On quality over quantity and my career journey

This post was published on November 8, 2017

As you might have read in last week’s blog post, TestBash Manchester, the talks I’ve heard there and the discussions I had around the event with other speakers and attendees, left me with a lot to think about. Especially Martin Hynie’s talk on tester craftsmanship, apprentices, journeymen and masters of the craft led to me asking a lot of questions to myself on where I am now, how I ended up where I am today, where I want to go and, most importantly, if the things that I am doing at the moment contribute to, or maybe hinder me, in my own journey towards who I want to become.

Martin’s talk and how he described masters of a craft confirmed me that that, for me, is what I do want to become: a master in the craft of automation. Someone that others turn to when they need help, and someone that is able to help and guide others on their way to becoming a master -or at least a better craftsperson- themselves. I also immediately realized that I’m nowhere near that point yet.

I might be on my way, possibly (hopefully!) even on the right way, but having thought about this for a bit now, it once more occurred to me that there is so much more to learn. Some aspects that I need to improve are directly tied to automation and testing, others are skills that are more broadly applicable (public speaking, teaching, communication skills, to name just a few), but all in all, there’s a lot of learning left to do.

I am very much looking forward to taking the next steps on my path towards mastery, but I also realize that I need to get rid of some superfluous baggage at the moment, consisting mostly of activities that take up a lot of my time yet aren’t contributing (enough) to my journey. In the words of the German designer and academic Dieter Rams, it’s time for ‘less but better’, or ‘weniger aber besser’ as he puts it himself, being a German and all..

Anyway, there are a couple of work-related activities that I will need to get rid of -or at least change significantly- in order to carve out the time required to work on the important. Starting with the projects I’m working on. I’ve just wrapped up one, but I’m still working on two different projects in parallel.

Where I used to think this was the ideal situation to be in (I do get bored quickly if I’m working on the same thing for too long), I’ve slowly started to come to the realization that all this context switching is driving down the quality of my work. Believe, no matter how hard you try dedicating specific days to specific projects, there will always be overlap in the form of emails, phone calls and other seemingly urgent, and sometimes even important, interruptions. Just like with other forms of multitasking, I lose a lot of time moving my mind from one project to the other and back again, sometimes multiple times a day.

What doesn’t help is that not all of the projects I’ve been working on lately have been equally satisfying (and in specific cases, that’s putting it mildly..). Doing only one project at a time should allow me to think more clearly about whether or not the project is, in fact, a good fit for me. So, effective as soon as I wrap up my current projects, I’ll start committing myself to working on just a single client project (meaning by-the-hour consulting work) at a time. Ideally, that would take up 3 (maybe sometimes 4, maybe sometimes 2) days of my working week, ensuring that I am both set with regards to my financial commitments (gotta feed the kids!) as well as have enough time left to dedicate to the other things I want and/or feel the need to work on. Most of those things revolve around training courses, workshops and a bit of public speaking, by the way.

Committing to less but better also means that I’m, at least for the moment, giving up on writing weekly blog posts for this site. Even though it is a highly rewarding activity, it takes up a lot of time to plan, write and review blog posts. I’ll leave the discussion on whether or not my blog posts look like significant time has been put into it to you.. Instead, I’ll shift towards writing at least one blog post per month.

The good news is that this will leave me more time to do research and thinking for my blog posts, which (at least theoretically) should lead to higher quality output. Again, less but better.. I might post more often than once a month, in case I’ve read a good book related to testing or automation, a conference experience I want to share or anything else I feel like writing about, since those posts take less effort in my case. However, I think I need to stop pressurizing myself to write a weekly blog post, since it might start to affect the quality soon. If it hasn’t started doing so already.

Lastly, I am considering looking for a mentor who can help me take the next steps on my journey towards mastery. The above measures I’m taking should help freeing up time to do the things I feel are important (e.g., more time for learning, more time to invest in teaching and developing courses), but I am by now quite convinced that I might benefit from a mentor that helps me to navigate the career and life path that’s ahead of me. I’d love to hear from others who either have been on roughly the same point in their career and have (or have not) benefited from having a mentor, or who can help me find a good mentor. All input is greatly appreciated.

So, in short, you’ll hear less from me from this moment on, but hopefully also more. And better. I’m looking forward to the next stage of my journey.

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