Site news.... and processing serious mixed feelings

First of all, the open call for blog authors is still in effect. I've invited our first author besides me, also an INFP, and I'm eager to read what she writes -- in particular, to learn about career issues in her part of the world, and how they're different from here in the US. So that's what's coming up soon.

Meanwhile, if you'd like to write here, just post a comment and I'll set you up.

Now to those mixed feelings. I'm still very excited about the degree of autonomy that my day job is offering me, enough to feel night-and-day much happier than I was a couple of months ago. I even moved!

But I still have a consciousness that coding all day just isn't my calling. It's a lot more manageable because I'm only doing it 30 hours a week and I can take more frequent breaks or arrange my day how I wish. But it's still like... well, I'm not sure how to describe it. I can make myself focus for certain periods of time (maybe 2-4 hours, tops) and solve a technical problem that needs to be solved, but it requires a Herculean effort to stay on task. It's satisfying when I grind it out, but only in the sense that running several miles might feel satisfying when you're done with it.

I'm also getting a little antsy wrapping up a task, because I feel like my boss really doesn't even know what I'm doing in the day-to-day. He wants to see daily deliverables, which would be fine, except I'm not sure he really understands when the task calls for some sort of research and troubleshooting that doesn't show up on a nice neat Web page. To be honest I'm not really sure how much he understands about technical management.

I dunno, I still think I'm in the wrong career. Fortunately all that work done to choose a new one isn't for naught, as I'll be able to start putting together grad school apps around August-September.

The poker's going quite well, incidentally. I'm playing about 15-20 hours a week and winning at a rate that would be pretty good for a temp job. I'm not yet ready to take the plunge into playing full-time because I like having insurance paid for, I like not worrying that a week or two of downswing will sap my motivation to play, and I like knowing that I have some experience to put on the resume. But if something were to happen to my day job, or if I wanted to leave to take a contract job here where I'm living, it would be nice to have my poker bankroll pretty stable and being built up week by week.

O joyous day!

I had a great day today. I finally worked up the courage to approach my boss -- well, finally worked up the courage on a day he was there! -- about going part time and working off-site. It sounds like this is really going to be doable. So I'm awfully enthused about that and thanking God that it looks like things may work out for me to stay sane without having to leave the job just yet.

Maelstrom

It's been a really strange week, with a mix of eager anticipation about finally shaking up my routine and paralyzing fear about shaking up my routine. I was hoping to talk to my boss about an idea I had, but.... well, here's what I posted on a message board:

*sigh*

I'm about to try to bring this to a positive resolution by approaching my boss about going part time and off-site. I think that will address most of the frustration that I feel from working here and free up a good deal of time (and loosen some geographical constraints!) so I can do more things I want to do.

However, I'm a little scared of this conversation too, even though I'm emotionally prepared to accept the outcome all the way up to getting terminated. So it's taken some emotional effort to prepare for this conversation....

TWICE so far this week! And my boss still hasn't shown up in the office! Grrrr. How can I get this stressful conversation behind me if I can't even find him? Perhaps I should just send a resignation email. Arrgh.

So that's what's adding most of the stress in my life. I totally forgot to show up for a shrink appointment on Monday despite four Google Calendar email reminders! I was so wound up thinking I might have that conversation on Monday, and then so relieved when it didn't happen.

Last night I happened to make a sarcastic comment to my Mom to the effect that, "Of course God wants us all to be miserable for a few decades then die." At least I think it was sarcastic. My point was that society acts like we have a moral imperative to just keep clawing away at something we hate, in my case in a town I despise, and that for us INFP types that's just bad advice. But it still comes wrapped up in all sorts of normative statements from well-meaning but wrong-headed ESTJs.

Mom replied something about how I need to be more grateful for what I have, which is probably true but still set me off as a total invalidation of my self-expression. At that point all hell broke loose and I just reacted out of anger. I'm not proud that I treat people like that but it still gives me a lot to think about. Is my problem that I don't wake up every day all happy-go-lucky about a job that sometimes feels like torture (not lately, mercifully)? Does being thankful for life mean that I have to just suck it up and pretend to like where I'm living? Apparently, to people who think like Mom, it does.

I was just born ill-adapted to the human race, and that's all there is to it.

Interesting new development

Apparently the boss knows I'm looking to get out. Hmm....

