What I think About When I Wear My Different Hats...

Triple Hatter

One Gal.  3 Hats.

I am an Incentive Compensation Management pro who does Commissions Administration and Implementations.

I am a Writer who writes advertising copy and a blog.

I am a Mother.

One Gal. 3 Hats.

So the question is…

….what do I think about when I wear my different hats?

I'll tell you.... 

What I Think About When I Wear My Incentive Compensation Management Hat...

With the grease still on my fingers from an implementations project, here’s what my thoughts have run to recently – which both users and business architects of Xactly Incent will relate to: 

Xactly Plan Design Object

1. I found myself wishing (not for the first time) that Xactly Incent wouldn’t take you back to Page 1 each time you saved a rule.  Given that an average implementation has 700 rules or more, life would be so much easier, if after one clicked "Save", the application would keep you at the same point rather than take you back to the first page of the Rules object.
2. I found myself also wishing the rules were numbered, so if I was making a change to only some of the rules, say Rules 280 to 400, (not an uncommon scenario), I could keep track of the ones I had already changed with the help of the numbers.

I have oodles of thoughts like these when I am working on implementations – these are just the most recent ones.

What I Think About When I Wear My ICM-2  Hat (Ideas for Change and Motivation)...

Here are 2 recent thoughts:

Water Usage

1. In the shower the other day, I thought back to when I lived in India and would use just one bucket of water for a bath. This got me thinking. Like the two minute timer on the electric toothbrush which beeps when 2 minutes are up, I wondered if shower heads couldn't come with a timer which would beep when you had used enough water for a bath (one bucket of water) and would beep again at the end of every extra bucket of water used and give you a read of the total number of buckets used when you turned off the shower.  If people knew by how many buckets they had exceeded the expected amount of water for a shower, would it motivate them to cut back a bit? I think so!

Public Service

1. I also had this idea the other day about getting people just out of school to sign up for Public Service. I wondered whether one could offer to give them student loans at a reduced interest rate or free higher education for one year after a specified number of years of public service.  Alternatively, if they were already through with college and had student loan debt, they could get some immediate loan forgiveness, or get their interest rate reduced - if they volunteered to do some accredited Public Service for the next 2 or 3 or 4 years.  The amount of reduction and forgiveness could be tiered – with the maximum accruing to work that was harder to do or required the longest commitment.

Of course, because I read a lot, it’s entirely possible that both these ideas are not new and I might have read them somewhere. But I thought I'd put it out there, anyway.

Moving on to my third hat...

What I Think About When I Wear My Mom Hat....

I recently thought about how I had morphed from Tiger Mom to Helicopter Mom to Hippie Mom and accepted several realities I could never have imagined myself doing before.  I have shared this in my post It’s Called Motherhood 2. 

Homework and Tests

Also, I recently thought about the fact that my daughter who has always been pretty good about her homework, has never been one to do so well on tests.  And then it dawned on me that life is more like homework than like tests.  Meaning, on the job, we are likely to utilize multiple resources to solve something – look it up on the internet, ask a friend, read the instructions several times, ask someone else to interpret the problems for us – these are all homework activities.  On a test, you can do none of these things. You are on your own, with just your head, a 2b pencil and a calculator – with the clock ticking.

Of course one can argue that if you have done your homework, you should be able to do well on any test - as my brother in law M argued when I shared this thought with him recently.

Please feel free to poke holes in my thinking likewise.

These are just some of the things I think about when I wear my different hats.   

What are some of the things that you think about when you wear your different hats? Do share your thoughts.

P.S.: If you are intrigued by my different hats and want to know more, you can check out the following posts:

My Day Job. Xactly.  More or Less

It's Called Motherhood -2

Or the post just before this one.... Dare to Share.

P.S.2:  As always, thanks for reading and do visit again.