At Google we have these quarterly goals that we're supposed to make for ourselves. In my experience, the steps involved in sitting down and actually thinking through your goals for the quarter is the most valuable part of the process, far beating using it as an evaluation tool for yourself. It's an opportunity to take a break from your daily momentum and examine what you're doing, why, and if there's something more important you could be doing.

This quarter, I included four personal goals that have absolutely nothing to do with work. 20 days into the quarter, I have to say that I'm really happy with how they're turning out. Not only am I sticking with them (or trying really hard), but I'm finding that they're yielding positive results, which means that they were well-chosen.

1. Don't say "no" to social events just because you're feeling lazy/superior/antisocial - This has been a big one for me. I realized that I was starting to become a bit of a social snob, refusing many social events just because it felt like too much work for too little gain. But of course that's the way to quickly descend into a boring social life. Sometimes it's at the weirdass social events that you weren't excited to attend that you meet the most awesome new people and experience crazycool new things. So this is my explicit goal to try to be less antisocial. So far (in only 20 days!) there's been almost a dozen things I've done that I might have said no to otherwise, and most of them have been very cool, or at least a whole lot more interesting than I had predicted.
   
   
2. Incorporate being active into everyday things - I don't mean join a tennis group, or start jogging in the mornings. This goal was inspired by a friend of mine (who doesn't read this site, but if they did they'd know this was them immediately) who displays a great deal of youthful energy just in everyday stuff. You know how kids walk along the sidewalk and come up to a bench and jump onto it, walk along it, and jump off? That. Having just that liiiittle bit of extra energy throughout the day. So far in the quarter I've gotten this goal to the stage of changing "oh I ran out of dishwasher detergent but the grocery store is far so I'll pick it up next time I'm there" to "oh I ran out of dishwasher detergent, lemme grab my shoes and zip over to grab more". It still needs a lot of work, but it feels like a good first step.
   
   
3. Don't use exclusion as team building - About a month ago I realized that this is a tactic I was employing a lot. There's no easier way to form a strong cohesive group that to draw a thick line around it and frown at everyone on the outside. This is a very flawed but very human way to create groups. Ultimately, of course, this becomes a negative force for the team. Healthy competition: good. Gentle teasing: sure. Using "us and them" to unify a team: no good.
   
   
4. Don't fall asleep reading / watching TV - Falling asleep to a familiar movie is lovely. You can close your eyes and just listen to the familiar dialogue, letting your brain fill in the rest, and gradually your mind's movie forks from the real thing and you fall asleep into movie-inspired dreams. Unfortunately, that falling asleep time is also a really good time for digesting the day: thinking about what went right and what went wrong, deciding what tomorrow's going to bring, etc. I realized that I get next to no "quiet thinking time" anymore...I'm always doing something. So in an attempt to fix this, I'm banning the use of books and TV as a sleep aid. So far I've only been successful about one night in three. Gonna try harder.
   
   

If you were setting small personal goals for yourself this quarter, what would they be?

I'm currently sitting in an airport in Cancun, for the second day in a row, trying to catch a flight home. Our original flight was canceled ("Attention passengers, the gas tank on this plane appears to have a leak") after sitting on the hot runway for approximately eighty years. And then we ran into trouble: there was a 757 plane's worth of passengers who needed to book other flights, which were already crazy-packed due to swine flu "fearvacuations".

We were put up in hotels for the night and then shuttled back to the airport at 5 am only to discover that all of our potential replacement flight to catch today had been cancelled. What's more: there was no one at the US Airways desk to take our questions, try to help us rebook, etc. We were told to sit tight for three hours until someone could arrive to answer our questions.

Now's when things get interesting. The first thing to happen is that all of the couples start fighting. It was amazing to watch, like a ripple across the crowd of couples finding some reason to blame each other, or to get impatient about something unrelated ("stop breathing so loud!"). Next the rumours started spreading about us being stuck here forever, or someone on our plane having swine flu, or all planes being grounded, etc. The food places at the airport only took cash, and most of the people didn't have any money left on them. I sat and watched as panic gripped the crowd in a remarkably short amount of time.

"Are you Canadian?", someone sitting next to me asked, noticing my MEC backpack. I nodded, "but I'm flying to San Francisco." "I'm trying to get to Vancouver", he said, "probably farther than any of these guys, but they're the ones really freaking out." That's when I decided that it was time to take charge of the crowd. There were over 200 adults freaking out for no good reason: freaking out wasn't going to solve this. Besides, I like making order from chaos. :)

Step One: Calm the crowds down. Grabbing my new Canadian ally, we found a Starbucks open at the airport and I purchased $20 of coffees. Walked back to the crowd and handed them out to people, asking for donations for another round if they had any cash on them to help someone else out. We soon had $20 again, went back and bought $20 more of coffee to pass it out. 15 minutes later, most of the crowd was sipping a warm beverage, and feeling good about themselves either for having bought a stranger a coffee, or for having a coffee purchased for them. People started chatting with each other about where they were from, what they were doing in Mexico, etc.

Step Two: Solve the problem. I walked over to another airline's desk and asked if I could use the phone to call US airways to rebook our flights. The nice lady at the desk said sure, of course, but it was going to take forever to book all of us a new flight. I called US airways' american number and explained the situation to them: we were all stranded, we all needed flights home, there were 200+ of us.

Step Three: Handle scale gracefully. If Google has taught me nothing else, I know how to handle large scale problems. Needing to book 200+ flights efficiently? No problem. "Attention everyone", I shouted. Everyone stopped and looked; why shouldn't they? I was the girl who brought them coffee. I explained that I was going to need to know where everyone was going and we were going to divide into groups. "Pretend this area is the US", I explained, "with the north east here and the south west here. Everyone go to approximately where you want your final destination to be and group up with everyone else who is going to the same city."

It took a little while for everyone to figure out what I meant but soon we had little bunches of people. Those going to Phoenix, those going to Houston, those going to Seattle, etc. "There are 26 people going to Phoenix", my Canadian ally explained to the lady on the phone, reading off their names. She found a flight for all of them leaving this evening.

The San Francisco group (there were 4 of us) got a flight this morning that stops in Philly and will take us 15+ hours to get home, but better than being stuck here in a chaotic mess!

By the time that the people at the US airways desk finally arrived in person, we all had already booked our flights -- we only had to pick up our tickets and go.

Man, crowds sure freak out easily. But at least they're equally happy to drone-like listen to someone who sounds like they know what they're doing.

So I'm being quarantined at home for 7 days.

That's right, Google is sending me (and anyone else who traveled to Mexico in the past few days) home until the incubation period for swine flu has passed. (The Google doctor was especially unhappy about the days I spent in the airport coming into contact with god knows how many people.)

As Anais put it, this is "such a [Catspaw] thing to happen". I know, right?! I look at other people's lives and so many of you have weird stuff like this happen to you .... maybe twice a year. I feel like weird stuff happens to me disproportionately often. Am I wrong about that?

I'm gonna go buy a shitton of groceries tonight and then settle in for a week of sitting at home. I figure since I'm away on sick leave, I only have to work half as hard as if I were in the office, right? ;)

I miss my team already. :(