Career counseling VII: It's time

I had my seventh career counseling session yesterday, and this one went 45 minutes. I had several successful informational interviews to report on, but by my request we also spent some time talking about my plans to transition out of my day job. At this point I'm emotionally committed to leaving pretty soon, most likely end of May. I'm open to continuing to work on a contract basis if I can move and report in remotely or come back to this town for the occasional meeting. But I don't want to live here, and this job is hardly enough to keep me here. In a change from a couple of months ago, Debbie didn't really question the rationality of my decision to move on. I mentioned that I feel much better now that I have a long-term career plan, that going to grad school for student affairs doesn't really require that I tough it out to fabricate resume continuity. She seemed to agree.

Speaking of the present job, we're really still just rearranging deck chairs on the site that I work on. It's blatantly obvious that this site occupies very little of my boss's attention, and I get the sense that he doesn't much care whether it succeeds or fails. On Monday several of us are going to float some ideas that we think would build up traffic -- hiring a professional blogger to write content is the biggest of these ideas. I don't know whether those ideas will be accepted or not, but I see this as sort of a "last gasp" attempt to make meaningful change in this job. You may not be able to imagine how frustrating it is to have a fairly clear idea what needs to be done to make my project a success, yet see time wasted on relative trivia that does nothing to drive traffic to our site. If the meeting next Monday doesn't go well then I'll pretty much take a knee and run out the clock.

To be honest, I'm probably going to move on anyway, even if things do go well. There might I don't like this town much at all, and I want to give the "poker pro" thing a shot for several months before starting grad school. I could play online but I don't like it nearly as much, so I need to live somewhere near casinos that offer poker. As I said, I'll keep this company as a freelancing client if they're interested. One of my colleagues had that arrangement for a time, but I don't know how disposed they would be to let me do the same. And I really don't want to do it full-time, regardless.

It's back

That same depressing ennui has returned. My mind is just so understimulated right now. I feel like I'm just voraciousy running around the Internet looking for something, anything, some bit of novelty to hold my interest for 15 seconds and get me that much closer to the end of the day. It's awful.

I am trying very hard to make progress on the informational interviews. It's a little hard, though, because I feel so burned out by 3:00 pm that the last thing I feel like doing is chatting with someone during my breaks. But it's really my only hope for a ticket out of this hell so I'm trying to be good about it.

Why won't my counselor let me just quit? I have five figures saved up in my rainy day fund / poker bankroll now. Probably not enough though. You can never have enough. You must continue pursuing more until you die. That's why you're human, ADHD, and INFP, so you can fucking be miserable until you die.

To reward you for reading this nonsense, here's a cool link someone posted on GlobalChatter, a list of different people's self-assessed job satisfaction by type (although it seems to know I'm INFP and give me only those, hmmm): http://www.typeandculture.com/typeresearch/ .

Sick

Sorry for the lack of updates. I've been sick with some sort of flu or other virus that's just totally sapping my energy. I've slept the past four days straight, and this is the first time I've felt well enough to go sit in a coffee shop and write.

Before last Friday, well, I don't have much excuse for not writing. It's just that last week at work was somehow painless, a fairly new experience for me. I don't know why. Maybe I'm getting better at coping. Maybe it's that I have an exit plan getting clearer by the week, I dunno. Maybe I'm distracting myself into a faint hum of contentment with mediocrity. Who knows?

Hanging in there -- barely

To try to motivate myself to concentrate on work that doesn't inherently inspire me, I make up a lot of games and challenges. The most consistent one is to keep a daily count of the number of times I consciously shut down superfluous stuff like Web surfing and make myself focus on whatever I'm supposed to be doing, or at least what I think I'm supposed to be doing. Then I reward myself, presently at the tune of 20 cents per point, towards the purchase of some frivolity such as a poker book.

(I'll break in and say that to the non-ADHD this may sound childish, or like I'm lazy or undisciplined or have no compunction about getting paid to goof off. Hopefully by the fact that you're reading this blog, you realize that life isn't as simple as all that for some of us, and that it requires conscious effort for some of us to make ourselves concentrate.)

Some days I forget to keep score, but in general my nadir is something like 5 or 7 -- on days where I come in, do some productive stuff in the morning, then think, "Screw it," and stop making the effort to focus. (I still do some work after that, just that I don't make that same conscious effort.) Until recently my high score had been something like 15 to 20. Lately I've been racking up days of 25 or 30. That's not because I'm any more motivated or excited about my work. To the contrary, I have less and less idea why I'm even here. The higher scores are just because I've been trying hard to "brute force" my way through this lack of motivation. I don't think that approach will work forever, but at least it's getting me through another day at a time.

Question of the day: An eccentric billionaire has offered you a job digging a ditch in his back yard, then filling it back in. What salary would you require for such a quintessentially futile task?

Miscellany / So what’s your story?

