Week 15, 2024
Another holiday week!
The plan was to spend some time with some friends on their boat. The kids and I have never been on a boat before (excepting a ferry or two). Alas it wasn’t meant to be - the winds were too strong for the boat to make it to a pontoon so we instead we spent three nights at the Travelodge in Paignton. We all had a fantastic time despite persistent rain - we went to Colton Fishacre and Agatha Christie’s house Greenway, and the kids spent most of their time last week playing chicken with the waves on the shore, skimming stones, crabbing, and teaching me to play card games I’d never learned as a child. Reflection: if you have good company and the right clothes for the weather, it’s easy to make the most of any opportunity. And it doesn’t even feel like a consolation prize if you can let go of your foiled plan, and embrace your alternative opportunity fully. It would have been easy to choose disappointment - instead we made golden family memories. I think there’s an obvious parallel with work - and how effectively ruminating on what might have been, focusing on loss, and inflexibility (of thinking, of planning) closes down possibilities. Open-minded optimism FTW.
I realised my friend with the boat is stuck in golden handcuffs. She works in a cut-throat culture, feels her job is constantly under threat, and is expected to take regular work calls during her holidays. And she knows wouldn’t earn even half her current income at a competitor firm, so she’s sticking it out. She’s not alone - golden handcuffs are the unspoken retention strategy at her firm. Reflection: it’s an interesting choice from her firm. In corporate law perhaps it’s easier to use money to retain talent than it is to nurture a culture that people want to stay for. But in the public sector we don’t have that choice - we simply can’t afford the golden handcuffs. It got me thinking about my own career journey - as long as the salary is above the minimum I need to pay my bills, I look for an inclusive culture, job flexibility, great colleagues, learning opportunities, and the difference I could make. I believe talent flight from the civil service is a result of these factors being steadily eroded over the last decade - but I’m hopeful good leadership can turn it around.
My eldest daughter saw a pop-up from Safari iOS saying I had 500 tabs open and suggesting that I close those I hadn’t used recently. Naturally she clicked yes - and deleted c.460 tabs. I noticed a week later - too late for me to recover the tabs through the “recently closed tabs” function. For months now I’ve been meaning to go through those tabs and save, share, or write blog posts inspired by them. I never made time. If I’m being honest with myself I don’t know if I ever would have. I assumed I’d be mourning the loss of the “treasure” within the tabs - but since I don’t have a record of what was in there, instead of feeling sad I feel relieved of the burden of tasks undone. Reflection: Where else is this true? Occasionally I take this approach with my inbox - archiving everything assuming anything important is already noted or will float to the top again. It’s a version of “ignorance is bliss” I guess. At the touch of a button I can significantly lighten my cognitive load and have a much simpler view of what’s on my plate. But perhaps it’s also dangerous - I’m abdicating a responsibility to make an active choice about what I will and won’t spend my time and attention on. What important things won’t I do because they’re no longer on my radar? What lower priority things will I do instead simply because they’re there in my field of view, or because they’re loud or persistent. Leaders should still aim for that lighter cognitive load and clarity - we can’t get anything done with too much work-in-progress - we just need to accept that deciding what not to do is a key part of leadership, and if we don’t make these active choices we should expect things to come back to bite us.