Operations Management as a Lifestyle Choice
Being disabled is an exercise is redefining capacity on an almost daily basis, and then trying to make sure that expenditures stay below the limits of that capacity. In many respects it resembles my experiences working in the IT industry: unpredictable, inarguable, autocratic. And there is always, always debt dragging everything else down. Buying down that debt takes way more time than accruing it did, and is never, ever the primary focus of work, unless there's a real special occasion or event that allows for that sort of focus.
As an example: my cognitive disability from Long COVID was severe – the impact measured in the number of minutes it takes for me to complete a crossword – and the best way to offset that impact is to practice doing the thing. I now do multiple crosswords a day, and while my time to completion is dropping measurably (and gratifyingly approaching my pre-COVID times) I am essentially stealing that time from whatever else I'm supposed to be doing every day. I usually do one in the morning to wake up and one in the evening before bed, not for diagnostic reasons but because that's where it's easiest to steal sleep time.
The recuperative impact of proper sleep is extremely well-known, even as so many other things about sleep seem impenetrable, and for disabled people that's often even more true: I heal, I increase my capacity, and I expand my abilities best when I get plenty of sleep. But we live in a world where the number of things required simply to continue existing does not respect the needs of the body, especially the disabled body. So I steal sleep, knowing that some future me will end up abandoning entire days of work when my body rebels and forces me to stop and recover.
Anyone who has had a migraine understands, but anyone who hasn't had a migraine doesn't truly get the idea of pain so bad and so unrelenting that the entire body rebels from anything, including things like "hearing", "seeing", and "eating" among other things. The only thing that a migraine allows is recognizing and enduring a migraine. There is no escape.
And migraines are only one of the ways that the body rebels, or at least my body rebels, when I overextend myself. Over and over again, I am given the lesson that ignoring warning signs and limitations results in disaster, and yet over and over again I push myself to ignore signs to accomplish what I "should be doing".
I started writing this newsletter with the intention of posting every weekday. I am currently averaging about one email every three weeks. This is what's known as a Capacity Problem. And often the only way to deal with a Capacity Problem is for the manager to go to her manager and say "Hey, look. We promised X. But it's not gonna happen. So I can give you Y, or Z, but X is off the table." And sometimes that works. And sometimes it gets you fired. But it's not the team's fault that the estimates were wrong, because humans are incredibly bad at estimating things.
Sometimes you have to face reality. And sometimes that costs you personally as well as professionally. But there's no magic button. People are just people.