I’m struggling even more than usual to concentrate today, for a couple of reasons. One is that one of our co-workers left the company. She was pretty much the person here with whom I most identified, and the operation was six people, so it’s hard not to let that distract me.

Secondly, I had a conversation at lunch that really confirmed and even expanded my sense that I work on a site without a clear purpose. Perhaps it’s just a communication gap, whereby the boss has never clearly expressed the goals for this site. Or perhaps those goals and strategy really don’t exist, and the plan has always been to “Just put up a site on that domain and see if anyone shows up.” At any rate, this gets back to the stuff about me being MBTI intuitive. If I don’t know that there’s a bigger plan, then it’s really hard to motivate myself.

I have my fourth of six career counseling appointments on Wednesday. I think I'll beg my counselor to please please pleeeeeeease give me permission to quit in good conscience!

I’d like to use the blog as a means of communication with the adult ADHD community, and to learn about other people’s experiences. On one Web analytics blog that I love, the author makes a point to end each post with one or more questions. I don’t know if I’ll do that all the time, but I’d like to get in that habit.

So what about you, Dear Reader? What brought you here today, and what’s your experience with working life as an ADHD or INFP or merely jaded and frustrated adult? Or conversely, what makes you happy about your working environment? Let’s start a conversation in the comments.

Whine whine whine

I'm trying to cut down on the mopey, "emo" posts here. I have multiple motivations for blogging, but the biggest one is to document my feelings and actions for the benefit of others in the same boat. Ranting repetitively about how I feel at work probably isn't that helpful to that end. (However, the second-biggest motivation for blogging is to use it as a coping mechanism, and repetitive rants are great for that purpose!)

Just thinking a lot about the need for stimulation.... rewarding myself for not surfing (too much), clapping my hands, imagining a marching band doing circles around my brain, whatever I have to do to survive.

One thing that would probably help, based on my career counselor's recommendation, is to take more (or in my case, clearer) breaks during the day. I goof off plenty during the day, but more important is to actually get up from the computer and walk around a bit.

A very lame entry

Need stimulation.... badly. Blue Valkyrie is about to die.

No joke -- sometimes during the day I just start clapping my hands because I feel the incredible need to do something. I'm sure my coworkers must wonder what that's about. A saner alternative that I've tried a couple of times is to bring in a few poker chips to stack and play with, but they became such a conversation piece that I stopped doing it. Maybe if I just used generic chips instead of real casino chips from my collection....

Actually, it's more interesting to sit here and ponder why the couple of coding tasks I could be doing don't get me more fired up. I mean, I have evidence galore that coding just isn't what I should be doing, so in some ways I'm gilding the lily here. If someone tells you Career X isn't ideal for you, and wouldn't you prefer Careers A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J?, it's sort of silly to invest more time thinking about why Career X isn't ideal.

But still, I like some things about coding, and self-knowledge is valuable, so I sit here pondering why I can't get started on these tasks. Blame the boss is way too easy, but I really think it's because I have no clear priorities set for my time. I know that I used to perceive one of these projects as really important; then it became clear that my perception was "misaligned," and so I stopped thinking about that one for a few weeks. The other one is just finishing up some work so we feel like we're getting our money's worth from a vendor, but frankly, it's a feature that won't have a dozen users by the end of its season in a couple of months. It's very hard to motivate myself to do either of these.

Trigger

It's funny how tiny, insignificant events can trigger strong emotional reactions. Today on the way out the door for work, I happened to glimpse on the kitchen table the US road atlas that I study obsessively. This atlas reminded me of my desire to just get in the car and drive to all kinds of places I've never been, and that reminded me that I can't do this because I'm shackled (however temporarily) to a job I don't really like in an overgrown town I hate working for someone who values routine just for routine's sake.

As you might imagine, focusing on work today is kind of tough.

Tell me what would make you happier -- no, tell me what I want to think would make you happier.

Imagine this scenario: [Anecdote removed. Although losing my present job wouldn't be a terrible setback in the long run, I'd prefer not to risk it or make myself subject to blackmail by getting too specific here. The point of the story was, the boss asked for some feedback, then embarrassed a person who gave it in a meeting because she gave not quite the precise feedback he wanted. This struck me as counter-productive and frankly rather detached from the big picture purpose of trying to improve morale, but hey, I'm not a manager so I don't get these things.]

