Life at Microsoft: January 2008 Archives
Working at Microsoft is often an unusual experience. At times the pace seems really fast and productivity is literally rolling along at light speed, while other times I feel as though I'm hitting the wall. These walls I speak of are hard to describe, it can often be caused by mismatched enthusiasm between my colleagues and myself, or sometimes worse- an ambiguous project with goals and metrics that are difficult to get my head around.
The good news is there seems to be a notion of balance in all this - for as much time as I spend trying to ramp up on a challenging project, there is usually a proportionate amount of time being gained back from a task that generates much less friction. In the end, I essentially have less and less bad days - but increasingly find myself evaluating my performance on a week by week basis.
With that in mind, I'm really accounting for any of the ups and downs being caused by the more ambiguous projects - and by the end of a given week I have a tangible sense of how effective I've been.
More often than not - when I leave on a Friday, I feel fantastic. Today was not one of those days.
It's funny because the day itself had very favorable portions. I had some really good breakthroughs with my colleagues on a marketing positioning framework we've all been processing through. The meetings I led generally felt effective and a good use of everyone's time. In one meeting, which happens to be a lunch meeting, the lunch order hadn't gone in - but my co-lead BHos acted fast and was able to put in an order late. Everyone was still able to eat, and thus-- much more open to cross-group collaboration.
That said, I had also been managing a large portion of this other project all the while. This particular project had been keeping me in the office till midnight a couple nights in a row. I'm happy to spend the time because I know how rewarding it can feel to chip away at the big rocks. This project had been coming along slowly, and it was becoming clear that it was not going to meet our required deadlines on its current trajectory.
You see, the information I was preparing was to be used in a number of focus groups we'll be running over the next few weeks. A funny behavioral observation I made about myself through all this is that instead of stopping the wheels that were in motion - I instead thought of ways that I could fix this on my own. More hours. More phone time with the vendors that had been helping with the primary deliverables. For some reason, I was stuck in finding an organic solution - that is, one I could grow myself without outside influence or assistance.
Why wouldn't I just speak up? Is it pride?
Raising the red flag early can often cause less frustration than raising it too late. It's never to late to learn from an experience, and this is one I shall not soon forget.
I've just sat down for a 2 day training in one of our larger meeting rooms here on campus. When making small talk with a few co-workers, my eyes wandered up to the wall, only to discover our true view of the world...
It may have been even funnier if there were clocks, but they all read the same time. (Shout out to BSol for that one!)
A few members of the team and I were scheduled to go down to Sunnyvale, CA this morning to meet with Palm. Those always make for interesting day trips, primarily because the flight out of Seattle is something like 6 am. However, in the ninth hour, plans changed - and I'm now heading into work as usual.
It would have been great to catch some California weather and maybe even see a few old friends, but the biggest thing I'll miss is the chance to eat at In-n-Out Burger. For the vegetarian member of our team,this was probably the greatest disappointment as well.
I guess the one up-side to all this is that my schedule has been completely cleared for today. Imagine a day with no meetings. What productivity awaits me!
This might even be the perfect opportunity to visit the most seldom used functionality my Outlook navigation pane, and click on a little button that no doubt will lead to a world of postponed and procrastinated work.
What button is this, you may ask?
As some of you may know, Bill Gates' last day as a full time Microsoft employee is coming up this July. Last night at his keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show, Bill Gates remarked that his last day at Microsoft may be a strange one. He then queued up an absolutely star-studded video of what that day may be like.
Much of it is filmed around the Microsoft campus, and the amazing part is the number of celebrities and political figures that were recruited for this video. Well done!
