Thursday, November 28, 2019

Injured... again. November 2019 edition.

Tuesday was a snow day along the front range, and in the evening I went for a run on the treadmill. After ice climbing in Canada for three days, I guess my feet were feeling it because I woke up on Wednesday with a lump, about the size of a pea about one inch in front of my heel near the outside of the bottom of my foot. I'm limping. It's been two days now. I took a butter knife to my foot to try to aggressively massage it, eh. I've tried to massage it, eh. I'm trying to stretch my calf, eh. It's my left foot, so the same as the broken ankle from skiing. It's depressing. It's really depressing. Thanksgiving? I'm struggling here.

Sunday, November 3, 2019

"It's not my job."

First, I hate when people say, "it's not my job". It's a failure of the organization to take ownership.

I've gotten to that point because at my former company design engineers doubled as responsible engineers (a new concept for me), and we would get blamed for a lot of problems. I had a boss that once said about the production line that had thrown up a lot of problems that day, "their job is to build things, we can't take the work out of work."

So I've come to the idea that if it is not your job, it must be mine.

That's one of the fun things for me about being at a startup, especially as we work on these one off facility projects instead of the higher volume products, we don't have a clearly defined structure for who will kit the facility assemblies, so it must be me, I mean, I did design it.

Saturday, November 2, 2019

Colorado Startup Life: Week 59

October 20th to 26th. Another good week at work and outside of work. The lowlight was being out sick most of Monday and Tuesday. On Sunday I climbed the 3rd flatiron for the third time with one of my coworkers who wants to learn to trad lead, and it just was too hard for the sore throat and runny nose that I had. I recovered toward the end of the week, but no one likes being out sick.

It's funny how being out sick gives us guilt. I'll tell you what, if retirement is anything like being sick every day, meaning no place to go, nothing to do, than it's not for me. I do usually tell sick people to just go home, and it can be hard to take my own medicine, and go home.

Being sick was definitely the major event of the week. I didn't go rock climbing, I only ran once for 3 miles on Friday after work. Basically I went home every day and laid on the couch. Saturday after spending the majority of the day laying around, I finally went for a little 29 mile bicycle ride, because it was 76 degrees out and probably the last good day for road bicycling for awhile.

If there is a startup lesson for this week it is chapter 7 from the book Extreme Ownership, prioritize and execute. We've prioritized and not prioritized with mixed results in the past and currently. In my personal life I like to imagine that I'm pretty good at it. Without knocking off tasks one at a time I wouldn't have climbed Mt. Everest or been on two Team USA ultra running teams. Point being make a list, in order of priority, and work your way down that list. I really like to see these types of lists, because even if people don't agree, they at least know the priority and can work around that.