@@ -3,12 +3,14 @@ layout = "post"
title = "Keep Yourself Drain Ready"
email = "drainready"
date = 2023-08-08
draft = true
lastmod = 2023-09-24
draft = false
tags = ["off-topic", "balance", "human"]
summary = """You have an, ethical, moral, and professional responsibility to
keep yourself drain ready at all times."""
summary = """You have a direct personal, professional, and ethical
responsibility to keep yourself drain ready at all times."""
+++
I used to work for a big data company. One of the responsibilities I had, was to
@@ -71,16 +73,7 @@ a rule! The decision can *not* be, "what will I ignore unless it's really
important." It **must** be "What will I ignore so I can save my attention for
the more important stuff".
Avoiding a black start is an emergency situation, something has already gone
wrong, and now you're in triage mode. There are now more problems than there are
people who are able to work on resolving said problems. Which means, priority 0
is now not allowing yourself to become an additional problem. If you lose the
ability to help, you're only going to make everything worse, for everyone. Don't
allow yourself to get there! Start **your** load shedding procedures, and start
ignoring everything you need to make sure you're doing a good job at what does
have your attention!
### Your Drain Readiness
### My Drain Readiness
I can still clearly recall the sudden feeling of unease, back at
`$BIGDATACOMPANY` I was sitting in a meeting with a number of engineers, when a
@@ -101,20 +94,39 @@ wanted to trust was already at, or over the capacity they should have. My first
reaction was much closer to disappointment, that there wasn't anyone I could
trust to help. But that was short lived, and replaced by that feeling of dread
when I realized, that I wouldn't have been able to volunteer either. I wasn't
drain ready myself.
drain ready myself, I was *way* to close to redline.
### Your Drain Readiness
Avoiding a black start is an emergency situation, something has already gone
wrong, and now you're way past just triage mode. There are now more problems
than there are people who are able to work on resolving said problems. Which
means, priority 0 is now not allowing yourself to become an additional problem.
If you lose the ability to help, you're only going to make everything worse, for
everyone. Don't allow yourself to get there! Start **your** load shedding
procedures, and start deliberately ignoring everything you need to make sure
you're doing a good job at what does have your attention!
No matter how perfect the metrics you use to predict how capable you are as an
individual, or how excellent you are at triaging under stress, unless you're
omniscient, there still might be something much more important around the corner
that you didn't predict. And if it's something important to you, that's the only
thing that should get your attention first. And don't allow yourself to make the
thing that should get your attention. So don't allow yourself to make the
mistake that I made, just because you have some personal buffer you can tap
into, that doesn't mean you're drain ready. If you spend your personal buffer,
you've just lost the ability to protect yourself, which also means you've lost
the ability to prevent yourself, and the problems you were fixing from dropping
on top of someone else.
And now, I'm going to say the exact same thing again, because everyone thinks
they're fine because they're not even at their capacity yet. But that's the
whole point! You're not drain ready if you're still "under capacity"! You're
**only** drain ready when you can cut a **full 4 hours** from your day[^sleep],
every day for a few weeks and still be within your personal capacity.
[^sleep]: If you lost 4 hours, what would you cut out? I'd bet for a lot of us
the first on the list is sleep. How long could you be you with 4 hours less
sleep? How many of us are now getting negative sleep?