Back in my naive days, I used to think that senior managers got to be senior because they possessed more of a big-picture view than the rest of the staff. Perhaps this was just wishful thinking on my part -- I'm MBTI iNtuitive, remember, which is a poor word choice by Myers and Briggs. They should have said big-freakiN'-picture. So perhaps it's self-serving to think that senior managers are supposed to have a big-picture orientation much like I do. But it has a certain logic to it. You'd think that the big boss would need to develop the broad strategy for the whole organization, and delegate the details to the specialists. Incidentally Strong listed "senior executive" as one of my Top 10 fitting careers, so I don't think I'm totally on the wrong track here.

But come to find out, there are probably plenty of people running companies who so get caught up in the details that they don't care much about the big picture. I can't imagine why running things makes them happy, but apparently it does.

Who knew?

CC2: Answering a lot of questions

I haven't blogged here for several days, for a couple of reasons. Mostly it's that I'm less inclined to write when I'm not suffering, and I've been working hard on leaving my career dissatisfaction to God and coping with the suffering (but not denying it!). That seems to be going relatively well.

Likewise, moving forward with the counseling has really helped. I still have issues, and indeed, the counseling is only confirming my impression that I'm not in the right career! But at least I don't feel so desperate to make something positive happen right away. I feel more inclined to trust that I can wait it out, because I know there's a plan in place to improve things. Some of my fellow Christian friends might see that need for a plan as a lack of faith. Perhaps.

And finally, despite the inadequate feedback where I work, I've gotten better at picking up on small bits of positive feedback. That makes me feel better about myself and feel valued here. Even though it really isn't a good long-term fit, it's a lot better for people like me to go to work every morning when we feel valued.

So then... about the career counseling.

I had session #2 yesterday, and to be honest it was more about Debbie reading my results to me than anything. I took the Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator, the Strong Interest Inventory, and the 16PF. I come out as:

• An INFP on the MBTI (strongly iNtuitive and weakly Introverted, moderate on the other two).
• SAE on the Strong
• I can't tell you what on the 16PF, but it certainly makes me sound emotionally unstable.

One of my favorite contrasts is that the 16PF gives me low potential for leadership (3 of 10), but one of the others indicates strong leadership potential. I think that reflects my ambiguous view of leadership: I love to motivate others to a common goal, but only if it's an authentic goal. I have no inclination whatsoever to be a bureaucratic middle manager, or for that matter senior manager.

I've been reading up on INFPs. I love this INFP profile from Typelogic. However, this one from personalitypage pissed me off with this graf:

INFPs do not like to deal with hard facts and logic. Their focus on their feelings and the Human Condition makes it difficult for them to deal with impersonal judgment. They don't understand or believe in the validity of impersonal judgment, which makes them naturally rather ineffective at using it. Most INFPs will avoid impersonal analysis, although some have developed this ability and are able to be quite logical. Under stress, it's not uncommon for INFPs to mis-use hard logic in the heat of anger, throwing out fact after (often inaccurate) fact in an emotional outburst.

However, the more I think about it (and about how MBTI defines "thinking" versus "feeling"), the more I realize why I'm so challenging. I'm not a typical F! To the contrary, I'm very good at logical thought. I just grow less enamored of it with each year of life experience, so I value logic only in situations that call for it. I think I come up F because I'm becoming more of a person who values feeling, even thought I'm still very capable of thinking.

In fact, I think this cuts to the heart of why it took them so long to diagnose me with ADHD. I've always done superbly in school, whereas most people like me can't focus on school. I guess it's a great reminder that four letters don't define who I am. It does remind me of my evil plan, with my best friend in college, to blow up the Greek system and replace it with 16 co-ed frats based around the MBTI.

In other news, a friend sent me a link to a careers-related blog, which led me to this fascinating NYT article about law and medicine being less prestigious than they used to be. It's a great point; in general our society values stability less than in the past. Maybe I'm well-positioned to gain in prestige as a vagabond -- as if prestige meant that much to me anyway.

Deck chairs on the Titanic

I omitted a few details from my earlier posts today, in part because they're specific to my situation -- I'd like to focus more on general ADHD-in-the-workplace issues -- and in part because I was writing from work and didn't want to get into gory details.

We had a company-wide meeting today (less than ten of us) that confirmed some of what I've suspected about, um, let's call it a disconnect in direction. Basically my boss wants me to focus on projects that in my opinion don't add much value, and wants to deemphasize projects that in my opinion have the most upside. He forgot about the work I was most anticipated, and once I reminded him, stated that it's just an afterthought that we need to knock out in a week or two.

