Finding work at work on your own
During slow stretches
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We are entering the holiday season in much of the world and ,with some exceptions like in retail, business is generally slowing down. People are taking long breaks for holidays. There might be a holiday party in the works. Teams are often finishing up their work for the year and making plans for the next one. I you are working in tech that touches the retail sector, you might even be under a code freeze because management isn't willing to risk a major issue during the biggest sales quarter of the year
Essentially, you every likely have some down time on your work schedule. What should you do with it?
Rest and prepare
This year has been marked by various industry layoffs, hiring freezes, and other painful corporate actions as the spigot of cheap money slammed shut. I’m sure that many people are worried that if they are seen as “slacking off” right now, it might lead to repercussions in the future. The impulse to keep the throttle maxed out throughout the end of the year is pretty strong.
But even so, my recommendation is to consider taking this limited time of the holiday seasons to do your best to slow down the pace a bit, recharge and make sure you're set up for the inevitable ramp-up of work that will come with the new year. It’s a bad idea to be working at an unsustainable >85% capacity all the time and burn yourself out, so you should be taking the opportunities to rest when they appear. Many other teams around you are going to be experiencing similar slowdowns due to end-of-year code freezes and half the team taking off for week-long vacations in non-overlapping intervals. The natural pace of work is going to be slower and that means the work demands those teams generate will be slower. There ought to be less on your plate now from those dynamics alone.
Plus, not all work is pulling data and pushing code. It’s possible to be doing plenty of visible work without overexertion. There’s always the strings of planning meetings for the coming year. You can chip away at tech debt. There’s other system maintenance type work that’s less demanding but nevertheless important. There’s probably some work sitting on the backlog that can be looked at now. Those are all options to pick.
But let's say that none of those existing projects feels like the best way to spend your time — they’re low impact for time spent and you can afford to pass on them. What if you feel rested enough and want to find some kind of project to work on of your own creation that is both good for your career and also valuable to your employer?
Creating your own work
As you go through your career, you should always keep an eye out for opportunities to contribute important, high-impact things. Maybe that involves joining an existing effort, maybe it means seeing something other people aren’t seeing and convincing people to come along. I’m not saying you should keep trying to make a name for yourself and climb the corporate ladder. I’m saying that based on the information and skills you have, you’re likely able to see opportunities and act on the ones that seem useful.
Of course, the hard part is identifying such instances, especially early in your career. So instead of trying to “be an entrepreneur”, look around you and see where the winds are blowing.
Part of the work for upper level executives and managers is to look ahead and make sure the company is positioned to handle what the future may bring. The further up you are the further ahead they’re supposed to look. Putting aside whether they're any good at it, they are at least supposed to be planning ahead and working backwards from those plans to see what needs to be done now to make those plans happen. Most often, unless you’re high up in the org chart already, you’re not going to be included in those discussions.
One thing you can do in these situations is directly help provide data, analysis, and useful insights that may help said leadership make better decisions. It means getting involved in discussions over what they are currently exploring in their mind and finding ways to use your data skills to shed light on the questions that come up. This is obviously easier in organizations where such leadership is approachable (namely, small ones). But even if you can’t work with people at the very top on the farthest reaching ideas, it’s often possible to work with people one or three levels above.
At the same time, it can be tricky, or downright impossible getting included in such conversations. I’ve been in plenty of situations where I’d be talking to someone about what they’re pondering over in terms of planning, and they’d be surprised that I’d have some piece of analysis using existing data that could help them make their decision clearer. Since they didn’t even realize I could help, they certainly wouldn’t ask me on their own. So it takes a lot of effort building relationships to even be included in such conversations.
And what if you’re just not able to get involved in those conversations? I’ve seen it take multiple years of steady relationship building before my teams got involved in that process. What then?
The other way is to talk to people up the management chain to get an idea of what was being discussed at those planning meetings. The way organizations work, this information is bound to flow outwards from the leadership through middle managers until it lands on your desk anyways. It doesn’t hurt to ask where things are looking ahead of time. I regularly ask my manager, and their manager, whether they’re hearing anything about strategic plans in the meetings they’re invited to. Armed with that information, you can then find interesting projects to do that are aligned with those plans.
As an example, let’s say your company is jumping on the AI hype train like everyone else [insert massive eyerolling here]. Well, on the data science team, you’re probably hearing bits of those plans already about how product people want to spray AI on the product. Is there any infrastructure that should be made to handle those plans? Maybe you and your team needs to do some research ahead of time to answer those questions. Maybe you guys already have some AI stuff built out, but it’s not ready to scale to the level that’s being talked about. Getting a head start on any of this just means your future life will be easier.
Whatever you decide, any work that aligns with where the big executive interests are pointing reduces the risk of having work be “reprioritized” and cut off short — a risk that is always greater when you’re running off to do something on your own (even with approval). Just make sure that your new project is also beneficial to you in some way too. Learn something, build some infrastructure that helps you, or at the least do something you enjoy working on. Life’s too short to actively volunteer to do work that you dislike.
Anyways, it’s a short workweek in the US. Please find some time for yourself and your loved ones.
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About this newsletter
I’m Randy Au, Quantitative UX researcher, former data analyst, and general-purpose data and tech nerd. Counting Stuff is a weekly newsletter about the less-than-sexy aspects of data science, UX research and tech. With some excursions into other fun topics.
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