What keeps me awake at night

“What keeps you awake at night?” Ah, yes, that ques­tion.

I nev­er feel like I have a good an­swer to that … the most cor­rect an­swer, since my kids star­ted sleep­ing through the night, is “I slept fine, thanks for ask­ing!”… which is not really a good an­swer to the real ques­tion. (The real ques­tion be­ing asked is, of course, “so, what’s the biggest thing you are wor­ry­ing about.” And it al­most al­ways seems like you can’t an­swer that… it’s a per­son­nel thing, or it’s really dull (budget), or it’s im­possible to ex­plain in a few sen­tences (deep tech), or it sounds preachy (vis­ion-y lead­er­ship glop), or you just can’t de­cide which is the biggest of all the many wor­ries, so you end up talk­ing about your lunch and us­ing it an in­com­pre­hens­ible meta­phor for tal­ent de­vel­op­ment, so you sound like a mor­on…)

For­tu­nately, or - ac­tu­ally - un­for­tu­nately, I have an op­por­tun­ity now to an­swer that ques­tion based on real world ex­per­i­ence. (And, since some of the an­swers re­late to NIBR, I’m shar­ing.)

Last night, I had one of those 3:30am deep angst mo­ments. You know… your eyes snap wide open. Your stom­ach is churn­ing. You’re pretty sure it’s not from the ta­cos. Your pulse is ra­cing. You need more sleep, but you can tell that it’s pretty much a lost cause. Some­thing is Not Right.

I’ve been through these crisis wake-ups an aw­ful lot of times in this job. I’ve learned that, when some­thing wakes me up, it’s a really good in­dic­at­or of where the ser­i­ous prob­lems are. It’s some­thing to pay at­ten­tion to and learn from. And, usu­ally, it’s in­cred­ibly ob­vi­ous what’s woken me up in a cold sweat.

This time, though, I didn’t know for sure. I lay there think­ing, “what’s bug­ging me? I can’t tell. Seems like a bunch of things. Feels im­port­ant.” I dragged my “ideas” journ­al out of my night­stand to take a few notes to see if I could fig­ure it out, and maybe, hope­fully, get a bit more sleep be­fore my Tues­day morn­ing 5:00 am bike race train­ing ses­sion. (No luck… I was up for the day.)

Here’s what was on my list, along with my 3:45 am “solu­tions”.

  1. IT too slow -> Pa­tience

    NIBR IT is head­ing in the right dir­ec­tion, but I worry that we won’t be able to de­liv­er the changes & sys­tems quickly enough to keep up with NIBR’s rad­ic­ally ex­pand­ing needs. We’re chan­ging how we work so that we can de­ploy large, glob­al sys­tems in a re­li­able, pre­dict­able way… but get­ting to that point takes time. This is driv­ing me crazy, but most of the usu­al ways to “ac­cel­er­ate” would slow im­port­ant pro­gress, so I’m try­ing to spend my days be­ing pa­tient and en­cour­aging. It’s the right thing to do. It’s what we need now. But ap­par­ently my im­pa­tience is ooz­ing out at 3am.

  2. Com­mu­nic­a­tion -> More

    It’s been a very chal­len­ging year. It al­ways is, so that’s not a vi­able ex­cuse. I’m do­ing a poor job on this front.

  3. No back­pack­ing -> Cope

    This year it looks like I can’t go on my an­nu­al back­pack­ing trip be­cause I don’t have enough va­ca­tion time… too many oth­er things go­ing on. I think my soul, which usu­ally get re­charged out in the wil­der­ness, is freak­ing out.

  4. Kid edu­ca­tion -> Double down

    We homeschool our kids, all three of whom are now young teen­agers. (!!!!) Get­ting in­to col­lege is in­creas­ingly dif­fi­cult. Did we make the right call to homeschool, or did we blow it? We won’t know un­til it’s too late to change. I’m con­cerned that there’s more we can do to get them ready, and at least at 3:45, I felt like just do­ing more was the right plan, rather than put­ting them in­to high school or academy all of a sud­den.

  5. Glob­al warm­ing -> AR­GH

    It’s not look­ing good, is it? We, as the hu­man race, really haven’t figured out how to re­act, have we? I, as an in­di­vidu­al, feel pretty much un­able to im­pact this prob­lem. At least I’m work­ing in health­care, where there will be ways to help with the com­ing night­mare we’ve un­loaded on our kids. But still. If there’s one single thing that we col­lect­ively can­not af­ford to screw up, it’s the cli­mate… and here we go.

So that’s the cur­rent angst list… and wak­ing up with that hor­rible feel­ing has at least helped me fig­ure out what’s on the list at the mo­ment, and, for sev­er­al of them, what to do about them.

I think, in prac­tice, the most im­port­ant thing on my list that I can do some­thing about is sup­port­ing my kids’ edu­ca­tion. It’s prob­ably the one that tipped the scales enough to wake me up. I have a num­ber of ideas, some very spe­cif­ic, about what I can do dur­ing the sum­mer to help that along. The oth­ers… we’ll make pro­gress. Pa­tience. (sigh)

Later this morn­ing, when grabbing cof­fee, it struck me that there were a num­ber of ques­tions that used to wake me up in the past year that are no longer wak­ing me up:

  1. Is there a po­s­i­tion in which my broken < clavicle | ribs | lung | big bloody skin patch > doesn’t keep me awake? (No.)
  2. How is Dad’s next can­cer fol­low-up go­ing to go? (So far, so good.)
  3. What on earth am I go­ing to do about < Patrick | Andy | Greg >’s de­par­ture and the po­ten­tial im­pact on the or­gan­iz­a­tion and our abil­ity to sup­port NIBR? (Con­tin­ue for­ward.)
  4. How are we go­ing to de­liv­er on < data ana­lys­is | cy­ber se­cur­ity | sci­entif­ic strategy | en­ter­prise-scale apps > ? (Find great people to lead them.)
  5. How is the new team go­ing to work out? (Pretty good, ac­tu­ally!)
  6. Will we sur­vive the next audit? (We’ll find out in about three days; but no mat­ter how that turns out, we’ve done a good job on our com­mit­ments since the last audit, I’m proud of the team, and there’s no point in los­ing sleep over it now.)
  7. Should I stop watch­ing the Walk­ing Dead right be­fore try­ing to go to sleep? (Yes.)

And I have to say, for all of these, I’m thank­ful they’re no longer on the list.

(Ex­cept per­haps #7. Can­not WAIT for sea­son 4.)

Hmm. Maybe I can take my son back­pack­ing on the week­ends to solve some of angst is­sues #3 and #4 at the same time…. and if we drive to the White Moun­tains in a Pri­us…. Hmmm….