Needs must. Necessity compels us. And scares some us too, I’ve no doubt. When your freelance income looks shakier than it has for a while, maybe there’s a genuine reason to pull up the duvet; order something from Amazon to cheer yourself up and hope it’s all going to get better Eventually.
Engineers and emotions are strange bedfellows. We are trained to solve problems, and, when there are issues with a live broadcast service, remaining dispassionate is a benefit. But dispassionate logic, without emotion, is Vulcan not human. And as human engineers, understanding our emotions can be a key part of our toolbox.
When managing technical projects, an important part is to review the lessons learned. I have a small book of project ‘post-mortems’. I review them and add to them after each project.
Many of the first post-mortems contain instructions to me such as “formalise the engagement” or “keep a professional, arms-length relationship”. Perhaps it was the stress of losing a client or losing revenue, that clouded the logic?
Kelly McGonigal, in her book The Upside of Stress, suggests that stress and meaning are inextricably linked. We don’t stress about things we don’t care about, and “we can’t create a meaningful life without experiencing some stress.”
As engineers, I suggest we need to review how we are reacting, under the stresses of Covid, with as much diligence as we’d use when creating backup systems and business continuity and disaster recovery plans.
The ‘pulling up the duvet’ method - passively hoping it’s all going to work, isn’t a recommended approach to broadcast systems design, as far as I know. And it’s probably not how we can best engineer our own steps, as we move into the next phase of life with Covid, whatever that may look Like.
So, how about a bit of introspection? Perhaps getting out of bed half an hour earlier, and using this extra time to invest in yourself, to prepare and equip yourself? We may not know where we are going next, but we can prepare.
As Shakespeare puts it in All’s Well that Ends Well: “I am driven on by the flesh; and he must needs go that the devil drives.”