Repotting
I was having a frank conversation with my manager the other day. I am often having frank conversations with my manager. This conversation was about how I have been feeling (restless) and my fear (atrophy). Get you a manager to whom you can announce your fears of outwardly imperceptible decay.
This feeling at work has been stark lately because other parts of my life feel so vividly alive. There are a lot of sources of this, some specific to me, some to my role, and some to my organization. A lot was outside of my control this year at work. The internal tool I was working on was replaced by a vendor tool after about 6 months of wavering uncertainty. Roadmaps (translation from tech: 'what we will work on for the next few months') were in flux which meant several projects didn't happen.
When I think back over the last work year I feel mostly sense of fatigue, not the kind that comes from good and hard work but the exhaustion of shattering one's focus into many fragments none of which seem to command the weight of attention. A lot of waiting around for something that was just about to happen.
The attention problem is a symptom of becoming more senior in an organization. As you get more experienced work that used to take you 2 days can now be sped by experience and other tasks come to fill those hours. With a wider scope also comes more conversations, more threads to monitor and pull on. More meetings but often, fewer outcomes.
This has been extensively written about and is one of the reasons that up until this point I have steered away from being a "manager", despite the fact I like people and enjoy mentoring other designers. When I had work that needed thinking time I would usually set aside hours in the evening where I could get a real stretch of time in without the distractions of slack or conversation.
In my most dire moments last year I felt like perhaps I'd never again get better at the actual work but that what was asked of me now was simply to get better at doing more things simultaneously and faster. A machine optimized not for depth but for surface area coverage.
This is why I have a creative practice outside of work. I like having work that is entirely mine to scope and achieve. I'm not always working on something, but when I am (like my bingo website) it is totally immersive focused work that I can sink into for hours.
When I described this feeling to my manager, 'restless' is still the best sum-up. She offered me this beautiful metaphor.
"It sounds" she said "Like you are in need of repotting".
Your house plants probably need to be repotted. Mine certainly do. As house-plants grow visibly: more height, more leaves, sprawling vines, sprays of flowers––under the surface their roots must expand to keep the plant nourished with water and nutrients. Because the pot is a limited space, cut off from the earth's mineral bounty, a house-plant can begin to 'outgrow' its pot. The roots in a bid for expansion twine in on each other, forming dense netted mats. The plant becomes rootbound. Denied its growth it will begin to decline.
Repotting is the process of removing a plant from an old container and moving it to a newer, larger pot. The concept has always intimidated me. Here is a fine pothos. It's been doing its job, looking pretty and sitting on my shelf. In return I am to wrestle it from its home spilling soil everywhere, rip its hard-won roots and plop into a new and vacuous container.
The act of repotting has felt like an avoidable violence.
Except, of course, to avoid the discomfort of action is to keep the plant root-bound and choked.
Repotting is uncomfortable and a little violent in the way that change often is, but it is necessary.
When my manager said this, I was reminded of a quote from Carol Dweck's Mindsets which describes her original study in which children are given impossible math problems. TLDR: children fall into two groups, those with a fixed mindset, characterized by squirming avoidance and devastation at failure and those with a growth mindset. (There is actually so much to this, I am always thinking about Mindsets, especially in this talk from a few years back).
Speaking about a growth mindset Dweck quotes a young boy who says sunnily "I love a challenge!". (In my head I always pre-pend the phrase 'Gee whiz, Teach!' and add freckles)
There was a time when this statement sounded like a foreign language. Not that I didn't seek out challenges or achievements, but the frank and open hearted 'for the love of the game'–dness of this kid was aspirational at best and envy-making at worst. Why would you court failure? Why would you voluntarily seek out a larger pot?
It has taken me many, many years of de-catastrophizing failure (a blog for another time) but I'm finally aligned with our freckly friend.
I do love a challenge. There is always the chance of failure, that the transplant[^1] won't take––but the risk of staying rootbound is real as well. We gotta, as they say, love the journey.
So thank you to my manager (for so many things!) but specifically for gifting me this metaphor right in time for the new year. 2025: repot yourself. ;)
See you all next week.
[^1] this wasn't even me, just the english language