Blogjune Day 6 - on catching up

I said that I'd catch up by Sunday night... here I am, in the wee hours of Monday morning, but I feel like it still counts. I often feel like I'm falling behind, and catching up.

I was out to dinner with my partner's family and friends, and I was struck by some comments around the importance of making the right career decisions that will help ensure a comfortable retirement. This was from somebody who was only a handful of years older than myself.

I felt that familiar pang of, "So, Andrew. How are you going with that, then?" How long will it be until I catch up with where I need to be to be able to retire comfortably by my mid to late 60s? Yes, I have a mortgage, a moderately sized superannuation - and a sizeable HECS debt - certainly not yet on track for where I "need" to be...

Then again, I feel like the goalposts are always shifting. I hear from those a decade younger than me who feel like they'll never be able to own property. For every person who I hear talk about putting extra money into their super, I hear about others contemplating taking out of the super to pay their daily bills and rent.

Part of me still aspires to try to aim higher, earn more, purely for the sake of being able to hang up my hat in 25 years and not have to worry about these things. But at what cost? If I'm comfortable now, somewhere in the middle, then why should I risk making my life more difficult or miserable, for a few dollars an hour more?

Then I think back to the years that I spent volunteering overseas. There's not a day that I look back and wish that I'd spent that time working in a regular job in Australia, earning more money, getting a mortgage sooner, putting more into my super, etc...

I realise that this is a position of massive privilege as it is. So why do I constantly feel like I'm still at a disadvantage?

Blogjune Day 5 - June 2020

 I don't think I'd blame anybody for not participating in Blogjune in 2020. Looking back on that month:

• More than two months into lockdown, and six months after my Dad died, I was just not in a good headspace.
• Also four months into a new job in a new organisation, in what felt like something of a trial by fire approach to learning a new role, and overcoming imposter syndrome regarding my writing and editing skills.
• I pretty much withdrew from most social media interaction - deleted my Twitter account, and vary rarely posted on Facebook. 
• I took time to develop some skills in amateur photography
  

My attempt at being arty

• Being in a full-time live-in relationship tested my ability to adjust and adapt to new domestic arrangements...
• I did a lot of cooking - more than usual.
• Finally, I committed to hiring a plot at the Canberra City Farm - a decision that brought a lot of hard work through the following months, but a good excuse to get out of the house, and develop a bit of a green thumb.

It was a horrendous month, to be honest. I was pushed to the limit, which I guess was the only way for me to learn when to step back, and find beauty and value in some of the simpler pleasures in life - an important lesson that has made the past year much more bearable in hindsight.

Blogjune Day 4 - June 2019

 Flashforward a year to June 2019.  A lot had changed...

• The month began with a mushroom-foraging adventure in a local pine plantations, using newfound foraging skills learnt at a workshop the previous week... 

Spotting the easily identifiable, and edible, saffron milk-cap mushroom.

• I was working for the same organisation, but in a very different role, and presented a webinar all about the Australian Web Archive
• The Broadway Cast Recording of Beetlejuice the Musical came out, and became my new musical obsession
• I went to Sydney to see the Vivid festival for the first, and so far only time.
• I bought tickets to travel to Athens for IFLA 2019 conference, along with a backpacking adventure around Romania.
• I was five months into a new relationship, which had quickly turned into a long-ish distance relationship, but worked surprisingly well. I developed a newfound fondness for the village life in the Southern Highlands every other weekend.

After what had felt like a challenging year in 2018, I was finally settling into something that felt like a comfortable pattern. My professional and social life was great, and I was still discovering new and wonderful things.

Blogjune Day 3 - looking back on June 2018

So, what *did* happen in June 2018 to break my four-year streak of blogging every June?

Looking back on my old emails and social media posts, I can glean the following things that happened:

• The month began a week into home ownership. As the month progressed, I slowly started discovering some of the issues with the apartment that could only become apparent after living in it for a number of weeks.
• This resulted in me spiraling into a mess of anxiety, entertaining notions that I'd made a poor decision and that I would be forever stuck with a crumbling piece of worthless property (which wasn't the case, but my brain couldn't logic in that particular moment).
• I'd deal with this situation by spending every Thursday evening at the Phoenix bar, belting out pop bangers at the weekly karaoke competition night.
• I came equal first at the grand finale, winning half a keg of beer's worth of a bar tab. Unfortunately, the Phoenix closed down in the following months, and whilst I drank a fair portion of this tab, never managed to finish it.
• I also performed at the grand final of the very first Canbeurovision song contest, with my song "Down like Chowne". I did not come last, which felt like an accomplishment in itself.

Who knew that my old scout uniform would still fit,
let alone come in handy for this occasion?

