My family has been enjoying the Netflix game show ‘Sing On!’ quite a bit lately. If you’ve not seen it, it’s essentially a karaoke singing competition. The contestants take turns singing portions of songs, with the best singer among them taking home a cash prize. The show’s gimmick is that ‘best’ isn’t decided by judges or even the audience; instead, it’s determined by a computer vocal analyzer measuring how closely each singer is in timing and pitch to songs as they were originally recorded.

This all seems great in theory, but the reality is a little messier. There is at least one competitor on every episode of the show who consistently lands among the top scores but sounds absolutely terrible. They’re nailing the notes and the timing, but something about the way they’re singing the song makes them really unpleasant to listen to. So what’s going on here? How can they sound so bad when the analyzer says they’re so on target?

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Every so often, I have a day where I look up after the last meeting has ended and feel like I’ve gotten absolutely nothing done. I’ve been busy all day long: having conversations, reading documents, and checking in with peers and team members. I’m exhausted, but I’ve accomplished nothing.

Except that’s not at all true. It just feels that way.

When you’re an engineer, the work you do is so tangible. You write code, you do code reviews, you deploy features to production, and you can see the direct results of your work in the systems and applications you work on. You can look back at the end of a day and there’s an obvious trail of progress behind you.

As a manager, it’s not so simple. Sure, you can see the features your team has worked on, but little (if any) of that is code you wrote. Instead, you spend your time doing things like facilitating conversations, leading retros, and coaching folks in 1:1s. There’s no commit log for all of that work, and the feedback loop takes so much longer than a deploy to production.

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I made the best cup of coffee I’ve made in a very long while this week.

Obsessing over my pourover coffee technique is one of my favorite pastimes. I’ve been through several iterations of brewing equipment and technique, finally settling on a Kalita Wave paired with a Baratza Encore grinder, and they have served me well. The combination produces exceptional coffee, and the Kalita is used by a number of amazing coffee shops alongside their terrifically expensive commercial grinders.

It was in one of these amazing coffee shops, Little Owl Coffee in Denver, that I realized I’d been missing the mark. The cup at Little Owl had flavor notes and subtleties to it that had somehow snuck away from me at home. I had produced cups like this before, but it had been a while. As I stood there watching the barista carefully tend each cup, pouring the water just so, I realized what a hurry I had gotten into making my daily cup. My coffee ritual had gone from among my favorite parts of the day to a banal set of steps I followed to get my fix.

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