Sleep Dep Zombie

I’ve been on the same contract for quite a long time. It has been just over 3 years which is kind of weird in itself considering when I started it was supposed to be for 90 days.  It isn’t like I’ve been doing the same thing for the last 3 years. That would have been deadly boring! In that time what I’ve been responsible for has changed multiple times. By this point the work I do has very little in common with the rest of the people on my team or what I was originally hired to do.

Not surprisingly, this is happening again (sort of). Always in the past it has come with a directive of go manage this migration, handle this new stuff we are supporting, or go clean up this mess. However, this time it’s a bit different. I report to a different manager and have been given plenty of rope.

One of my initial projects is to define what my new role does.  This position doesn’t exist. I am making it up as I go along.  There will be some input from my managers, but at the end of the day it will be whatever I manage to create for myself.

One would not be unreasonable in wondering, “That sounds like a great deal. You get to just define your job and do whatever you want, within reason. What’s the matter with that?”

It’s not really a bad thing. The trick is I’m not totally getting rid of all my previous responsibilities. Some of them are getting rolled up into this new gig, and I am getting an opportunity to hand off some of the old work as part of this process. Unfortunately, if I keep too much or define my new responsibilities too broadly I run the risk of drowning. If I hand off too much or define everything too narrowly I run the risk creating something that is irrelevant. No one wants to be irrelevant. It is hard to judge where to draw these lines because no one is doing most of this new work right now.

Today, as I make up my new job description, I think I’m erring on the side of taking on too much. It will probably be easier to hand off extra work if it becomes necessary than to scramble to find something to prove what I’m doing is worthwhile. I fear that a fair bit of political capital has been used in getting this spot created and I don’t expect to have a second chance to do it right if I’m wildly off the mark.

Hopefully, I’ll manage to get it right.