And the third reason I was distracted

 First, I remain gainfully employed.

Having said that, 89 people at my company do not, and we've been reorganized like crazy. We've flattened the organization, which is corporate speak for saying people leaders have more direct reports, and there are fewer of us.

A week ago Thursday, I had to tell a couple of my direct reports that while they, too, remained gainfully employed, they were being demoted back one level and were no longer going to be people leaders. Their pay and bonus structure remains the same, but make no mistake. This wasn't a great day for them (or for me).

In my larger group, our reductions made up close to 10% of those layoffs. That's a lot.

I've been through this so many times before; I worked for Sprint from 1997 to 2006, and beginning in 2001 after the dot com bust, Sprint laid off thousands and thousands. In early 2001, we had over 100k employees and when I left, we were about half that size.

So that's the last reason I have been too distracted to post here.