Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1506
GMHHAY book volume 2 is now underway. A long tale about cosmic punishment masking as a management essay. My god I hope I don't kill the cat.
Hello hello hello good morning hi how are you? The world is horrible are you holding up okay? I hope so. Did you know, reader, that there are several people who regularly answer this question and email me how they are doing? It is so awesome. I love that shit.
I have exciting news for you! Well, if you are a gmhhay-head. My editor Lisa is back in action, settled into a new life and home and ready to edit. Thusly, we have kicked off volume 2 of the book version of GMHHAY. If all goes well, we are going to just keep on going, and I can envision volumes 3, 4 and maybe even 5 being done in rapid succession, maybe in the next year or so. No promises, but it is back on track.
Volume 1, you may recall, was issued about three years ago. it is for sale on my site. It does not sell particularly well. I sold a bunch when I released it, but very few since. But that is just fine. I do not care at all. That is the brilliance of GMHHAY: it is about as non-commercial as an artistic project can be. I engage as little as possible with the commercial world with this project: if I had more time I would get off of even the most liberal, indie email publisher, but these guys seem okay and I have other shit to do.
But, you know. I haven’t “put out” a book in years, so I should really get on that.
Plus, I love this whole process with my editor Lisa. I have known and admired Lisa and her work for, oh, twenty-five years or more. I give her very wide leeway. The process is: I send her the manuscript - unedited, entire copies of past GMHHAY entries, and she reads the thing and strikes everything that is boring to her. Mercilessly. Then when she’s done, and has a more complete picture of the volume as a work, she does another pass, maybe deletes more, maybe restores some stuff.
Then I get an avid GMHHAY reader to write a forward.
And then I might write a quick one as well.
And boom. That’s it.
So, you know, they are not 100% copies of the emails. They are essence of email, really. Just the good stuff, just the hits.
Cuz we all know GMHHAY has plenty of filler.
Anyway, I am very excited. Will keep you apprised.
Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!
We are listening this morning to new music by hometown heroes Superchunk, who have a new album coming out this summer and a big tour coming. The big tour weirdly does not have a date here in the Triangle, their home, but I assume that will be compensated for in some exciting manner. The new single “Bruised Lung” is mayhaps my favorite Superchunk song of the last decade or so, so this is a very promising album.
As you know, I have a day job. And I work from home. What you may not know is how seriously I take this. I mean, yeah, obviously I take my job seriously, but also I take my work at home trust seriously. I am deeply, deeply paranoid about spending too much time away from my desk during the middle of the work day.
Now, I am an executive, and I have a smartphone, so, in theory, about 80% of my work could be done away from my computer. And that number goes to, like, 90% when you separate out my “work product,” which manifests itself primarily in Keynote Decks and Google Sheets documents (wouldn’t it be cool if either Google Slides or Apple Numbers was good enough to replace the other company’s product and I could standardize on a single platform but nope). Obviously, when I need to work on some work product, I prefer to do that on my computer, with my big monitors and nice keyboard and fast computing power. I would never try and do that away from my computer.
But I am not talking about that here, I am talking about the bulk of my time as an executive, where my job consists primarily of three things: 1) thinking a lot, 2) talking a lot, 3) being there when the shit hits the fan.
There is a bit of a paradox here because #1 is a huge part of the job and almost impossible to do in front of the computer. But because I am an executive, paid a salary not based on hours, I can do that part of my job 24/7 and much to the chagrin of my wife, I do, and I do a lot of my work thinking on the off hours.
(Ironically I get most of my best work thinking done while working alone on the recording studio in the chore house attic. And if you have worked for me in the last decade you know I am obsessed with putting off all major decisions till the following Monday. When possible, buy yourself time to think about it, preferably while you’re alone, doing chores.)
But we are not talking about that here.
Same with talking a lot. I could, of course, be one of those bosses who does their one-on-ones while on the golf course or in the Maldives or some shit. I do not. I do them from my office, mostly. I do stand up, walk in circles, and get away from the computer, sometimes. Mostly I putter around and file records and clean up. It seems real rude to me to do a one-on-one while, like, at Walmart. Though I suppose that is maybe just me. I don’t like to give my co-workers the feeling I am multitasking during our one-on-ones. And a lot of my other meetings require me to, like, be in the job tickets or dashboard or something, so they’re just better done at the computer.
