Getting comfortable about work that drags on forever

This has been a busy, tiring week. My diary doesn't look crazy, there are no big deadlines... but I've been labouring over a competitor review document in the last few weeks, which sounds like such a silly thing to labour over.

The last minute rush to set up the Miro boards for this month's internal guild discussion session added more intensity to my Thursday. And I was ambitious when I signed up for one too many sessions on mental health, which were running as part of an internal initiative. I'll have to go back through the recordings once I have a bit of breathing space... some of them are really good.

I have been reluctant to produce standard UX documents for non-UX stakeholders. After years of producing so many of them, they end up being such a waste of time because they lack the rigour, substantiation, care and preparation they deserve to elevate insights to a point it makes any difference. You get out what you put in and all that.

Now a few weeks since starting on the deck, I wasn't expecting to spend as much effort and time as I have just to produce the documented insights. I feel I should know this by now, but my ballpark figures never seems to match what actually happens.

I might as well go back to my old software development heuristic of doubling or tripling initial estimates — a shorthand I used whenever I was asked to say when a piece of software would be done. It worked surprisingly well for many years.

This just goes to show "years of experience" feels like an inappropriate justification for anything, really. 10 years of experience - wireframes, JSON, agile, Microsoft Word, competitor reviews.

I think my gripes come from the discomfort that the work I do seems to drag on forever. And it's sort of the nature of the beast.... quite a bit of it is messy, thinking work.

I might as well get over it and get comfortable embracing the "dragginess" of strategic work.