Moreover, it's clear that no one's visiting the particular site I work on. I'm not an idiot. I know that when no one views your site, you don't sell advertising. I don't think anyone blames me for this state of affairs. Indeed, I actually have some ideas that I think would go a long way toward "monetizing" the site I work on. But even if no one directly says, "He's working on a doomed site," it's clear that if sites get shut down then demand for developers decreases. I think the boss is happy with my work, but I could be wrong, and in any event I'm the last one hired.

I also think the economy in general is headed down the crapper -- remember the olden days of yore when electing Republicans was thought to be good for the economy, with economy not necessarily defined to mean "portfolios of the CEOs"? -- so I'm very reluctant to make a career change now without a clear goal in mind. Well, that's why I need the career counseling.

Understimulation

I'm feeling oh so very understimulated at the moment. Hard but instructive to try to put my finger on why. I mean, I do have work to do. Some of it really needs to get done, and some of it is like, OK, I'm rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, adding features to a site that no one ever sees that don't happen to be features any of the public cares about, but hey, it's what my boss wants.

I tried working on the stuff that really needed to get done earlier today, and that seemed to go OK (if a little distracted). But now I've moved toward allotting time for the stuff that is really unimportant, but my boss will probably ask for sooner than the other stuff. I just try to concentrate and my brain says, "I don't wanna."

I've more or less prayerfully decided to take some kind of "radical action" when the good project wraps up in March or April. That doesn't necessarily mean quitting; it could be a three-month sabbatical or changing my work so I can do it offsite. But I just can't keep at it with the same old routine for another 6 months or five years or whatever normal people do when they're trapped in a boring existence.

I've always thought that having a plan for making things better should be enough to calm me down. But I'm ADHD, so it doesn't work that way. Having a plan to make things better just gets me into this state where I'm frustrated because it's not yet time to carry out that plan, and that just makes the routine into drudgery.

Productive Thursday

I came in this morning determined not to repeat my unfocused yesterday. And mercifully, I can still do this for short periods of time. The first 1:15 of my day, I've been pretty focused, largely cleaning up some messes that have been screwing up our database.

I'm trying to quit a lot of the Web surfing (or, let's be honest, looking to fill my intellectual stimulation deficit) but I am letting myself blog a bit, obviously, and did let myself read these two posts from the law school dropout poker guy: Deep Thoughts Part I and Part II. It's not really about poker, more about how you assess what social value different careers produce. Good stuff.

But You want a truly worthwhile job? The guy from Triple-A I had to call to start my car in a bad neighborhood in -10 degree temperature when I had absentmindedly left my inside carlight on. The sewer inspectors who wade through other people's feces from 10pm til 6am so that you can flush your toilet in the morning. The city's electrical engineers who are literally on call 24/7, frequently dragged out of bed at 3am to fix the power lines the evening storm had knocked out. But I'm sure as hell not going to face the shitstorm that would result if I took my 2 ivy-league degrees and accepted one of those jobs.

It's really too bad this guy doesn't still blog, but perhaps he resolved all the issues he felt he needed to.

General grumpiness

How ass-backwards is it to make the development staff into receptionists and customer support agents for your store because you don't have anyone else to answer the phones?

I'm trying to be less critical of stuff at work, and when I started I accepted the occasional interruption as just part of working for a small company. But it's getting a little out of hand. I'm already easily-distracted as it is; when I process three or four store returns in a day, I start to feel more like a CSR whose just writing a little code in his spare time. And of course, that's not the way to get your website developed.

Then again -- no one actually reads the site that I'm working on anyway, so it seems like all my effort spent to add features is sort of fruitless. "Hey, everyone! We have live notification of games that you haven't signed up for! We have automated women's basketball rosters even though no one reads those pages!" It's like we're majoring in the minors. If you want to redeploy tech staff, redeploy us to marketing. We need marketing. Bad.

OK, now that that's off my chest....

Last night I had a total meltdown. Going over my litany of failures with the counselor earlier in the day was a bit taxing on me, and it really got to me late last night. I ended up losing about 1 to 1.5 hours of sleep because of it.

Also, my resentment over living in my hometown, at least 100 miles from any sort of anything that I enjoy, got to me, beacuse I'd planned to go to a concert tonight but can't because I'm too busy with shrink, counselor, career counselor, and CTS doc. I really fucking hate this place.

("But God has you there! Be happy!" It's hard for me not to believe that God has me here because he enjoys making me miserable for reasons that are beyond my theological comprehension. I realize that trials and tribulations are supposed to strengthen us. In my case, they just beat me down and take away my will to live.)

Good news!

Boss noticed my carpal tunnel splints; gave me some suggestions on adjusting my desk.

The problem isn't that he doesn't care. The problem is that I don't know how to communicate my needs to him before they get to be a crisis.