The 9-to-5 at a Manager's Peak Season

Today (well, Wednesday) was a long day...

Knowing that a colleague was under pressure to deliver news about something related to my team, I'd told him that I was available (amongst other time slots) before 10:15 a.m. My calendar has a blocker scheduled for 9 to 10 a.m. every morning named "No Morning Meetings," but I torpedoed my own initiative.

At the time where I closed my laptop for the evening, I wasn't aware yet which time he had chosen. When my smartphone ringtone went off before 9 a.m., I suspected and then was able to confirm that in fact the meeting slot was indeed at 9 a.m. Looking in the video call preview, I saw that I looked more or less like night owls look at 9 a.m., and with 3 minutes to go did a few arm circles to get my blood moving and look more alert. The meeting didn't go too badly; and, despite the close relationship between early morning hours and intellectual underachievement, no glaringly absurd things were said.

After that there was one meeting after another until lunch. For lunch, I opened a parcel that a lovely colleague had sent as a pick-me-up: chocolate, scented bath lozenges, and tea. It was a great and most welcome surprise.

Then I had to go for a corona rapid test; it was quiet there and I was the only pokee. It has still been windy today; January has been cloudy to an above-average degree, but the wind swept aside the blanket so that sun rays could pierce through. It also drove specks of sidewalk dirt into my eyes so that I faintheartedly took shelter in the nook of a building until the fiercest gusts had passed.

After lunch there was also one meeting after another.

Meanwhile, like densely flocked storm clouds, the consciousness loomed that I still need to finish coordinating all of my team's yearly self-reviews, peer reviews and company value criteria into a people-manager's overview. I have finished rating every friend, brother, and uncle in my team from 1 to 5, which felt like vivisecting vulnerable little animals one moment and like ripping my heart out the next moment. On Friday I need to join other team leads for a meeting with someone from the parent company, where we calibrate these scores.

(Calibrate = If one team lead believes that all their geese are swans and give them 5s, that team lead will need to lower the scores to match the dourer conservatism of other team leads, and give everyone's teammates a fairer chance.)

At the same time we're still architecting our projects for the next half year. (Which also gave rise to my 9 a.m. meeting.)

After 6 p.m. I went to my voice coaching elsewhere in Berlin.

A police car passed me when I was near the city centre and joined two other cars. They were reinforcement for a group of officers who were clustered around a man, crouched on the sidewalk, who was hoarsely shouting in Arabic. It's always strange living in the city when, absorbed in the most mundane line of thought, you suddenly brush against the deepest dramas and most poignant troubles of someone else's life.