ways, or in pragmatic ways. Like, maybe Power Point slides about your sex life are not as bad as people are making them out to be, or maybe it’s really not worth reporting sexual harassment. Except she usually leaves out the “maybe.” I walk away from her posts with a look-up list, not a to-do list.

So, the TechCrunch article lacks nuance, and it doesn’t apply to everyone. But for those of us who do want children, who weren’t anywhere near the top of the ladder by 27, and who are considering starting our businesses and our families at the same time, it’s a point of reference.

Exactly how hard is this going to be? From a project management standpoint, am I scheduling my newborn sleepless nights at the same time as my 100-hour weeks? If I’m not with my husband or my future husband yet, am I leaving myself enough hours in my week for a social life that will let me find him? Where are my hacks for these issues?

I’m simply not going to stand for anyone telling me it’s taboo to discuss these questions on the internet. I don’t care if they are women entrepreneurs with kids.

The “worst article on the internet ever”? “You’ve taken us back 50 years”? Let’s take it down a notch, people. By reacting with such vitriol, you could be shutting down women for whom these issues are relevant. By reacting with hysteria, you are not representing yourselves well to the venture capitalists you’re so concerned about.

If feminism were that fragile that one article could set it back so much, we would have bigger problems than one author. Are people really angry because it’s detrimental to the cause, or because it cuts on a personal level?

I’d like to see more discussion about how to structure a startup that works better with a family. I know that people end up losing their marriages and being heartbroken over missing their kids. Please, please don’t make them jump through PC hoops of fire to share those experiences.

I don’t want to hear about how “but she shouldn’t speak for all women, so that gives me the right to curse at her on Twitter or call her a disgrace.” That’s high school, and I don’t have time for it. I want to hear about what works.

Did AmerIndians Have Kaizen? How to Use Metrics

A People’s History of Business Trends

I took American History as an Advanced Placement course in high school, so I’m not sure why signed up for it again my second semester at New College, but it was worth it.

The class met in a small, bookshelf-lined room in a waterfront mansion built in the 1920′s by John and Mabel Ringling. As in Ringling Brothers. We sat around a shiny oak table and discussed our readings with a professor who entertained the Dalai Lama whenever His Holiness was in town. 

Photo by livingonimpulse.

When we started reading about Andrew Jackson, and the Trail of Tears, the professor started off the discussion referring to Native Americans as American Indians and then shortened it thereafter to AmerIndians, which was handy. I wonder if any of the other students wanted to cop the term as badly as I wanted to. None of us did; not in class. In fact, I don’t remember many of us talking much at all. But I was pretty dumbstruck by most of the New College experience, so maybe it was just me who was mute.

For the first time, I saw what happened to American Indians as a series of political plays. By themselves, many of the moves were cold-blooded and villainous, some were regular old greed and bureaucracy. The process of genocide became even more shocking when conversationally disrobed of its mystery. It was a great class.

I’m also part Cherokee (who isn’t?), and I’ve done some reading about their culture. So, when I began slowly making my way through A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, this summer, I had already read a bit about social and governance traditions for various tribes when I came across this passage quoting historian Dale Van Every:

The freedom of the individual was regarded by practically all Indians north of Mexico as a canon infinitely more precious than the individual’s duty to his community or nation.

Zinn goes on to describe tribal government as, “an occasional assembling of a council, with a very loose and changing membership, whose decisions were not enforced except by the influence of public opinion.”

During my New College years, that would have pleased me, though I doubt I could have actually envisioned the daily functioning of that kind of system. Now, it makes me uneasy. I mean, isn’t that just a vague meeting with action items like, “Okay, consider doing what we discussed today,” and, “Make sure everyone knows how advisable this is”? Shudder.

Zinn quotes a minister who lived among Indians, “. . . [A] government in which there are no positive laws, but only long established habits and customs, no code of jurisprudence . . . in which age confers rank, wisdom gives power, and moral goodness secures title to universal respect.” It sounded dismally conservative and unchanging to me. Where was the continuous improvement?

As I read the chapter and experienced my own reaction, I realized I would probably horrify New-College-Age me.

In Which I Overwhelm and Alienate

In the past year, I have been reading about content strategy, so I’ve been learning how to base content, including product documentation, on business needs. To some extent, my company does this naturally. They know that we need docs to satisfy the labeling requirement imposed by the FDA, so they hired all us tech writers. Of course, docs can do more than that, but justifying the means to other business ends requires some sales work on our part. So I’ve become obsessed with various metrics that can help with that.

