This week, and part of last week, and the week before, seem to be a deluge of fuck-ups. Not current fuck-ups, either, but things I fucked up weeks ago that nobody noticed until this week. It’s a haunting of past mistakes. Many of them are oversights and there are quite a few false memories involved [1]I know I sent that email but it’s not in my sent folder….. These errors appear to pile up over me and make me begin to wonder if I’m able to do my job.
And oddly enough, my manager saying things like “I’m not looking to place blame, I want to understand the process that didn’t work out” doesn’t help my state of mind.
Nobody likes to make mistakes. At least, I don’t like them. They create extra work when I’m trying to get other things done. It leads me to feel like nothing ever really gets finished, a problem exacerbated by having to mark things done in two or three different lists.
When a mistake is uncovered, what I’m experiencing is called an impression. The immediate appearance that comes along is a small package summed by “oh shit”: I have to drop whatever I’m doing, power up full crisis-mode thinking, find someone else to blame, and have a completed “Josh saves the day” response in the next 30 seconds or so. Then when I discover I have no one to blame but myself, past associations with bosses who assumed I could read their minds and predict the future[2]Why didn’t you set your alarm for 30 minutes earlier if you knew there would be a traffic jam? come forward and demand all my attention, which naturally makes it harder to actually deal with the problem.
When this happens to other people, I can dispense advice; when this happens to me, I can’t hear any advice at all. The tactic I think I need is objective observation. I found a response I gave to a powerlifter who was disturbed by past failures under the bar. I even wrote
Failure is part of the process.
But what I was referring to at that point was a process of growth. I do not know at this moment if I see my job as a growth process, even though I am constantly challenging myself to learn new things; to write cleaner, more powerful code; to learn how to use Power Automate (shudder); and to document everything I do during the day. Along many small scales, I am growing, but my job as a whole is not a “growth mentality” kind of thing, therefore, failure is not part of the process, because there is no single “process”. There are hundreds of processes overlapping processes vying for attention.
The first belief I have to expunge is that mistakes are blameworthy. Mistakes happen. I try to design systems based on three rules:
- Data Entry Sucks
- We’re Going to Screw Something Up
- The System Needs Screw-Up Correction Measures
There’s nothing we can do about the first two rules. They are descriptive. The third is prescriptive and involves lots of scripts cross-referencing different files, and scripts testing those scripts. So I know I have a way of managing screw-ups without assigning blame to anyone. Unless it’s my mistake. Then I am to blame. I need to fix this thinking.
On the same post, another user who is better at penetrating through problems to their root cause than I am wrote: “A person whose only objective was to improve, meaning that they were looking for that failure point rather than looking not to fail, is the type of person who would experience no negative mental state.” To paraphrase him, I want to work in a way that “does not match the reality of work” by never screwing up.
What my brain is actually doing, though, is trying to devise a model that makes screwing up more difficult. I’ve been using checklists for a lot of the common complex multi-step tasks I have to do, and these screw-ups have two sources: not checking the checklist regularly, or not having a checklist to begin with. Many ad-hoc tasks don’t have a set procedure, and it is impossible to predict every possible task that could come my way. So I’m thinking about a general checklist generation system, a few questions I need to ask myself (and record) before I start any work.
- Can I do it?
- When can I do it?
- How long will it take?
- How will I know I’m done?
That last question is the vital one, the question I’m missing in a systemic way. But it’s still a preventative. It doesn’t fix my belief that when I screw up, I am to blame and that I am unqualified for my job.
I keep a small pile of cards at my desk that get shuffled around and I sometimes even pick them up and read them. They have important truths I need to remember. I have added to my small set of cards the rule “It doesn’t matter who is at fault for a mistake, but how we move to correct it.”
So a mistake happened. Unfortunately some mistakes cannot be fixed if the mistake was not dealing with an issue until a deadline is passed, and the system was designed on the principle that nobody would ever make a mistake so corrections are always a palaver. I can keep trying organization systems but unless I build the habit of living in them, mistakes will keep happening, and–again–this is not addressing the belief that is the cause of my distress.
I could ask “How would I feel if my manager made this mistake?” Well, I wouldn’t be able to really get mad at him because he’s just as overworked as I am. I would be irritated at the interruption.
I could ask “How would I feel if my trainee made this mistake?” Well, I wouldn’t get upset unless it was a mistake I had corrected several times under several strategies.
I could ask “How would I feel if this wasn’t my mistake?” Well, I would, depending on who made the mistake, sympathize or dismiss any anger they have over the mistake.
Changing a belief, especially one that is ill-defined, can be challenging. I think I’ll simply use a “fake it until you make it” approach. As I was writing this up over the past week or so other mistakes have come up. One of them was months old, but ultimately not my fault other than I maybe didn’t foresee this kind of mistake happening in a system I designed. I’m in the process of updating that system for the next fiscal year, so I’ll see if I can make the system make the mistake impossible. Wrong solution, but it pays the bills.