But we are not talking about that here.
What this leaves, then, is a good chunk of my time where I do not have a ton of active work to do: my work product is finished, my one-on-ones are done, I am not in another meeting.
With this time, I am basically doing two things: responding to emails, and “being ready” if an emergency happens.
And emergencies happen all the time! I mean, I am using the word loosely here, but stuff happens daily that requires me to immediately stop what I am doing and give it my attention. A client my have a gripe (I am in the vast majority of the client Slack rooms, lurking, to the chagrin of my coworkers). Some tech thing might go down. There might be a reporting error. One of our biz dev partner companies might have a question or gripe. A billing thing might crop up. My CRO might need some info from me to close a sale.
This stuff, in theory may not need to be answered immediately, but in reality, it should absolutely be dealt with immediately. It’s one of the things our clients love about our company, and it is business dereliction to have some employee be stuck on a thing for their job while they wait for you.
Of course, most executives don’t care and spend their time running around doing conferences and networking and whatnot and are hard to pin down and the whole company develops a vast infrastructure to keep track of the CEO and/or keep all the balls in the air till their admin can track them down and assault them with a list of topics that require answers from the CEO immediately.
I do not do this shit. I hate this shit. I cannot stand it. I suspect most people who work at Nimbus with me don’t even think about how I have no admin, how when they need something from me they (generally) get it very fast. That there is no apparatus in the company to “keep track of me.” That they’re not all spending cycles keeping track of what city I am in. They know the answer: I am at my fucking deck, in Chatham County, NC, where I should be.
This is, of course, a wildly unpopular way to approach the CEO job. I am probably alone in this approach. But I have been doing this a long time. Everything else about the job – the things people think CEOs do — can be assigned to other employees. I mean, yes, I suspect I would get something useful for our company out of Sun Valley like I used to get something useful out of my World Economic Forum jaunts at Barbarian.
But I have learned the hard way I will get more done for us by thinking, and dealing with the stuff.
But anyway this is not intended to be a management screed here. It’s all just setup for a stupid story.
All of this is to say that yesterday I violated my rule, and after my 1:1s for the day, I decided to risk it and go spend ten minutes upstairs putting away my laundry.
I mean, this is the extent of how seriously I take this: I do not like to stray from my computer during the day, because when a thing happens, nine times out of ten I need to get back to my computer so I can get into a spread sheet, or a job board, or a stats dash, quickly and properly. All of these tools have mobile versions that will work in a pinch, but they suck and I am less efficient in them than the desktop versions.
So I like to stay near my computer.
My wife — and probably every other remote employee would agree — is always like “well sure but your whole house and property is close to your computer so what’s the big deal? Spend your free time in your wood shop or something.” And in theory this works for people: if you are an employee of mine, and you’re reading this, that is fine. I don’t expect you to be tied to your desk during your thinking time. You probably shouldn’t be! Go vacuum of some shit.
But for me, I get so wrapped up in these tasks in the woodshop or whatever that I forget to check my email and then everything gets fucked. I don’t hear my Slack beeps. Shit. I have it set up so when my wife texts, and only when my wife texts, it is the only thing that causes this, my watch buzzes on my wrist. And I still don’t notice.
I have tried this in the past, and every single time, David or Kristen or Shaun or someone at work ends up needing me and I don’t notice it for 30 minutes and it sucks and I have kept them from being as efficient as possible in their job and I have spent money doing it and I hate myself for it and it is lame.
SO… as annoying as it is, I try to keep my forays away from my computer to less than 10 minutes during the work day. Except for lunch. This, coworkers, is why I am so relentless about lunch and keep it blocked out on my calendar.
This is not a perfect system, and it comes with a cost, because it keeps me from being able to do my thinking during the work day and I don’t love that, but I have found it to be the best for me.
ANYWAY. Again, all this is to say that I took a significant risk yesterday and decided to leave my computer for, say, fifteen or twenty minutues to put my laundry away.
And oh god, was I punished for it.
