MakerBlock

I’ve often told my family that if it were not for them, I’d basically work all night, every night, on whatever latest project popped into my brain, and then fall asleep at the workbench/eating plank/soldering station every night/early morning.

The thing is, these tendencies just aren’t very conducive when it comes to trying to live with other people, especially those you’re semi-responsible for.¹ It’s especially challenging to work in a professional environment at DayJob™️when I’m working crazy hours.  I don’t want my clients or the other people I work with realizing they’re communicating with the functional equivalent of three meth-addled racoons in a trench coat.²³

I have a few ways of passing for a socially normative respectable professional.  Here are some of my coping mechanisms:

• I’ve put several buttons into Outlook’s quick access toolbar.  The most important are:
  • “Delay Delivery” so that I can draft and hit “send” on an email, but not have it go out until a socially acceptable time
  • “Signature” so that I can easily send an email with my “mobile” email signature or my full fledged obnoxiously enormous “professional” email signature.  Why would I do this, you ask?  Well, if I want to get away with a quick reply and not really do a deep dive, I’ll fire off an email as if I were typing from my phone.  I’ll even introduce “strategic typos” to really sell the impression.  Then again, if I’m typing a really long email into my phone and want to have it appear more impressive, I’ll use the “professional” signature.
  • “Work Offline” so that I can work uninterrupted for even a little while.  Being able to shut off the firehose that is my daily work email inbox is incredibly helpful.
• I addressed strategic typos earlier, but it’s really genuinely a real coping mechanism aside from just an email signature.  Adding typos makes it more likely someone will focus on appreciating your responsiveness and less likely they’ll get nitpicky about the content.
• My old cell phone using Google Voice as my “personal cell phone” number.  I don’t want to talk to people, but it’s basically unavoidable.  Then again, a quick text from the phone can handle many situations.  Even better, clients feel like they really have access to me.  It’s also nice that I can keep Google Voice open on my desktop and be able to “text” from my computer and using my keyboard.  In reality, I just leave this secondary phone and just … walk away from it.  No one outside my family needs that much access to my life.
• I’ve spent a lot of time tracking my productivity and know what days I’m the least productive.  Unsurprisingly, it’s Mondays and very especially Fridays.  This means I try to avoid meetings on these days as much as possible so that I can lean into unproductivity if I need to.  Why flog myself into working ever harder when I already know that however hard I push myself, it’s just not gonna be a productive day?
• I really try to avoid all meetings.  Mercifully in person meetings are all but extinct.  Video meetings are nearly as bad, but at least I don’t have to wear pants.  Whenever I have a video meeting (or phone conference), I will make a special effort to ask for an “agenda.”  If you don’t have an agenda, or at least some kind of idea about what you want to accomplish at a meeting you’ll never know if you’ve succeeded at the meeting … or when it should end.  And, once I have the agenda, I will send an email with as much detail and cover as many points as possible.  Sure, no one will read it… but its’ my way of preparing for the meeting and I can keep referring back to it as necessary. I’d say in roughly 40% of situations that email is enough to torpedo the entire meeting.
• Recently I created, with the help of ChatGPT⁴ I wrote an Outlook macro which will help me automate when I send emails.  Whenever the “Work Offline” button is toggled and I hit “send” on an email, it picks a random time between 7:15 AM and 7:59 AM and schedules the email to go out on the next business day.  Sure, this means people will get a flood of emails from me first thing on Monday morning.  But, it’s that a lot better than getting a stream of emails from me all weekend?
• I hate phone calls, so I will dodge as many as I can get away with.  And, when I’m on a long phone call, I will play a recording of someone knocking on my door and asking for my attention in increasingly urgent tones, until I can get off the line.

I don’t know – maybe this all adds up to some kind of antisocial behavior or DSM IV diagnosis?  What I do know is that with these various tools I’m able to better work with others in a professional setting.

It’s a little after 4AM right now.  I’m not sure how to end this post so I’m just going to publish it.  :)

1. In so far as I can be responsible for other humans [↩]
2. God, wouldn’t that be an amazing Halloween costume?!  Me dressed as three racoons dressed as me?!!? [↩]
3. Where was I? [↩]
4. Don’t @ me.  I don’t care. [↩]