• I bought a lot of second-hand furniture online, and slowly my apartment started to feel like a home.
• I also learnt a lot about how plumbers work, and got to know my neighbours a bit better. By the end of the month, I was settling into an uncomfortable but stable level of security about my life choices in property ownership.
• In my job, I was doing simple but awesome stuff with my social media project, NLA50ppl, and had my conference proposal accepted to speak at the ALIA Information Online conference in 2019.
• I was also working with an international team with NPSIG, preparing what would be an awesome program of events at the IFLA 2019 conference in Kuala Lumpur.
• All in all, it was the best of months, it was the worst of months, one of those roller-coaster months, where I was at both my best and my worst.

Blogjune Day 2 - ghosts of blogjunes past

One thing that I enjoy about blogging is the ability to go back and read my past reflections that encapsulate a moment in my life. Yes, sometimes this can be embarrassing and cringeworthy, but it's a moment in time captured through words (and sometimes images and videos).

By the same token, Blogjune is a whole month captured in words. So, I thought I'd take this opportunity to look back at my past forays into Blogjune...

Whilst the tradition of Blogjune began back in 2010, when I think back to that year, it was the year that I first started to really disengage with the sector...

I didn't start officially participating until 2014, though it's interesting to note that in June 2011, I felt like I was on the verge of leaving the profession for good, and in June 2012, I was already back in a library job in Melbourne, and in June 2013, I was halfway through my first overseas AVID assignment, in Alotau.

June 2014: After a year of hopping between working overseas assignments in PNG and Vietnam, performing at arts festivals in Melbourne, and working casual public library shifts in-between, 2014 was the year that I was making my triumphant return to the library sector, managing a swish school library in the inner suburbs of Melbourne (again). June was a pivotal month for me - clearly I was having a lot of thoughts about whether this was right for me, and by the end of the month, I'd decided to give it all up, and move back to Vietnam to take up a 18-month contract with an NGO in Hanoi.

June 2015: A year later, and I was no longer in Vietnam! The role wasn't a great fit for my skills and experience, which happens, but I think I made the best of a less-than-ideal situation, and still have many positive memories of my time there. On the plus side, I'd been successful in a securing a place in the UN Volunteer program at the UN Mission in Kosovo as an Associate Information Management Officer. Through this month, I was still processing a lot of initial impressions of a new country, dealing with feelings of failure from my previous assignment not working out the way that I'd liked, and trying to maintain a balanced perspective of working in a developing country... clearly I was already mindful of my own mental wellbeing, and the challenges in managing it in these situations.

June 2016: Another year on, and I was coming up to the final month in my UNV contract. The first week comprised of me using up the last of my leave to travel around the UK, volunteering at the Hay Festival, and visiting lots of places on my bucket list, such as Cardiff, Stratford-upon-Avon and Oxford. I was also getting to the point where I needed to figure out which direction my career would continue - whether that would be in libraries or maybe another foray in development.

June 2017: Turned out, it was libraries. By June 2017, I'd finally ticked off another career objective, and secured an ongoing position at the National Library of Australia. It was also a month where I really started reengaging in the sector - I joined ALIA again, after a six-year absence, went to the New Librarians Symposium, and signed up for the ALIA Mentoring Scheme - all things that set me on the path that has led me to where I am now.

2018-2021: Blogjune fell by the wayside, but a lot has happened. I'll reflect more of these in coming posts.

However, it's interesting to note that June has, in many ways, marked some real turning points for me in the past. I wonder if June 2021 will be remarkable in a similar sense?

Blogjune Day 1- on deadlines

It's June again, and this blog post is prompted by Con, snail, and Kathryn...

I could be forgiven for letting #blogjune slip by me last year, but it's actually been four years since I last participated. My life has changed in oh so many ways since then, that I feel like there's enough that I can catch up on from the intervening years that will fill the month.

Speaking of catching up... I'm starting this series three days behind schedule. Time to set myself some deadlines, I think!

My working life is currently dominated by writing deadlines, and true to form, I'm already behind, but determined to catch up before my tardiness impacts on anybody else's workflows.

Deadlines are a funny thing, aren't they? My usual practice is to set deadlines that allow a couple of days flexibility, so that I can chase things up, or accommodate the occasional spanner in the works.

The problem is, once my reputation for flexible deadlines precedes me, everybody knows that when I set them a deadline, a couple of days late isn't going to end the world. I react by offsetting future deadlines by a few days, and before we know it, I've set a whole lot of deadlines that don't actually represent the timeframe in which I actually need work done by.

And then there are those who want to know, 'Yeah, but what's the actual deadline. You know, the absolute deadline that you actually need stuff by?'

Fair question.

