Home Alone

 Yesterday I seemed to be the only one at work with the group calendar showing most of the folks OOO - out of the office. Some are out of state enjoying their vacation. Most will be coming back at the start of the new year. I decided to stay or rather had no plans to travel out of state. Instead, I decided to stay home and do some work attend, online training, catch up on work and strategize for the coming year. 2022 had been a wild ride for me with my new role and I often seemed overwhelmed.

There is too much to learn and I started an online course on Agile and scrum made by the IBM network. I know most of the concepts but never in this manner. I did not have any training in my new role as scrum master and the training said this is the first mistake that companies make by not providing training to new people who come on board like me. In most cases, the thinking is that project managers can automatically become scrum masters and the biggest mistake is to adapt 'waterfall' methods to lean and agile sprints.

I did attend the lean and agiler journey but as a team member not as a scrum master. So I have a good understanding of the agile process but not as a squad leader. So the training is a good refresher. I am also attending short pieces of training on JIRA which is the tool used in our company. However, I get to use new tools like ZenHub and GitHub instead of JIRA. This is a refreshing change as gives another viewpoint on the process. One of the main concepts is kanban which is a technique to visualize work externally via visual cards. The use of dashboards and pipelines or swimlanes in these tools are good illustrations of the external mind.

I know I have to ramp up my skills with new thinking and methods and these training help me (because of a lack of a training plan due to the negligence of my superiors). I feel I am left on my own and to survive on my wits. Hence, I decided to spend my holiday vacation reflecting, learning new concepts, and trying out new techniques such as building a second brain and applying these new concepts using new tools like Notion and increasing my knowledge on MS suites like Teams, To DO, and Planner.

I started new meeting initiatives which also use planner dashboards that apply concepts like the external mind and second brain. There are also new thinking in my field that I need to ramp up on such as DevOps, Cloud computing, velocity, and cycle time. Being a squad leader also requires a different mindset ( following Agile philosophy) by applying the scrum process. One needs to be more of a coach and influencer rather than a manager. An entirely different role as compared to my former role as project manager. This is the paradigm shift.

From a biological point of view, I am learning to juggle, meditate, and be more mindful of my work methods and procrastination. My emotional reaction and mental bias and reactivity often take me to the wrong path so the challenge is to re-learn or replace my old mental models. This feels like a new world for me; a voyage of discovery has begun where I need to leave my mind and my mental rumination. In fact, I am trying too many things now that my mind has been opened.

The main challenge is really to focus instead on my usual scatter brain and opening up too much to new avenues that result in distraction and procrastination. This journey of self-control and focus will help me in my quest to be a novelist and entrepreneur. This is in preparation for my new career after I retire. There is too much to learn with all the available materials out there on youtube and online courses like Courserz. I plan to attend Google's digital marketing course and also several IBM courses.