The past few days I’ve felt a bit stuck in my work, feeling the need for some change although I’m not quite sure what yet. My weekly routine has been quite that: routine.

Every week, I spend four days with my primary consulting customer and the fifth day I teach classes at ITVitae. For over a year I’ve been thinking how I could change that up, especially now that I’m self-employed and “a businessperson”. I don’t just get to run my own career, I have to!

I’ve been juggling all kinds of options.

• Can I maybe split my four days among more than one customer?
• Could I maybe split weeks between teaching for another company and doing smaller contracting gigs?
• Could I do three days of contracting, having one day for “management” work? Does that mean I could try and get an employee?
• Am I really happy with the direction my consulting gigs have had, these past years?

After a rather big family event (one of our two cats passed away) I turned all the sourer and more introspective. I think I want something to change, but I’m not sure what.

So, I got to mind mapping and brainstorming. Thinking about things that give me energy and things that really eat energy from me. I put those into clouds of “things I like which help others”, “things I like which feed my ego”, “things I enjoy”, “things I dislike” and “things I’m not good at”.

Which resulted in the overview you see above (here’s a larger image). EDIT: Just to give more insight into my process, here's what the whiteboarding session ended up looking like. 

I then looked at where those things either feed upon another, or where they clash.

For example:

• Ever since I took over as CEO of Unixerius, I’ve been thinking about helping juniors by employing them, getting them into IT. But after guiding five interns across four organizations I have learned two things: I’m not good at “bossing” someone if they underperform and between all my other work I don’t have/make/take enough time to manage them.
  
  So, if I really want to do this, then I really need to drop hands-on work. Which clashes with the fact that I really, really enjoy doing my own hands-on work. 
  
  Conclusion: it is not a good idea for me to hire a junior employee of my own. If I can help another senior who is self-reliant like I was when Dick was CEO, I’ll do it! But I can’t in good conscience hire a newcomer.
  
  
• Some of the best fun I had while contracting, was four customers ago when I worked for a government subcontractor. At the time I speced, designed, built and documented three key infrastructures for a green fields IT environment. I built an HSM-backed PKI, a Graylog central logging system and a PAM solution as core infra for hundreds of servers. 
  
  That was a huge challenge and it let me run three whole projects by myself. I was hands-on with everything, and I loved it!
  
  Yes, I also had to deal with some of the formal architecture stuff which I loathed, but it was worth it. But I do know for a fact that I do not want to make architecture my main activity. Never ever. 
  
  Conclusion: I want to do more hands-on work again, building something real instead of telling people how to do it. 
  
  
• There’s a big clash between my dislike of not understanding something I work with and me wanting to really learn in-depth about the tech I work with. This frequently leads to imposter syndrome because I keep learning how little I really know. 
  
  That’s not something easily fixed. That’s not something you take away. It’s something I need to learn how to cope with through introspection, mindfulness, and acceptance.
  
  Conclusion: I should find exercises to accept my limitations, while also investing time and money into learning what I want and need.
  
  
• The last three of my assignments were all about DevSecOps. I very much enjoy the tech aspect of it, helping people by building pipelines and tools that make developers’ lives easier. I love teaching people how to improve their work, giving them new skills. And I don’t even mind working with architects to help clarify security and compliance requirements.
  
  But I have a hard time dealing with management BS and politics. And it grates on me when people willingly refuse to learn new things. Fighting against the momentum and drudgery of a slow turning ship wears me down. I really do want to help people, but from time to time I need a change of pace. 
  
  Heck, last year my WICCON presentation covered all this stuff!
  
  Conclusion: Next time, maybe less with the AppSec coaching stuff, no?
  
  
• I really want to spend MORE time learning, spending time and money on my own education. To be open: I’m afraid of falling behind! I am afraid of losing relevance in the consulting market. 
  
  But I don’t have time enough! I already spend many of my evenings on learning, or on preparing classes for my students, so there’s no more room over there. 
  
  I could switch back to three days of consulting, one day of teaching and then have one day for learning. I could do that for a few months and then go back to four days consulting. That would work!
  
  Of course, the alternative to staying relevant as consultant would be to hire a few people and manage them while they bring in money. But we already covered that: I don’t know how to pivot into that successfully and I don’t know if I want to.

So… Decisions!

• I have already started pitching lines to new potential consulting customers, so I can do a 2/2 split in my days and work on two different assignments. 
  
  
• I have informed my current primary customer that I will be decreasing my hours a bit. This will either give me the room I need for that second customer, or it gives me temporary respite for some additional learning!
  
  
• I have discussed my desire for more hands-on work with my coworkers at my current consulting customer. I had already set wheels in motion for a project to implement a new infra and app stack, so we decided that I would do the who shebang. 
  
  That means moving part of my DevSecOps coaching and managerial work to the new internal hire, which is a good thing. 
  
  
• I have become a lot more “selfish” insofar that I’m outright decreasing my availability to my primary customer, to make room for teaching and learning. 
  
  I’m teaching my week-long DevSecOps intro class twice this fall and I’m doing SANS Amsterdam this October.

This introspection has been useful! 

I’m not done yet though. I need to rethink my planned learning path, to make sure I’m still investing time in the right things.