Category Archives: Assess

Fishy Performance Improvement

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A porpoise is a sort of piscatorial bobble-head. It goes up and down in the waves. At times it is flying completely free of the water, keening its way through the salt air, larking about in bright sea light. At other times it is unseen, submerged within an enfolding black cloak of ocean. To my mind, I have been engaged in porpoise like activity. This is my tale of fishy performance improvement.

For the past week, I have experienced mood swings. Episodes of quiet confidence alternate with bleak despair. One minute life is manageable. The next minute I plunge into black depths and life becomes impossible.

In engineering this behaviour is known as porpoising. In humans it is typically associated with manic depression, now better known as bipolar disorder. But I don’t appear to meet the standard criteria for this form of illness. According to Wikipedia, the different moods of bipolar disorder each last for a period of months. I was shifting gears in a matter of days, or hours. What was going on?

I puzzled over this question, trying to find an answer. The porpoising commenced when I located the performance appraisal / letter of reference material described in the post Time Evaporated.

Then came a revelation. My self-assessment was being conducted from two conflicting perspectives. When I contemplated my performance from before the accident, and compared this past performance to my present day performance, a range of deficits became evident. If my past performance scored at 100, my present performance was not worth more than a 6. I became depressed.

If I measure my performance today against performance from a year ago, then I find a significant improvement. If today’s performance scores as a 6 then a year ago would not score much higher than 3. From this perspective there has been a tremendous improvement. I became elated at this positive change.

Depending on my perspective, I would experience either quiet confidence, or enter a depressive tailspin; such is the disparity between my present capabilities and those I enjoyed prior to the MVA.

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There is another aspect to this issue.

As a child, I constantly experienced exclusion from my peer group. In order to gain acceptance, I would try and identify the requirements of the group: what did they prize or value? What characteristics must I demonstrate in order to win acceptance?

This form of analytic query commenced at a very age and has continued up to the present. I would undertake it without being aware I was doing it. While the other members of a work group were simply showing up for work, I was engaged in a complete analysis of the work environment, seeking to define what was critical for success and acceptance, what needed to be done, what standard of performance was required or expected. Once I had established those metrics, I would then seek to meet or exceed them.

One consequence of this behaviour is that in every job I have held I have quickly gained respect in the workplace and been promoted into a supervisory or managerial position. I did not seek out such a role. My actions were not undertaken with promotion in mind; I was not even considering the prospect of promotion. I simply wanted to be accepted as a member of the group.

This behaviour also generated domestic conflict. I remember my wife being very unhappy with me due to the inordinate amount of time I devoted to my job, She complained that I was being grossly underpaid, that the company was taking advantage of me, that there was no reason for me to deliver the level of dedication to the firm that I exhibited. I simply could not understand what she was talking about. Her complaint made no sense to me whatsoever.

In that particular job, I doubled my salary each year of employment. I had no concern for the extra money. My focus was on my expanding area of responsibility and the performance standards required to ensure that I would fit in and be accepted as a member of the new group into which I had been promoted.

 

 

 

 

Blogging & Avoidance

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I have identified another benefit of blogging. This deals with blogging and avoidance. It may also involve self-discovery and pacification.

After writing the prior post – A Litany of Forgetting – I went in search of an earlier blog post in which I had attempted to apply a metric to determine if my capacity to create text had improved over the course of time.

In my memory I believe I performed an extensive analysis of this topic, devised appropriate metrics, and then examined my written output as measured on a words per day basis between a date in summer 2012 when I wrote my first insurance claim submission (5 pages written in the course of a month) and a later date when I made a second submission to the insurer, or to some other body.

My memory of the results of this analysis was that there had been a slight improvement between the two dates, something like a 10% variation between the first date and the last. What I really wanted to find was a description of the metrics employed so that I could duplicate the analysis. I wanted to compare my present day ability to create text with my abilities in 2012, and with the contrasting date utilized in 2013.

I searched the blog using several different keywords and, while many positive results were returned, I did not locate the post that is recalled by memory. I have four hypotheses for this:

  • The post does not exist. I think I performed such an analytic comparison, but the reality is that I am imagining something that I wish that I had done.
  • The analysis was performed but was contained in some other document and was not made the subject of a blog post. This is entirely likely. I know I have sought to provide the insurer with some metric that demonstrates the effects of my injury. It is entirely possible that I performed this analysis but then did not use it as the basis for a blog post.
  • My search terms were inadequate to the task. This too is likely. Searching on the word “blog” produced a large number of hits, as did “word count.”. I do not remember the other search terms used. All gave a large number of hits.
  • The analysis was performed, and was entered in a blog post, but was not made the central topic of that post. In some posts I have added an addendum. a sort of colophon created after having had an opportunity to further contemplate the topic. So the analysis may have been performed, it may be in the blog, but it is buried deep within another topic and I failed to find it. This is highly likely.

As I searched, I was shocked by another set of posts based on a TBI inventory completed in September 2012, and again in September 2013. This inventory was very revealing. The shock was due to the fact that I had completely forgotten about it. Now that I have found it, I remember it chiefly for the great difficulty of coding the rather attractive tables that form the basis of each post. I had to hand code each of these as WordPress does not contain any inherent facility to handle and display tabular material.

