Category: Personal

— AUTOMATIC REPLY–
Carl Bliss is Out of the Office

Thanks for your email. I’m out of the office for the Thanksgiving Holiday, and will be away from email until Monday, December 1. I will respond to your email when I return…

OK… actually. I’ll be close to email… freakishly close… I’ll have it in my pocket, or on the sofa table… and I’ll hear your message come in. That “bing” sound. I’ll glance at it… and ignore it. Although the contents will probably bug me. Because I now have an open loop. I’ll put together a hastily crafted reply and will hover over “send”.

Then I’ll think “Wait… if they see me responding to email on Thursday at 1pm, they’ll think I’m one of those guys who are addicted to the email inbox… I don’t want to be that guy”.

So, I’ll finish typing the message while my daughter sets up the Risk board… and put it in the draft folder.

Thanks for your email. I’ll send the draft of what I am currently writing to you, when I get back to the office on Monday.

Have a Blessed Thanksgiving

Carl

I was doing some office organization today. I came across a 3 ring binder of emails I wrote 13 years ago (apparently I used to print significant emails for archival). Reading through it was at some times entertaining and at other times cringe-worthy.

Time only goes one direction, but I sure wish I could go tell that high-strung kid a few things:

Here are my notes to the 25 year old me:

1 – Stop running things up the flag-pole every time you are concerned. 

Seriously! At the nearest sign of conflict or disagreement, you seem to go to your boss a lot. Try working things out with your coworkers first. (He’s THEIR boss too!) Kicking it up a level will escalate the tension in the conversation, and you’ll be dealing with some of those relationship issues 13 years later.

2 – Technology changes… that’s always funny.

Hey young me.. you’re in the middle of a pretty big project. I’m glad you’re documenting the requirements so well, and trying to get buy in. I hate to burst your bubble, but everything you’re working on will be obsolete in 10 years. (OH… and I noticed you lamenting about the high cost of web content management systems. Give it a few years. Things are about to open up.)

3 – It’s not that big of a deal.

You sure seem concerned about a lot of things. To you, the universe seems to only be as big as you are able to see. It’s a LOT bigger. The things you’re dealing with today, will not be of huge consequence in a few years. However, how you handle them WILL be important a decade from now.

Don’t be defined by your tasks. Focus on how you perform them. The things that will last will be the trust you’ve generated, and the integrity you display. That’s really about it.

And, do you really need to print all those emails? You aren’t going to use them. You’ll just laugh at them in 13 years. Just like 51 year old me will laugh at this blog post.