Behold, the second part of our surprise two-part series about how to pound concrete onsite as an elder millennial or Gen Xer1 and not die (Part I myah).
Well, you’ve got all of your cool stuff and you’re looking like a real professional out there now. But we didn’t mention one last critical piece of hardware last time, and that’s you!
You may have noticed by now, but your body doesn’t quite work the way it used to. Our raw physical performance begins to degrade in our 20’s, from reflexes to muscle mass to immune response to healing factors2. My misspent youth ended mostly because I realized that at age 28 I wasn’t getting any faster on my bike and wasn’t likely to do so.
After 30, you don’t heal from injuries anymore. You just collect tiny disabilities.
—Jaromir Jagr (apocryphal)
The CarFax on my body has more red flags than Putin’s wet dreams. One season I held the bike shop record for “most crashed helmets” so we’ve definitely got salvage title here. Cartilage divots, torn ligaments, broken bones, abdominal surgeries, and a sketchy sacroiliac joint due to fighting a full size Chevy to a draw put me in less than prime condition.
So how do I take all of that and go onsite for days? Mostly by being the goddam Batman.
No, not by being a billionaire playboy philanthropist3, but through Batman’s true twin superpowers: willpower and preparation. We’re gonna walk through all of the phases of a site visit and talk about the things that we do to be ready for them and execute well4.
Pre-Visit: Days Before
You don’t need a crazy gym routine here, just make sure you cover the basics. You’ve gotten a couple of good nights’ sleep in the past week. You’ve been eating out of something other than a garbage can. You’ve been hydrating reasonably well and peeing clear to light yellow5.
The bat does yoga and you should too. He’s not hard core, he’s all core. Even a day or two of yoga in advance of a site trip can make a huge difference because you’re not bringing in pre-existing stiffness and trying to solve it at the last minute.
Clear your calendar and silence your notifications. Running back and forth to offices to take phone calls will completely wreck your rhythm. You’re investing thousands of dollars to be onsite, make the absolute most of it by being wholly present.
Morning Before You Go Onsite
Get up 2-3 hours before you need to be onsite. As a night owl, this advice hurts to read, but you’ve got prework to do that needs that time.
If you went out last night and have a hangover, and I know you probably did, you’re gonna want to fix that. Start yourself off with electrolytes. I like Nuun tablets because they’re shelf stable, slightly fizzy to help settle the stomach, and they pack really really well, and you know you’re starting to rehydrate once you can taste the flavor of them.
If you absolutely positively must shower in the morning, make it a quick one. If your skin can only tolerate one shower a day, move it to the evening.
If your hotel serves breakfast, go down and have the basics. Read anything that’s not work-related and not just doomscrolling; you are purposely setting your mental space right now. Preferably, do it on a separate device like a dedicated eReader where you don’t get notifications and won’t be tempted to “just peek in” on Slack. Focus on non-caffeinated liquids if you can like milk, fruit juice, and herbal teas (sometimes I’ll actually have a cup of each). Eat hot foods, even if they’re just the institutional powdered eggs. I wouldn’t carb load; skip the oatmeal, cereals, and waffles, but a bagel with two ounces of cream cheese isn’t carbs so much as it is a fat substrate. Basically, your objective here is to eat slow-burning fuel where you won’t have to manage a caffeine or sugar crash.
Go back upstairs and get your yoga on6. You can follow a bunch of different programs or whatever, but what you’re looking for is a slow flow that focuses on the lower body. Look for tuck-toe squats, ankle flexes, half splits, folds, pigeons, lunges, and hip openers. My Apple Fitness+ subscription sees constant replays of Episode 13 of Jonelle.
Okay, now pack your shit and hit the rental car. Crank up that playlist that gives you that swagger and makes you want to run through a wall.
A big part of being mentally ready for a site day is developing your own ritual. Nothing complex, just one thing that’s easy to obtain and that you can rely on pretty much always being available. Because, no matter what else happens in the day, as long as you’ve had That Thing, you’re going to make it through. When my dad traveled to Taiwan and South Korea in the 1980s for work, he found his in a big American breakfast. Mine is a very specific Starbucks order. It doesn’t matter if I’m up at 4am and about to go into an absolute shit show of a day where I will 100% get yelled at for 12 hours straight by everyone who has ever heard my name in the zip code, my venti chai latte with soy milk extra hot was there for me.
Alfred says that the hobbits were right. Get yer Second Breakfast on the way to site. You should be able to finish your beverage by the time you’ve finished walking through the parking lot to the site’s front doors.
Onsite
Any time you think about it, you should either be drinking water or acquiring some. You just walked in the door; do you have water? Go to the break room and buy a water for yourself and anyone on your team who looks like they don’t have one yet right now. Now you’re ready.
Step Through The Portal
You are about to enter a peculiar liminal space. Warehouses are waypoints for stuff, but the processes, people, and routines around them are fitted exactly to the space and the work to be done. Time will move differently here7. I call it “FC Time”, where the rhythms of work are roughly divided into 2.5hr segments and punctuated by truck departure times. It doesn’t follow the usual 9-5, so trying to adhere to your office schedule will do you wrong. Pressures and problems will hit differently and with different urgency here.
Get onto the floor and stop. Just take the moment in. What are you feeling, seeing, and hearing from this massive megasystem around you? What’s the energy and vibes like? Our senses tell us so much more about how a system is operating than a dashboard can, and developing that ability to “smell” how well a warehouse is functioning when you walk in the door can be a powerful tool.
Keep your devices in your pocket unless you need to take a photo or communicate. Writing your notes in a physical notebook connects you with your environment, enables you to sketch freely. Your $20 notebook also requires fewer mental hurdles than a $1200 pocket super computer to decide to take it out and scribble something down. Timestamp your entries and gather names/logins because you will not remember the details later.
