Project Managing Virtue

Subtitle: I Took A Look At My Life And I Realized There’s Something Left

I try remarkably hard to Get Stuff Done. Like so hard that I project manage my life. Like hard enough that I intermingle my Work goal planning and my Life goal planning so it’s easier to see everything laid out in front of me.

And seriously, I spend 40-50 hours a week at the office. It’s silly to plan my non-work life without considering what I have and want to do with my work life. Because I like my job and want to be really good at it.

Part and parcel with getting to Really Good, I mapped out the most important things I want (need?) to improve, the mapping of which happened in early Januay with my yearly review (I do those too). These are all things that, when I do well with them, my life is significantly better for it.

Shall we List! Yes, let’s list.

Things I care about:

(In priority order)

• My relationship(s) I never understood the “my wife is awful trope” found on so much entertainment. Why would you marry someone if you didn’t enjoy spending timeouts them.. Like, why would you hate yourself that way? I married my best friend. She supports me, smooths my rough edges, and helps me a better person.

Why wouldn’t I want to be around that? And I should be active in maintaining and improving it, even (especially?) if that is as simple as a kiss every morning or a regular date night.

• My health You can probably imagine that this has become even more important of late. In fact, this got bumped to #2 priority after dad died. I take fairly good care of myself but haven’t hit many of my health and fitness goals in the last few years. I’ve kept my weight down around 190 for the last two years. I have a much healthier relationship with carbohydrates and feel far less powerless to resist. I regularly put to go for a run when I feel crawly because I think I truly grok how exercise helps me now

But I’ve not been able to increase running mileage or reduce body fat percentages much at all in the last two years.

• Creativity When my life is stable, I am compelled to make things. It’s both an overflow of energy as well as a desire for Legacy, the latter of these likely a longer entry on its own.

Creativity usually manifests as words on the Internet, like this, or new Bunny Rope things. This year I’ve been trying to learn how to draw and it is going painfully slowly. Which is what happens when you neither work at it regularly nor set specific, actionable goals.

• Wrestling with Franklin I may not be writing about it publicly every week but I’m still trying to be a better person. I set a focus virtue every day and catalog how I think it went most every night. I think I’ve just sort of the last few months insofar as I haven’t felt like I’ve made any progress… Gotten any better at any of them.

• And work Being good at my work be it day job or Bunny Rope is extremely important to me. It’s income, life style, and how I leave my mark on the world. If I’m not trying to improve, what worth am I adding?

Supporting all of these things requires a lot of time, time that is already short enough in many real and metaphorical ways. And supporting them requires building a system for success, systems that support your engagement in your goals and reduce distraction. Any system worth the effort to maintain it will provide you means to accomplish both of these things. And it will do so with ease.

I’ve been trying to build all of my goal tracking and maintenance processes on my phone and tablet. I’ve been kinda dirty all in on iOS for a while but recent improvements in processing, input and applications has allowed me to drop the last vestiges of non iOS use which has allowed me to take advantage of iCloud sync, full screen apps, and controlled multi-app interfacing.

I spend every second of every day with my phone. I’ve started there in reducing distraction.

Look a Squirrel!

Smart phones are the best damn thing in the world man. So much capability. So much potential to build great things. So much opportunity to dash it all on the rocky shores of Idle Interneting.

I have removed or isolated as much access to distraction as possible on my phone. Here’s what it looks like as of this morning.

  <img src="_image.jpg" alt="">

I’ve dramatically reduced the distraction folder. Today, I only have Instagram, Neko Atsume, and Blockbox. Blackbox I can’t finish until I travel further than Chicago and find a tall enough building to finish the last two puzzles. Neko Atsume requires nearly no effort and makes me stupidly happy to play so it gets to stay.

Also: kitties.

IG serves really one purpose - all IG photos flow into Day One 2.0 automatically. So every photo ends up in my journal where I expand on it and the day’s events over time. It helps me remember.

Supporting Systems

So that’s reducing distraction. What about actually improving in your goals? I’ve tried a few applications, Habitica being the most recent, to track daily To Dos and Goals. Ultimately they fractured my focus and, since I spend most of my time in OmniFocus and my calendar, I needed something I them that would be more in my face.

So I ditched Habitica and back to my favorite scripting application: Workflow. Workflow lets you string together steps between applications along with things like variable manipulation, date math, and if/then logic. So let me outline what each does and how they help me with my goals. With it I created Begin, Rest, and End

Begin

Every morning (yeah, every morning) I trigger that application. It asks a few simple questions.

First: is it Monday? If yes, it launches me through my weekly review process. Monday mornings, I open up OmniFocus and step through all of my active projects, my someday/maybe list, and my upcoming tasks. It’s the standard GTD process - Dutch things that don’t matter, update things that need it, schedule stuff you want to get done, think about the rest.