I'd love to work in a world where we only work by actual deadlines. ie if you don't meet this deadline, then there will be actual consequences (probably not actual death, but at least death stares). None of this mucking around dancing around arbitrary dates, running on the assumption that we're all equally as unable to exercise discipline in getting our jobs done... but to err is human, and to ignore the fallibility of human behaviour is to set oneself up for failure.

So, my deadline to get back on track will be this Sunday - you can expect another five posts by then.

I could show you my favourite obsession.

I have always loved a good puzzle. Jigsaws, wordsearches, crosswords - particularly cryptics - and high school maths, which totally counts. There's something satisfying about trying to crack a code, or just working through a process of elimination, to gain a solution to a problem that's seemingly impossible.

In a previous workplace, we used to have jigsaw puzzles in the tearoom, which in theory is an excellent way to momentarily clear one's mind between workplace tasks. Our outgoing team leader, as a farewell gift, gave us a 1000-piece puzzle of the Magna Carta. It was ridiculously difficult - and whilst it was probably envisaged as a team exercise, it became more of a spectator sport to see how long it would take Andrew to persevere until it was completed. And I did complete it after several months, and many flex hours taken over long lunchtimes, and the occasional afternoon after clocking off.

But that was nothing, compared to a far greater puzzle - one that has taken up many years of my life, and had an impact on friendships, mental health and my personal finances....  yes, I'm referring to the puzzle that is career planning in the library sector.

I was one of the lucky ones. I got my foot in the sector as a library casual worker when I was a student. That led to a full-time job as a library officer - which was when the obsession started. The first two steps were relatively straightforward: (a) get relevant experience, and (b) get a qualification. My strategy: do whatever it takes to make sure I have an entry level professional role by the time I graduate - preferably sooner. In my case, 'Whatever it takes' meant moving to Darwin, and within two years I was managing a small public library branch.

But that wasn't enough for my obsession. Getting to this point in regional Australia was one thing, but making it in the library sector in a capital city was another, and that was my next goal. I thought it would be easy. It wasn't. Turns out, in the days before Zoom, it's hard to be competitive in a phone interview from the other side of the continent, and it's even harder to be competitive when you're fresh off a four-hour red eye flight. Every rejection felt like failure, and I would rerun the interviews through my head, checking that I'd done all the right things - worn a suit and tie, spouted prepared responses to questions anticipated around the selection criteria, shook hands (in pre-COVID times!), and followed up with enthusiastic emails reiterating my interest in the job.

I felt trapped - particularly by one of the big rules of career planning: 'Don't quit your job until you have something else lined up.' And then, somebody gave me contradicting advice: 'Why don't you just move back to Melbourne, and see what happens?' Against all my instincts, I decided to embrace the insecurity, and quit what really was a dream job at the time, and moved back to Melbourne. Within two weeks, I had a new job, developing new skills in the library sector.

It wasn't the last time that my obsession reared its ugly head. It happened when I would submit application after application for overseas volunteer assignments. It happened for years of applying for the APS - really, when your guide to job applications is entitled 'Cracking the code', you do have to wonder! Living in Canberra, I remember once sitting in a cafe, and overhearing a couple of fledgling public servants engaged in looping conversations about their plans to move up and make it to EL1 by the time they turn 35. I also saw it in my colleagues at the UN when I was a volunteer at the UN Mission in Kosovo. Their obsession with their career planning strategies was next level. It was horribly unhealthy, and overwhelmed their hopes and dreams for their future.

When I left my last job - and with it, an ongoing place with a coveted library employer - one of my colleagues was shocked, and told me that I was taking a huge risk. 27-year-old me would probably agree. But if there's one thing that I've learned, it's that some puzzles are far too complicated to crack, and that obsession with the long game is just not worth being thwarted by human randomness getting in the way. At at its heart, career planning is about trying to control the uncontrollable. At its worst, it feels like an impossible thought spiral that will never end. At its best, it's an addiction that I know that I shouldn't feed.

These days, I sympathise for those who are entering the sector - it's certainly no easier now than it was then (despite the repeated promises of retiring baby boomers!), and the rules are constantly changing. Recently, my eye caught a new series of articles from ABC Everyday, entitled 'Ready for a career glow up?' Apparently, career plans are becoming a thing of the past, so now I definitely feel a bit silly, right? (To be fair, the list of 5 tips at the end of the article sound suspiciously like career planning...)

Of course, I do feel privileged to be in a position where I no longer feel like I need to break into the sector, nor am I feeling like I'm getting close to obsolescence. I'm somewhere in the middle. You could perhaps call it 'career inertia' - and there's definitely something comforting about it. Rather than obsessing over regaining control, for the first time in fifteen years I'm really content to embrace the insecurity, and go with the opportunities that come my way.