Hiccupps

  A few months ago I stopped having therapy because I felt I had stabilised myself enough to navigate life without it. For the time being, anyway.  I'm sure the counselling helped me but I couldn't tell you how and I've chosen not to look deeply into it. For someone who is usually pretty analytical this is perhaps an interesting decision but I knew that I didn't want to be second-guessing my counsellor, Sue, or mentally cross-referencing stuff that I'd researched while we were talking. And talk was what we mostly did, with Sue suggesting hardly any specific tools for me to try. One that she did recommend was finding a happy place to visualise, somewhere that I could be out of the moment for a moment to calm disruptive thoughts. (Something like this .) Surprisingly, I found that I couldn't conjure anywhere up inside my head. That's when I realised that I've always had difficulty seeing with my mind's eye but never called it out. If I try to imagine ev...

I recall a time where I was moved to dig up this aphorism and share it with my colleagues: Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine. We chuckled because, naturally, your referred to other people and our planing was exemplary. It took me a minute or two to find a reference † because in my head the words were these: Your fantasy is not my emergency. Which I think I like better because it's more general and snappier.  However... I'm very conscious that it's easy to sound like a dick when rolling out a quote like these. It feels judgemental and won't move anyone up the team-player rankings, which probably explains why it doesn't get said much. But not being said doesn't mean not being thought and I've seen people think it a lot about project management, despite understanding that project management can be very, very, hard and that we generally aren't seeing the full picture. So, PMs, if yo...

  This month marks 13 years of Hiccupps and this is the 660th post.  It's traditional for me to mention in my anniversary posts that, when I started the blog, I tested my interest in blogging by challenging myself to write around a post a week for year. I usually then also say that I'm amazed I've kept that rate up in the intervening years. This year is no exception, although I am particularly surprised because my personal life is getting increasingly difficult and I am finding less time and energy for blogging. A non-surface glance at the numbers reflects this: 40 weeks into 2024 and 24 posts. If I cared about such things, I might worry that Blogger's unreliable numbers suggest that someone (or more likely some thing ) is visiting more as I do less. But I don't care. Instead, as I look at this graph my testing head wonders whether this possible inverse relationship would mean that I could get a very large number of views by re...