JohnAs the title states, I’ve had to slowly come to the conclusion that it’s not that complicated and I don’t need to worry about everything.
“But what’s not that complicated, John?” you ask?
“Everything“.
In my everyday life and in the role of TPM, I have a natural tendency to need to know everything. I know I don’t necessarily need to know it all, but I believe it helps with painting the big picture and making the best decisions. For instance, why wouldn’t you want to know what cancer is and how to prevent it, right? As a TPM, why wouldn’t you want to know why it takes an engineer 5 years to develop something, right? But maybe I’m taking it a little too far.
As humans, I feel like we’ve lost that ability to be curious and ask those questions and dive deep into everything to understand things. But for me, it had a negative affect – I overcomplicated everything because I inevitably tried to solve everything – even if there wasn’t a problem.
“What do you mean, John?” you ask?
We’ll let me provide an example.
At work, I’m constantly asking engineers technical questions – they’re all super annoyed at me. I feel like it’s an addiction to know the most up to date information because I need to be on top of my game in case upper management asks. I cannot be wrong, I have to be ready. I need to be an AI system that is constantly fed information!
“Why didn’t you tell me you decided to write this in your where clause when you could’ve done this?“
“Why didn’t you tell me you you’re going to pull a PR at 2:00 PM when you said 11:00 AM?“
“Why did you take a lunch?“
Just kidding on the last question. But – I then overcomplicate things because I’m throwing unnecessary wrenches into the process when I should just trust the process. Always worrying about this and about that. Then I come up with ridiculous thoughts about how to boil the ocean in 5.2234 seconds. Then I try to convey to upper management all these potential risks; key word potential because they probably wouldn’t have been there if I didn’t cause a ruckus.
I do apologize, I’m just curious and want to help. I know it’s not that complicated, I’m probably complicated.
But damn, am I micromanaging then? My bad. I’ll change that.