This informs the following four questions it then asks.

• What health goals do you wish to work on this week?
• What relationship goes do you wish to work on this week?
• What creativity goals do you want to work on this week?
• What work/Bunny Rope goals do you want to work on this week?

As I advance through each, those answers get stored as all day, recurring events for the next week on my calendar.

It looks like this:

   <img src="_image.jpg" alt=" That 5k has been killing me. This is the 3rd week I've tried to hit it.  ">  That 5k has been killing me. This is the 3rd week I've tried to hit it.   

This does a few things for me. It means I see this every time I look at my calendar on my phone or Google Calendar. It also appears in the forecast view in OmniFocus which I use most mornings.

If no, the workflow asks what virtue will be today’s focus. Now, Franklin would rotate week to week on each virtue, not every day. I do too but, frankly…. I keep forgetting the week’s virtue if I add it once on Monday. I found myself at my End of day journaling having not really thought about the virtue much at all and thus had little to frame my day on.

So, setting it every day reminds me to maybe actually be virtuous?

Rest

But won’t you forget about your goals and virtue anyway?

NO. GOD….

Yes, probably. The Rest workflow is a simple “how’s it going?” question. The flow grabs my goals and virtue, drops them into a Day One 2.0 entry for me to fill out. I don’t generally fill it out during the day when I have a moment to myself - usually lunch, sometimes only in the bathroom (:/ that this is the only time I have open in a day is a whole ’nuther thing….).

When done it looks like this:

   <img src="_image.jpg" alt=" Minus the typos usually...  ">  Minus the typos usually...   

I fill it out quickly and am on my way. The intent is not to do it multiple times a day, whenever I’m at rest or even once every day, but just regularly. Things don’t get better if you pay no attention. But too much attention is obsession. And you have to actually rest occasionally

End

End builds on the rest but includes more stuff. I fill out things like how the whole day went, what things I am grateful for as well as more specifics for the day’s virtue.

The gratitude part, actually, is probably the best thing I’ve started doing. But that’s such longer thing to dissect. Suffice that if I inspire you to try anything, try writing down a few things you’re grateful for, especially people; really, even if it is just 1 thing, that gratitude can build up and help bolster bad days.

And this does what exactly?

Well, it certainly keeps me feeling guilty for doing nothing for my goals? No, only recently. I’ve been unenergetic since dad died mostly because that plus the estate plus big problems at work leave me drained.

To a point, it is reasonable. Losing a parent us stressful even without having to manage an estate and probate across state borders. But you gotta get your head together and get back to your life. That includes looking at how you Do Things and trying new approaches.

Novelty is helpful as is the introspection but you may hit on something that really helps your life be better. And that is certainly virtuous.

Don’t Panic

Slowly I feel like I’m getting a better hold of work. But I come home exhausted from all the Emergency Things we are dealing with. I have energy for maybe one other thing in a day right now like exercise or estate phone calls. But that’s it.

I feel like I should be able to do more because “I’m doing so little, you can’t be this tired.” Which is, of course, utter brain weasel bullshit. Stress at work, even now “background noise” stress that’s sort of in s chronic, elevated state but not like actively on fire is taxing. Then the constant, low-grade worry of estate accounting added to it.

Of course I’m tired.

Of course it’s reasonable to cut back on things.

It’s just not easy to internalize. I’m making little progress on 2016 goals. I’m not really writing, paper or otherwise. Still haven’t replenished stock from my last show. Blahhh.

I am, at least, opting more often to exercise as the one thing and that keeps my mental state stable if not happy.

And I do little things like make new wallpapers for my iPad.

The Veil Nebula

On Focus

Subtitle: Do The #$%!ing Work

I’ve been attempting to reduce distractions at work (and life) with the desire to be better focused on the things that I do well, that satisfy me, and that I’m best at. This is not simply reducing browsing to Facebook et al.(that is a discipline in which I could use more dots) as well as actively divesting myself of tasks or projects I don’t need to be doing. Anything that doesn’t meet the above standards is noise even if it is necessary.

Take, for example, design and development triage. All project designs and development my team creates needs to be assigned testers - ditto that of everything coming from outside applications. I do it every morning. I have been doing it every morning for the last 9 years. It’s gotten to the point that my team is large enough and on the tail end of enough other stuff that I have been spending 4-7 hours on this every week. When my 1:1 meetings with my team start at 8:30 that generally means most of my open time was taken by these tasks. And if it’s a particular busy development week, it can bleed into the afternoon.

That bleed could just murder my focus and productivity for a whole day. Despite that, I don’t want to distract my team by giving it up. That’s just me being a slacker, right? I own this, I have always owned this!

Well, my views have flipped since returning to work.