Do you guys remember how I have this very specific clothes hangar preference? How I buy very specific wire hangars from Walmart and then use wire cutters to cut the hook part of them shorter, and just so? Well I do. And you may even remember that it is kind of a whole thing to deal with the little remaining wire cutoff pieces, because we have a cat who eats everything. Just absolutely everything. Relentless. And he is not getting smarter about it as he matures.
And you may remember my comedic journey to buying a pair of dedicated closet wire cutters just for this purpose, and my wife supplying a plastic tub in which I should deposit the wire remains, ho ho ho, GMHHAY is so funny with its little chronicles of domestic quirks.
Well, reader. Yesterday, as I began this incredibly transgressive act of putting away my laundry during the workday, a thing I have never done in the eight years I’ve had this job, behold:
It is important for you to understand that this photo was taken maybe thirty minutes after the act, wherein I did a comedic slip of a shirt and the bin of wires went flying and scattered all over the closet floor. And it is important to understand that they are really fucking hard to pick up. They can only be picked up by hand, one-by-one. It took forever.
And, of course, I might just kill the cat if I miss a single one of them while picking them up.
THIS IS THE UNIVERSE PUNISHING ME.
Some CEOs can, you know, burn a trillion dollars, destroy entire rainforests, and BS about creating life and they seem to get away with it.
But me? Ten minutes away from my computer and I am punished.
Oh my god I’m gonna kill the cat.
Also why the hell am I keeping these things why don’t I just throw them away? I mean, it’s kind of a pain to throw them away, to cut one off, then walk to the trash can, then cut another one, then walk to the trash can. I do them in batches. I don’t know man. I should have thrown them away.
Also remember that Monty Python skit about the guy who’s trying to sell string only through a set of unfortunate circumstances, the string is cut into 3-inch segments? That skit still gets me, even where most Monty Python does not anymore.
Jane had her first grade “graduation” yesterday. Well, it was an award show. I did not go, because it happened during my 1:1s with my coworkers and, well, see this entire entry. It seems like I was the only dad of Jane’s friends who didn’t go, and those dudes all have important jobs in research and health care and shit instead of adtech so, a) yay dads stepping up, b) boo Rick and your weird neurosis.
Jane won “best storyteller” which was interesting. I would actually say that storytelling is not one of her strong suits? She makes cute books but those books primarily shine in diction, design, bookbinding, spelling, pathos and illustration. Also Emma said that all the classes gave all the math awards to boys and, like, come on man, I doubt all those boys are also doing math at Jane’s fifth-grade level, give a girl a STEM award. Last year she got best vocabulary, which makes more sense because that girl’s vocabulary is intensely expansive, ravenous, and probably at, like, a eighth-ish grade level at this point. I do not know what the other girl did to beat her in that this year, but that is fine. Clearly they felt they needed to address her stunning literacy, and that’s fine, but also give a girl a stem award.
We had a talk last night about whether or not there was a different award she would have preferred. She wouldn’t say. I told her I thought she deserved more than one, that she was probably better at math than the others. She knows she is better at math than the others but didn’t really care. I told her about the debate in America between people who believe in awards for everyone and people who think awards should just go to the best. And how I sort of used to lean to the latter view but that I’ve come round. We talked about how important it is to keep students engaged in learning and how that’s probably the paramount consideration in all of this. She really did not care one way or the other. She was totally fine with everyone winning an award. We all agreed that “most kind” is the best award to win and that was swell.
Also a few months ago she “lost” the spelling bee, placing second. She is mostly over it but 100%, still, refuses to tell us what word it was on which she lost. You can tell it annoys her. You can tell she knows exactly how to spell that word.
And boy does that click with dad. I will tell you my word, the one I lost on in my spelling be, getting second place, like father like daughter:
Anonymous.
I have known how to spell that word since the day of that spelling bee and I will never forget.
Though I have forgotten whom I lost to.
Looks like I don’t have a playlist done for you today which is real weird because I have been listening to nothing but new music for like four days straight here. Lot of them are close, but nothing’s done. And Nick and Abby messed up my Youtube history because I left Youtube logged in in Boston and they were watching Solid Gold episodes and shit, so, actually here:
Byeeee. Until tomorrow.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.