+ Underwater

If I'm being honest, I have been completely underwater for the past few weeks. Work is always busy, but recently it has ramped up to an entirely new level. Without getting too into the details, the gist of it is that I have been working on a new project for the past few months. Our original plan was to start heads down work in July and deliver the whole product to customers by end of year. It was a logical, sensible plan: we would implement the simplest version of the product first to get it out the door, move on to the intermediate version, and then close things out with the most complex version. It was a solid plan, but then something happened…

We learned that one of our biggest customers needed exactly the product we were building. Suddenly, the project that was supposed to start in July and wrap up by the end of the year suddenly became a project we had to start in May, with a partial delivery in mid June and final completion in July. To say the least, that is a massive shift in timeline. To make matters worse, because this customer has a big, complex business, they need the most complex features right away. Our clean plan of starting easy and building the harder features on top as we went, was out the window. Now, we are building the hardest part first. I have described this internally as trying to build the pyramids from the top down.

I oversee about 12 products (13 now that this new one is active). Two of those products were already designated as our top company priorities for the fall, and now this project has jumped right up there alongside them. We are not a small company, so having three of these major priorities on my plate is either incredibly good or incredibly bad luck, depending on how you look at it ("the only thing worse than having everyone care about your work is no one caring about it"). The end result is that my workdays are jam packed with meetings to keep everyone aligned, and I'm left with scant, fleeting minutes here and there to do the actual work I need to do, like working on design and thinking through critical decisions.

This schedule has made it incredibly difficult to keep up with anything outside of work. This happens to be the week of WWDC, which is usually one of my biggest writing weeks of the year for Birchtree, but my output has fallen off compared to previous years. I have managed to write a few things, but I have so many more ideas that I simply have not had the time to put to paper. Between Monday and Tuesday, I did manage to record an episode of my podcast, Vision Pros, and an episode of Comfort Zone, but today is Friday, our usual recording day for Comfort Zone, and I will not be on the episode. In a first for me, I am missing the recording not because I am traveling, but simply because I do not have the time. I know Chris and Niléane will do a great show without me, but I really wish I could be there.

Last night, the universe decided to just start messing with me; some tornadoes blew through last night. Having lived in Illinois my entire life, I am used to this. We get half a dozen nights a year with a tornado watch, and a couple that turn into warnings (which means a tornado has been confirmed on the ground). Usually, these warnings last about 30 minutes, and the storm inevitably weakens or passes right around us. Last night started with a standard watch, and it looked like everything was tracking south of our area.

Then, suddenly, every device in the house started blaring the emergency alert system. I opened Carrot Weather on my phone and saw a brand new storm cell had materialized right on top of us. I pulled up the local news to watch the weather report, and not only were we in the warning zone, but the meteorologists started to list street names where the cyclone was headed. They reported that the tornado was positioned between two specific streets, which happened to be the exact streets I live between. They are not far apart.

Suddenly, my wife, our dog, and I were huddled in our bathroom, watching the news on our phone and listening intently to the outside world. We heard intense winds hit the house, and I genuinely worried that we were about to sustain real damage or worse, be put in actual physical danger. Thankfully, the roaring noise started to die down, and when I looked outside after it passed, there was no significant damage to our home. There are some incredibly large tree branches down in the neighborhood, but our house and our neighbors' houses are okay. It seems the tornado weakened just before it reached us and we ended up just getting significant winds and rain.

Today looks like a beautiful summer day with no storms in the forecast, and it seems like we are going to have a really nice weekend. Yet, as I write this on Friday morning before work, my mind immediately shifts right back to my schedule. I opened my calendar this morning only to see 8 meetings scheduled for today. It is time to get back to it, but during at least one of those meetings, you can be sure I will be quietly checking to see when I can take a vacation in the very near future.