When I realized I was going to be out for a few weeks while dad was sick, I reassigned all the triage duties. And while it took six people (yeah, seriously: six) to efficiently divide it, they all did just fine with it. And a few of them enjoyed it. And a few of them were really good at it.

As managers, we tend to be the sort of people that like responsibility. We like being “The Person”. The one who owns the thing. We value that expertise in ourselves and in others.

If it is true that we value ownership in our teams, how does it follow that me continuing to own a thing is valuable? Sure, I can do the thing well but couldn’t some one (or six some ones) learn to do that too?

Owning a task that no longer enriches your career, that distracts yo from the core functions of your role, that doesn’t challenge you is an act of Pride. It no longer serves you but you’re not allowing it to serve someone else.

So let it go. Not only do I get that time back but now my team is more engaged in and aware of outside development projects and as more in tune with team workload.

In so thinking, I made the below art to serve as reminder. There are my lock screen and general background on my phone now.

  <img src="_image.jpg" alt="">




  <img src="_image.jpg" alt="">

So Long and Thanks for All The Fish

We are safely returned to Madison. Alyska and I left on Monday as we’ve accomplished all we can really do on site - the house has been organized and perishables removed. We distributed some food and cleaning supplies to family. The rest, Alyska and I will be taking to a women’s shelter nearby where a friend volunteers.

Our next steps include canceling services (mostly done yesterday), working with lawyers in Executorship over the Estate, and getting extended family organized to distribute the large items in the house before listing it. It certainly sounds easy….

Alyska and I had some fun on the way home with The Fish and Dad’s sunglasses.



As did the cats upon arrival home.

  <img src="_IMG_0784.jpg" alt="">

And lastly, we found Dad’s record player in the basement. Much of his record collection actually survived the flood so we took what we could fit in the cars. I got the player working last night, though the RCA cables seem to have a short which interferes with stereo sound.

  <img src="_img.jpg" alt="">

I played Debussy first which was one of his favorites.

Death of a Father

It’s snowed on Dad’s last day. It felt fitting but really, any weather would have felt right. Snow is for sadness and endings, sun is for the lost days of happiness, rain is for weeping. Melancholy can turn even the brightest day into an appropriate dreariness.

While death is never easy, not for the survivors, not for the dying, death can at least be merciful. Dad’s decline started two weeks ago on admittance when the stress something caused a series of mini strokes in his frontal lobes. he grew agitated and had to be forcibly admitted when he tried to leave despite erratic behavior and jumbled speech.

It was clear early that something more was amiss from the initial testing. Dad had been complaining of shortness of breath for the last few months as well as increasing lower back pain, the latter growing so much that he’d been working from home.

What we soon discovered was a series of large masses in both lungs, numerous inches in diameter, that had infiltrated the lymph nodes and spread. The masses were in his ribs, clavicles, each vertebra from the 12th thoracic down, both femurs, and his left humerus. It was late stage 4 pulmonary adenocarcinoma.

The details of the subsequent days are inconsequential - we made plans, cancer changed them. Dad declined far more rapidly than expected - prognosis moving from weeks to months to minutes to hours in less than a week.

On his last day, Kristin, Alyska, Iris, and I sat vigil with him. We talked and joked and cried in seemingly endless cycle as we listened to his breathing. His feet and hands grew cool as his body withdrew into itself. His breath became more staccato with ever growing length between. And with one final and relieving sigh, Dad expired at 3:46pm surrounded by a strong and caring family stilling holding tight to him.

What matters most is that despite his time being cut short, we were there with him on this final journey. Death is hard but it is a certainty that we all will face. It is our duty as sons and daughters, siblings and parents, to walk along side those we love as far as they can go. When we reach the end it can be a companionate experience for the living and the dying together.

I will miss my father. But I am grateful for all of the things that happened these last two weeks, good and bad, because I was here for all of it with him.

William Bruce Ringland 5/29/46 to 2/24/16

Survived by a son, daughter, brother, sister and one really heavy taxidermic northern pike.

The Fish his father caught in Bear Lake.

Godzilla vs. Giant Eagle

Godzilla vs Giant Eagle
(With apologies to Godzilla who is less destructive)

The radicalized bird Hit me first, hit
us. I hit back and maybe harder
than it hit me. I would say not all of them
are terrorists but…
the ones that would fly in
could fly in present a major issue

You think ISIS is not going to put birds?
ISIS is going to put birds there. We’ve been
attacked pretty viciously.
I will tell you, we have to be in a position where
that never, ever, ever,
ever happens.

Birds can take out the East Coast
Birds can take out the Midwest,
Birds can take out things that were unthinkable.

I’m not creating the fear. People are living in fear.

I’m not scared; the birds are seriously
beautiful. But extra cranky.