Self Awareness
Hyperfocus and overstimulation make us ignore our physical bodies because there’s just too much else going on for us to process it all.
Develop a rhythm for checking in on yourself. Have you drunk water recently? When was the last time you peed? Have you stretched anything in the last 15 minutes? Can I still hear my internal monologue? Every time your brain comes up for air and becomes aware of your physical self, run that checklist on yourself.
If you stand in one place for too long your back will tighten up. Get moving, even if it’s pacing or doing a lap around the floor. Your co-workers do stretches throughout their day, and you should too. Lunges, forward folds, and shoulder openers make a big difference for all of us.
Peopling
Table stakes, though, act like a human. Respect your site’s rules the way you expect any entry-level warehouse worker to do so; they know you’re a corpo so you need to set an example and demonstrate how important those rules are. It’s either important, or it’s not; there are no gradations here. One of my favorite ops leaders, who I deeply admire to this day, had a rule on his site that, “if you walk by a problem and you don’t do anything to fix it, it’s now your fault”. If you see a pallet jack handle that isn’t secured, go ahead and turn it 90º; if you’re not sure how to do that, approach a site manager and ask how you could get trained to do so. Pick up debris on the floor not just because it sets a good example, but also because this is your house too and you’re not an animal.
Courtesy and humility will take you far with your colleagues and yourself. Introduce yourself to your co-workers, tell them a little bit about why you’re there and what you want to learn, and ask them to tell you one cool thing and/or one aggravating thing they have to deal with. If you’re watching someone who’s working in path, ask them if it’s okay to watch them and tell them they’re not being graded. Feel free to say “I don’t know” in response to a question, but note it down and figure out how to get an answer back to the person who asked it no matter what level they’re at.
Keep an eye on your crew. If they’re starting to get crabby, pull them out of the work stream and suggest they need a snack. If they’re getting a thousand-yard stare, they may be in sensory overload8. If they’re looking whipped, they may just need to go sit down in a break room for a day or even head out early. Make space and make it okay for others to be human.
Logistics
If you’re traveling with others besides yourself, make the executive decision and appoint someone in charge of making lunch happen. Whether they corral everyone into a car at some moment in time or they’re responsible for causing the group DoorDash order like a Babylonian king causes monuments to be constructed, that is their one goal for the day.
Make sure that the lunch chosen provides sufficient variety from previous meals. Our team was once on a terrible, miserable project where we knew the experiment would return negative results and everyone was grouchy. When someone suggested that we order pizza, a colleague had had enough and shouted, “I’m not going to eat any more warehouse pizza!” I swept in and patiently, kindly asked if sandwiches were okay, then got his and everyone else’s orders and just made it happen. Food is a carnal pleasure and it can either save the day or destroy it.
Once everyone has eaten, appoint a different person to choose a team dinner site. Attendance should not be compulsory as sometimes social meters runneth over, but ensuring that there’s space for everyone matters the most. The timing on this is key; you need it after lunch so that there’s no hanger influencing the decision, but relatively early so that people aren’t so exhausted that they can’t make choices any more.
Set a departure time with clear and limited criteria for pushing that time later. Guard this boundary jealously, as this liminal space can easily make you lose track of the outside world with “one more thing” requests.
After Visit
You got past Security, you teased the co-worker who had to get security wanded because they forgot their keys in their pocket, and you’re now being blinded by the outdoors9. Yay!
Take a deep breath and head back to your hotel room to a chill playlist. When you get back to the hotel, buy two bottles of still water. One for the rest of the evening, one to have next to your bed overnight/first thing in the morning. The form factor matters just as much as the water itself, because you’ll have an easy visual reference for how much you should have imbibed and it’s easier to encourage yourself to pound down a 20oz/1L guzzler.
Have some sips of water, run a cool washcloth over your face, and give yourself a quick look-over for any hot spots or small cuts/scrapes that you should attend to. Go have a lovely evening with your colleagues if you can manage it. When you get back take a Hollywood shower (or even a bath if your room has a tub). You’re taking it in the evening to work out any muscle knots acquired over the day and to scrape off any site filth before you get into your sheets. The hotel-provided goops are table stakes; bring your own really nice soaps and moisturizers because you deserve a treat. Sometimes I even bring bath or shower bombs with me. After a really tough day, I go for the shower beer10.
Once you’re in a bathrobe or a towel, all fresh and warm and moisturized, call your partner and/or your kids to remember why you do it all.
Set your alarm, find yourself a quiet glide path with some low-overhead entertainment, and drift off to sleep at a somewhat reasonable hour so that you’re ready to do it all over again tomorrow.
- The Oregon Trail generation in the back would like you to turn it down. ↩︎
- Thus why we begin to rely upon our far greater powers of treachery and experience. ↩︎
- Hot takes that the extremely-online Batman community doesn’t want to hear: Bruce Wayne and his companies extract all of the spare money out of the economy, exacerbating the social problems that create those victims of desperate circumstances who he performs karate on. ↩︎
- Or, at least, not completely show our asses in front of the children. ↩︎
- If the bowl ain’t green, the pee is clean. ↩︎
- Don’t half ass this. Don’t just “I’ll do some stretches”. Commit to the bit. ↩︎
- It’s not proper liberal arts, but I will punt with a social science. How we perceive and count time varies wildly depending on our environment and cultural context. ↩︎
- My partner authored and maintains a thorough guide for fighting con shock at PAX East that has many great pointers for this problem. ↩︎
- THE DAYSTAR, IT BURNS ↩︎
- Seriously, feels like a million bucks. ↩︎
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