| Current mood: |  there was no coffee involved |
My Life : A Postmortem (not literally!)
I think I've finally accepted that I'm really and truly a designer now, which is good because now I can get on with it and immerse myself in figuring out what that means. I've been hovering insecurely, waiting to be pushed back to artist or worse...
ANYWAYS, yay for me, blah blah, POINT:
Yesterday the designers as a whole had a discussion (I was included! Thus the acceptance speech) about the practice of postmortems, which is a system in which, once a project has all been completed, everybody gets together and discusses what went right and what went wrong and how to streamline the process and never have those problems again. Of course, by the end of the project everyone's forgotten half of it and gotten really emotional about the other half, and everyone's so tired that they don't actually pay attention and forget it all by the time they get to the next project.
And we all read an article on Gamasutra about ditching the postmortem. The article, by one Wolfgang Hamman, suggests that instead you have micro-postmortems at every milestone, or at predetermined checkpoints, so that you can find out what's going wrong BEFORE it gets out of hand, and maybe fix it for THIS project instead of the next one.
AND maybe I was a little distracted by thoughts of my hubby, who was in the middle of a phone interview with a very, VERY cool company (not jinxing), and of our relationship and my tendency to wait and wait and wait and wait until something gets unbearable and THEN mentioning it to him. (Eheh...) I thought, that's kind of like a postmortem (and just like a postmortem it usually doesn't solve anyone's problems). Hmm...think about other people's relationships. Think especially about how when I've seen one fall apart and there's a million billion unresolved issues that come pouring out like a shaken mouse nest, SURPRISE! Hmm, have also seen people swear they'll never make those mistakes again and then hop into a relationship where that's bound to happen...DUDE It's JUST LIKE a postmortem!
So last night, I suggested applying Critical Stage Analysis to our relationship.
I got The Eye of course. The one that says, with naught but a cocked eyebrow, "Did you try to drink coffee again?"
Okay, yeah, maybe it'd be a little weird...just a TEENSY WEENSY LITTLE BIT. And awkward. And perhaps I shouldn't have started out the conversation with the phrase, "So I've been thinking about our relationship..."
....yeeeeeeaaahhhh...
So before I do that again, I'm going to pre-test it on my life. I have goals, I have deadlines (milestones). I most certainly have issues with the way I end up doing stuff. I also 100 percent look back on my life and try to analyze what went wrong, but usually way too late to fix problems. That's a pretty close analog...should be a walk in the park, right? RIGHT?
So every weekend I will list in order of impactfulness:
5 most important things I did right,
5 most important things that went wrong,
5 ways I could improve for next week.
And (kicker alert) pay attention to those the following week.
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doubletake) wrote,
