Recently the media has been a buzz with the layoffs in the tech industry. It is even sad to have seen the company I work for take part in layoffs.

As a middle manager, the layoffs my company did are now a long running problem I have to plan for and manage for the next several years. Overnight the sentiment on the teams shifted from how great the company is and how they plan to work here for years to one of questioning when the next round of layoffs and if they will be part of it. No matter what our CEO says, or us lower managers say, the sentiment is hard to move as actions speak more than words.

To start off the year, I got to take a several month break from my graduate school program, which allowed me to use some of the free time to clean up my backlog of tasks and by extension recover from my burnout. However, returning to school again, really highlights how some classes have been great and others have made me question why I continue in this program.

What really decides if a class is good or not is the teacher. One of my teachers spent the first week of the semester talking about how great they are and selling using the software that the company they work for produces over other common tools such as excel or Tableau which other classes in the program use. This overall leads to a bad taste for the class, as the tool itself is getting sold to me instead of showing me what the tool can do. The focus on this tool, also means that I do not understand the basic concepts of how to do the same tasks without the tool. Most classes up to this point have shown how to do the concept in excel, teaching the basics of how a process works using a that almost all companies have access to and then how another tool could help do the job faster for an added cost.

So I love to play Minecraft, or what I commonly call digital legos. After a long week with work and school, it is great to sit down at the computer and mine and place blocks in a digital world. Sometimes I do this alone with just an audio book, sometimes I like to hang and chat with friends, but one of the most exciting things is when you are on a server with other people as each time you log into the server, something in the world changes as the world is ever growing. But the challenge has always been finding a group of people to play with.

Often in my professional and academic life myself, or someone else, will have done something wrong. And when called out on “wrongness”, I have noticed about three general reactions: deny the wrongness, justify the wrongness, blame others for the wrongness, or admit to the wrongness and figure out how to move forward. The first two of denying and justifying seems to go hand in hand and also happens to be the one that I use to use frequently and still catch myself returning to time-to-time.

Prior to starting my recent travels I lived within the DC metro system, which overall I will say is one of the better system in the United States. However the placement of some of the stations was less than ideal as the stations were clearly designed for cars and not the humans. Along with the design of the metro system is clearly moving people into and out of DC if you happen to not already be within DC.

For the last several months, I have been escaping the DC cold and traveling around to warmer areas. My travels have brought me to Phoenix. While traveling around I have not had a car, so I generally get the explore the walkability and public transportation of each city.

Phoenix has stood out to me as one of the oddest places for the no car life style. The street I am on is a main street with a train that runs up and down the street and hits many of the populated areas. The store mix on the street is not bad, with generally restaurants and connivance stores within a half mile to one mile walk. However, this is where the oddity comes in. The stores have a face towards the main street with the public transportation and the sidewalks, however this is actually the back of the store with the main entrance of the side with parking lot behind.

Every organization I work in, there is at least one manager, leader, or coach that blames members of their team for failures when the team does not hit goals, wins, etc. This is an interesting conundrum as the most important job of any manager is picking the people for their team and then working to maximize the ability the of the team members. So what does it look like when a manager blames a team member?

Burnout can be challenging to recognize even while having significant impact on you daily life including reduced sleep, anxiety, depression, weight gain, and more. But commonly we got about trying to fix burnout all wrong.

The source of burnout is challenging to recognize, but it tends to be related to some persistent part of your environment. Maybe it is from work, home, school, friends, a combination of, lifestyle choices, or something else altogether. And even once you have figured out which of these that it is, there is still the question of can it even be changed and if not what else can you do?

I tend to live a very busy between work, school, social, and traveling around experiencing living in new cities and all that entails. It is easy to become overwhelmed and stressed out with all that is going and so easy to cut out time alone or exercising.

Walks are this great thing as the tend to be able to bundle both some exercise and time alone to let your brain think and recover from the rest of everything that is going. On a walk your mind is free to experience a larger world instead and to see the mix of life going on around you. While walking your brain is free to think about other areas and come up with ideas. While walking, you should ignore your phone and take a step back from all the other connections.

As someone who tended to follow conservative finances growing up, one of the hardest lessons I have had to learn is that sometimes you just have to spend money to make money. Well this applies to many area of business, a common place to see this is in higher education.

The cost of education is growing every year and more people are considering trade schools or learning on the job as an alternative. But in the “considering” is the key point, it is to evaluate the different options. Both options have costs, risks, and possible returns. It is only with all three can a choice really be made.