I’ve also been working on audience analysis, with the goals of making our writing process more efficient and our information more findable. I’ve wanted to measure the users so that we can only write what we need to, with the assumption that we are currently writing way to much about some things and not enough about other things. The assumption is that we are not instinctually writing what the users need, nor are we hitting the mark based on the few anecdotes that have been shared with us.

I have wanted to be systematic, and there has been friction. I had my review last week, and I had all high marks, but with one piece of criticism regarding my collaboration skills, “. . .[S]ometimes Kristi can overwhelm and alienate her team mates with her initiatives and the depth to which she wants to be systematic in her approach.” Ouch.

It was not the first time my boss has mentioned this, and I’ve been working on it. It’s been hard for me to empathize with the aversion to metrics. My boss has expressed such a faith in the autonomy of the team, though, and in honoring their interests and preferences, that I’ve been exploring this blind spot of mine.

My reaction to the AmerIndian anarchy provided a clue. Maybe I should be doing metrics in moderation. Maybe I am overindulging. Commerce has not always been in this form, as Clue Train points out, and continuous improvement might arrive by other paths. If too many numbers spell a fear-based workplace for some people, what is the proper role for metrics?

In Which I Count Calories for Less Than a Week

I have had an extra 30 pounds on me since not long after I started working as a technical writer. I’m 5’10”, so it’s not as extreme as it might be for a smaller woman, but it’s still uncomfortable.

I’ve had a few anorexic friends. I have a pretty good idea of what an unhealthy food conversation sounds like. I feel half-anorexic after one conversation about food with just about any woman, and so I have resisted  counting calories, but I’m doing it for a limited time to recalibrate my ability to judge how much food is too much for one day. I’m doing it because I was running four and five miles and still not dropping pounds.

And after about two weeks of not even being diligent about the calorie counting, I’m seeing a difference.

It was the same way with budgeting. I set up the budget, and was diligent about counting every dollar for three or four months, and then I just internalized it. I more or less memorized the amounts and got used to the idea that there was a finite number of dollars available.

So how does that relate to performance metrics? How does it relate to the business goals of product documentation, and measuring the needs of customers?

Maybe it’s just that people don’t want their entire working days tied to someone else’s interpretation of the numbers. Maybe people want some control over which numbers are helpful. Maybe we want people we trust to lead that discussion, or else we’re going to keep doing what has gotten us raises and reasonable working hours, thanks very much.

When Last-Minute is Good Enough

This week is a typical example of how my blog posts are largely written the morning they are posted. Let me say in advance that I am not beating up on myself. I am pretty dang proud that I have been consistently posting on Mondays and Thursdays each week.

Ultimately, the goal is that most posts will have not only a story arc, but also quotes, shared expertise, lessons learned, or statistics. And not half-assed statistics like this post where I talked about riding the bus in terms of tech comm salaries, and discovered that it might just be me who’s not really getting paid.

I want to revise posts and talk about what I improved. I want to interview business analysts and content strategists. I want to interview Snob on a Bus woman.

Today, I will have to settle for writing about the process of making my blog posts a priority. The kind of priority that results in well-researched, well-written posts.

Monday, I wrote a blog post about a conversation I had the night before with the Suncoast STC treasurer. Tuesday I planned to start Thursday’s post but every work break was filled with phone calls and then I fell asleep on the couch soon after arriving home because I am not doing coffee this week.
Wednesday I did yoga and Suncoast awards ceremony emails. Last night I worked on Suncoast site settings and deleted 700 spam users. I also deleted 30 legitimate users and had to send an email to the listserv to let people know. Then I went to bed.

This morning I have been emailing with a user whose resume was deleted. More setting tweaks, restoring the Register link, and chatting with him to find out how his resume came to be posted on the site in the first place. I have to stop writing in a few minutes so I can post about the April awards ceremony for our publications competition.

I am cheating by using the time I have to post to discover why my blogging is not making the cut in my daily priorities. I’m looking at what I have done this week to see where I have wasted time or gotten bogged down. Then I can adjust things next week. Writing is iterative; even blogging. Every week is a chance to improve my process.

And, I think a blog is perfect for writing about process. It’s ok to write about the uncertainty of learning something, and the halfway marks of project milestones. It’s ok for posts to resemble journals or project logs, at times. I think this blog is making my writing better because I am stopping on Mondays and Thursdays no matter what and typing something up. The frequency hones my chops regardless of any lack of preparation.

