Time keeps on slippin'...

What a week.

When General Petraeus took command at the beginning of July, he stated that he would have a 30 day "settle-in" period during which he would get up to speed on what was happening on the ground.  This is the mark of a good commander.  Changing things willy-nilly without learning about the process you're tinkering with is a bad idea.  With no context of how things work, and no idea of how well they work, making changes is folly, at best.  You may be breaking the most efficient part of your organization without knowing it.

For example, a relatively new O-6 Colonel just moved in as the head of an organization a couple buildings over from us.  One of his first questions was "what are the duty hours here?"  Typical of the rest of the command, the office he now commands worked 8 AM to 8 PM everyday with a half day on Friday and two hours off Sunday morning.  His immediate response: "Well that's gonna change now that I'm here."  They now work full days on Friday and are expected to be in the office until 10 PM.  This change was made within a few hours of him arriving at Camp Eggers.  He had no knowledge of the situation in the office, no idea of the quality or quantity of the work his staff was able to complete with the hours they were working at the time.  But he thought those hours sounded like people were being lazy, so he changed them.  Now his soldiers hate him, they come to work tired as they aren't getting as much sleep as they used to, and they aren't getting any more work accomplished than they were before.  These are the kinds of things that can happen without learning about your command and it's processes before making changes.

Thankfully, General Petraeus knows this.  He gave himself those 30 days to learn what was going on before he started making policy changes.  Unfortunately for me, those 30 days are now over, and the good General is starting to ask for more pointed data to inform decisions.  And when a four-star general asks for something, people run around like their hair is on fire until they get it.  The requests have been hot and heavy for the past seven days or so, with no sign of a slow down.

And in an unfortunate, cosmic coincidence, the three-star general in command of NTM-A/CSTC-A (where I work) just got back from three weeks of R&R and needs to get be brought up to speed on what he missed.  And because it's the beginning of a new month, the two-star general that my organization reports to most often wants to be briefed on last month's personnel data and issues to recruiting and training.  That's nine stars worth of generals asking questions.  NINE.  Those questions require data in order to answer accurately.  Guess who gets to provide a lot of that data?  That's right.  Me.  In the past week I've turned in slides for four different briefs and one info paper, and have slides for five more briefings in the next five days, one of which I will be responsible for delivering.  And the hits just keep on coming. 

All of this work doesn't come without a toll.  Just like the last few weeks of a school semester when everything is due at once, you surge your effort over a short period of time and end up exhausted by the end.  That is definitely what I am: exhausted.  I've been having to sleep late (0730) and skip my workouts in the morning to try and get as much rest as I can.  I haven't been able to stay up to type on my blog since I've been getting to back to my room after 10 PM every night (only doing it tonight since I get to sleep in tomorrow.  Half-day Friday, yay!)  I haven't been able to call my family in the morning back home because I'm too busy trying to finish products for deadlines or am wrapped up in meetings.  I can't wait for a slow down.  The frenzy should take a chill pill around Wednesday next week.  In theory.  Hopefully.  Probably.  Please?

*****

Besides being the start of our "weekend", today is special in another way.  As of today, I have been away from my family for exactly two months, and have completed one-third of my deployment.  All things considered, the time has absolutely flown by (though I'm sure that's not the case on my wife's end, being abandoned to care for three children and all).  I'm hopeful the remaining time will go as quickly.

I try not to watch my time here too closely.  Today was a special occasion, since I crossed a milestone, but counting the months, weeks, days, hours or seconds isn't something I do often.  Yes, seconds.  When I reached 33.33% of my deployment at 3:53 PM today, I had accumulated 5,414,038 seconds in my deployment and had 10,829,161 seconds remaining.  Thank you, Excel.  Watching these direct measures is too painful normally, as I am reminded exactly how long I have left, which makes the time stretch even longer.  Watched pot never boils and all that.  Instead, I like to keep track of time through more indirect means.

I'll give a small primer here on direct and indirect measures as preparation for my next blog post.  A direct measure returns an answer in the same units that you're interested in measuring.  That sounded confusing, so I'll clarify with an example.  If you want to know how tall you are in inches, you find a yard stick, hold it next to your body, and read the amount of inches that corresponds with your height.  You were able to measure your height directly, without any intermediary steps.  By contrast, an indirect measure returns in answer in some other units that you can relate to the measurement you're really after.  For instance, using your car's odometer to determine when you need to fill up your gas tank when your gas meter proves unreliable.  Knowing how many miles you've driven doesn't tell you directly how full your gas tank is, but your mileage since your last fill-up is related to how much gas you have left.  Math people might even say the two factors are correlated.  One factor does not directly indicate the other, but they have a relationship that allows you to gain a fairly good estimate of one factor if you know the other.

So, in order to avoid crushing disappointment and despair by looking at a calendar every day and longing for my flight home, I use indirect measurements of the time I've spent away from home.  My first measurement was when my boots broke-in.  It took quite a while of 24/7 use before my left boot stopped rubbing a sore on the top of my foot, and my right boot stopped squeaking when I walked.  But when those things stopped and the leather started flopping over to one side at night when I set them by my bed, I knew they were broken in, and I wasn't "new" to theatre anymore. 

My next indirect metric was office turn-over.  My predecessor was one of the first to arrive in the group of soldiers that was here when I arrived, meaning he would also be one of the first to leave.  As such, I got to say goodbye to each of the others.  As each one left, we got closer to having a completely new group of people.  When everyone in the office was newer than I was, I knew I was past another milestone, and that much closer to my own departure date, where this time I would be one of the first to leave.

Upcoming "chalk marks" that I'm tracking are my daughters' first day of school, my parent's anniversary, my boss' return from his mid-tour R&R, the ripening of the grapes and pomegranates present on Camp and, far down the road, my replacement's arrival at CRC and in theatre.  The trick to these to to not tie them to dates.  Tying them to dates defeats the purpose, since my brain will spite me and, over my strongest objections, do the subtraction to figure out how many days I have left anyway.

The last set of metrics I track are on-going, ones that slowly change with how long I've been here.  My malaria pill bottle gets one pill emptier everyday, and over time I can tell I'm getting closer to the end of the pills, and thus, my time in Afghanistan.  The number of Monday morning "ORSA Breakfast" meetings that I've attended keeps getting bigger, while my time gets shorter.  Each "fatburger" I've consumed (one per Sunday lunch) is another tick mark towards home.  The number of hail and farewell meetings I've attended increments ever closer to my own farewell meeting.  I'm sure there are all sorts of others I could come up with if I tried.  The trick is to get creative with them, so that I never have to look at the clock or the calendar. 

Tomorrow is the start of third number two.  And I press on.  All for now.  Out here.