A second shock came when I began to collect the URLs so that I might list each page of the analysis in this post. This analysis commenced with an introductory overview of each of the six sections in the inventory. This introduction was then followed by a series of six posts detailing the findings in each section. See if you can spot the problem:

Introducing the September 2012 Inventory
Inventory Analysis Section 2
Inventory Analysis Section 3
Inventory Analysis Section 4
Inventory Analysis Section 5
Inventory Analysis Section 6

If you arrived at the conclusion that there was no analysis of Section 1 then you are absolutely correct. I do not know how I missed this error. I do not know how I missed discovery of the omission. I can understand loosing, or omitting, a paragraph of text contained within the context of a much larger work. I cannot understand the loss of an entire numbered section.

It may sound as if I have documented another failure on my part. I prefer to congratulate myself on my success in generating a new insight.

The insight derives from two events. On the desk before me there sits a stamped addressed envelope which contains the letter that I sought to mail yesterday. The letter is dated May 10th and is going out on May 14th. It was delayed, yes, but the positive news is that I have completed the task.

I paid close attention to completion because the letter was referenced in a blog post. I therefore wished to capture the outcome in a second blog post. This blog operates as a sort of confessional. I declare my sins and seek to repair my faults. The blog is ostensibly public but it has no true public audience and is unlikely ever to gain one. Still, writing to the blog carries a sense of making something public, of speaking to the wider world, of communicating with other members of my species. Since I wish to make a good impression on you, my absent reader, I wanted to communicate the fact of task completion. Left to my own devices, I might overlook and completely forget the task.

You will laugh at this. Maybe. What is not funny is the fact that the letter I intend to send today has been in preparation for almost a month. I think I have the means to verify the elapsed time from conception through to realization. This may form the basis of another post.

The relation between blogging and avoidance also arises in respect to the 2012 TBI survey. This inventory reflects a number of issues I would rather not to acknowledge. This may explain why I ever so conveniently managed to “forget” about it. Avoidance may also explain why I failed to complete the review of Section 1. The benefit of this blog is that it makes it much harder for me to avoid encountering unwelcome facts about myself, my capabilities, and my performance. It doesn’t stop me from doing it. It just makes it more difficult to achieve.

The final benefit of the blog is its possible role in pacification. When I found the 2012 inventory and quickly scanned it, I started to become concerned, or upset. A quick reading suggested little improvement from September 2013. If true, this is a very unpleasant and unwelcome fact. I have come to recognize the onset of depressive episodes (I refer to them as “tailspins”). As soon as I recognized the onset of a tailspin, I engaged in writing the blog. The effect was one of instant pacification. Somehow the act of churning out words, and putting them down on digital paper, has a calming effect. I do not know the reason for this.

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Update 20/05/14
I recently located the incomplete draft of Section 1. It may be found here:
Section 1 Analysis
 

 

 

A Litany of Forgetting

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Forgetting is what I am good at. This morning I left the house for a copy run. As I closed and locked the door, I realized the item I intended to copy had been forgotten. So I went back into the house to fetch it. At the copy shop, I realized I had also forgotten both the envelope and the stamp. That letter was clearly not destined to go in the mail today. I also forgot to complete and print a second letter that I had also wished to copy and send.

While on the road, I realized that I knew the route intimately. Each hazard, each bad curve, the blind intersections, the bottomless potholes, those places where other drivers always attempt to do stupid things. Those places where I have done stupid things. Because I always drive the same routes, I know exactly what to look for. I anticipate every possible problem. I never drove in this manner before the accident. I would just get in the car and go. Half the time I was thinking of work, or some other issue when driving. The exception was when driving in falling snow, or freezing rain. Under these conditions, as now, all of my attention was dedicated to safe travel.

I do not understand how it is that in one case I am forgetting things, but in the other instance I am totally focused on events. There were past instances of me forgetting where I parked the car. This problem has been resolved by only parking in a select few locations and using the same location for each visit to that specific area of the city.

On the thirty minute walk to my appointment (My selected locations are often distant from my ultimate destination. I prefer the extended walk to a lost car.), I found myself thinking about the workplace performance review I had found. It suggests that I am far from recovering all of my prior skills and abilities. Then I thought about this blog effort, and the fact that I have managed to enter a post each day for the past seven days; this is a significant change from a year ago when it took several days for me to complete one post. This was not immediately visible to the casual reader as I had started drafting potential blog entries two weeks before actually commencing to post.

So, on the way to my appointment, I was reassured by the belief that despite all of my other deficits, my writing skills have improved. On departing the appointment for the long walk back to the car, I realized my optimism was misplaced. Of last weeks seven posts three were “borrowed” from other texts composed during the 2 month blog hiatus. One post was a direct crib from a letter to my lawyer. The fifth was written at night, in bed, while listening to the rain. Once I had the text blocked out in my head, I needed only to come downstairs to fire up the computer and perform the final act of data entry.

By the time I reached the car I was again concerned over the question of improvement. Am I getting better? Or is improvement an illusion, just wishful thinking on my part? I am going to hazard a guess and claim that yes, there has been an improvement. I feel more positive about writing, I have come to enjoy the discipline of it, the demand that it places on me, the requirement that I come to an appreciation of my world, to exercise judgment, to investigate and weigh different conclusions, the fact that I now have an oeuvre (love the fact that I can now deploy language like that) and a written record of all my triumphs and failures.

When I first started blogging, everything was new and difficult, and laborious and awkward. Now the writing is more playful and less of a forced effort. I think that is worth being labelled as an improvement.