September 2, 2026

The vendor selection project came up again today. Paulina asked me directly if I wanted to lead it — a six-month engagement picking a replacement for our current portfolio tool, involving four vendors, procurement, and probably three stakeholder workshops. She said it'd be "great visibility." I said I'd get back to her by Monday.

Here's what I actually know: it's probably 8 to 10 extra hours a week for at least four months, the executive who owns the budget is hard to read, and I've done this kind of selection before — the last one in 2022 added nothing I could point to on my comp review. What I don't know: whether this one lands differently because the new CTO is paying attention, or whether that's wishful thinking on my part.

The trade-off is concrete enough. If I take it, I'm giving up the four hours a week I've been putting into a systems thinking course I started in August. I'm halfway through and actually finding it useful for how I run retrospectives. If I drop it now I'll probably not restart it. That's real.

Three rough options:

• Take the project, pause the course, see what the visibility actually amounts to by March.
• Decline, finish the course, add it to the spreadsheet as a Q3 skill bet with a 12-month check-in.
• Ask Paulina if the scope can be scoped down to the evaluation framework phase only — about half the hours.

I notice I'm leaning toward the third option partly because it feels like a compromise, which is its own kind of red flag. Sometimes a scoped-down version is genuinely smarter; sometimes it's just avoiding the decision. I'm not sure which this is.

Current best guess: I'll ask Paulina about the scoped version on Monday and see how she reacts. If she pushes back, that tells me something about how optional my participation actually is. Review date: end of September, once I know whether the project kicks off on schedule.

#career #decisionlog #tradeoffs #worklife