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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.