Getting sleep is important. Being on time for work is important. Yoga and bf time are important—I can only put off personal maintenance for a short time before everything suffers. Urgent matters come up for Suncoast occasionally, and there is a to-do list in that category that could swallow all my time, because we’re shorthanded. I am learning to say that I chose to do what I could, rather than apologizing for what I didn’t get done.

And for this week, I can learn to tell myself I’ve done well enough.

Building Fringe Benefits into a Project Plan

The Benefits of a Winding Path

In a previous post, I wrote about momentum problems with our team’s help system design project (a.k.a. HD). I am happy with the unexpected benefits and the unexpected learning opportunities that the project yielded, but the amount of time it took still seems inordinate. After posting, I got curious about ways to plan a project while leaving room for those types of fringe benefits.

Here are some of the benefits we got out of spending so much time with the project (and with each other):

• Team building skills
• Consensus building skills
• Client service skills
• Survey-writing skills
• Presentation skills
• Training skills
• Research skills
• Whatever other technical skills necessary to produce the deliverable (our deliverables were XHTML topic templates for each information type, plus methods to guide our team in converting tens of thousands of topics to a new format)

Stopping for Directions

It seems like it would be easier to plan ahead for gaining bonus skills and relationships by being honest about not having them in the first place.

Um, doesn’t that mean you won’t get to participate in the project?

It depends. Is the culture of your team that people are encouraged to take projects in order to grow skills? There’s more to it than cranking out documents to get deliveries out the door—it takes an investment of time to advance the team’s skills. Is it a critical deliverable for a critical client? Is there someone on the team who is already an expert who can take you under their wing? If there is an expert, but they don’t have mentoring skills, what then?

I can’t imagine my manager refusing to let someone participate in a project they were interested in without helping that person find another way to develop the interest. In addition, one criteria for getting promoted is to act as a leader and a mentor. There is incentive to grow these skills. There is opportunity to work on new things. I think these two things work together to make the team sustainable. I know this combination is one of the biggest factors in my having stayed on the team for four years.

Planning Ahead for Detours

After HD, I’ve established for myself that fringe benefits are usually worth the time they add to a project. This week I’ve been thinking of ways to draft a project plan at the outset that I can use to justify the skill development.

List the Expected Deliverables
This and the next item were inspired by GTD, which I read over six months into the HD project. List anything you will be expected to produce for the project, such as training, templates, presentations for each stakeholder group, status updates for the larger team. List them for your manager to make sure your expectations match hers.

This is a good time to candidly discuss with her if any of the deliverables make you nervous. “I’m not good on the phone,” or, “It usually takes Dave and I a while to come to agreement.” You can brainstorm with her how you will address the concern. Do you need to build extra discussion time into the project plan? Do you need to attend your company’s meeting training and agree on a meeting format for the project?

Add the concerns and the necessary time to the project plan. If you’ll have to research something in order make a decision, add time for that, too. If your manager balks at the extra resources, she can recommend another way to address the need.

You can always ask again in the midst of the project if it becomes apparent that you really do need the research or the discussion. I can think of so many meeting discussions that ran over the allotted agenda time when it would have been useful to be able to say, “Our project plan says we will have this decided by today. Do we need to add a week to the time line so that we can have this decided by next meeting?”

List the Criteria for Success
This is also GTD-inspired. We were almost finished after a long, rough ride on the HD project. We were ready to present to the team and start using the new format. Our manager asked us to present to her first. Then she proceeded to rip holes in our design. We spent another month getting the new templates up to snuff because they didn’t meet her criteria.

We should have clearly discussed criteria for each project deliverable ahead of time, and we did at that time. It was frustrating to be having a discussion we clearly should have had at the outset to make sure our criteria met the department needs.

I almost think you can’t be too detailed about doing this. Probably each deliverable should have criteria that you can refer to when you are deciding if the deliverable is good enough.

This Advice Fits in the Glove Compartment

Groan, I know. Sorry. I think what it boils down to is to be explicit at the beginning of a project about what the project parts are and where you will need to develop team knowledge in order to be successful. Then make that development part of the project. Add skill development as tasks and allocate time for it. You might not get everything you ask for, but at the very least you’ll be clear about which team skills you’re developing in this project and which ones you are postponing for another time.