Tag Archives: plan

Not ready…

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I’m running down the clock on my last few hours of mid-summer vacation doing laundry, making dinner, and generally trying to smooth the transition back to work tomorrow. I’m not going to lie, there my have been a FML moment when I cracked my eyes this morning and realized I was 24 922e95ce8dd0b51f9a273eb8cd59d075short hours from diving back into the grind. It’s not that I hate work, but like everyone else there are just a trillion and a half things I’d rather spend my time doing. Such is life.

One of the unavoidable conversations you hear at the office is contemplation about how people will keep themselves busy in retirement, whether or not they’ll be able to adjust effectively to a world where a third of their day isn’t pre-planned for them. Every time I get away, I’m reminded that I won’t ever have to ask myself that question. I know with absolute certainty that I’ll manage to fill my time with activities that feel way more rewarding than ginning up a well-crafted PowerPoint or thousand column spreadsheet. Mercifully, my interests don’t require a small fortune so when the time comes, it’ll be surprisingly easy to flip the switch and get on with it.

Yeah, so while I’m not ready to get back to the so-called real world, I’ve got readiness in spades for the day I don’t have to. Talk about long range planning.

Three parts…

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Since my iPhone wasn’t smart enough to know that I took the day off today, it went off right on schedule as the sky was just staring to turn grey. It wasn’t exactly the kick off I planned for the long weekend. At least I got to use the morning productively – which is something that almost never happens on a normal Friday. As per schedule, I loaded Retribution onto my Kindle and sat at the kitchen table reading it one last time word for word. I was tracking along on my laptop and making the final few edits as the story went along. It took three hours of wordsmithing, tinkering with format, fiddling with the dogs, refilling my coffee, and watching the morning fade away to do it, but what I ended up with today was a finished product. The very last thing to do is upload it to the retailers and cut it loose. That’s a big part of tomorrow’s plan of attack.

I’m a man of three parts this evening. The first wants to go out and get falling down drunk in celebration of a milestone. The second wants to crawl into bed and sleep for four days in an effort to make up for sacrificed sack time. The third, the one who’s the real glutton for punishment, he’s already casting around wondering what the next project is going to be. I’m trying to ignore that part right now… even if I do have a few ideas rattling around between my ears.

Since going out to celebrate means dealing with people, that’s not likely to happen. The sun is still too high in the sky for me to seriously contemplate bed. Finally, there’s as good a chance of my spontaneously combusting as there is of me writing anything more complicated than this post tonight, so it looks like I’m left with the 4th option – mixing myself a good strong drink and sticking my nose in someone else’s book for a few hours.

Now that I think on it, that option doesn’t really sound bad at all.

Roadmap…

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So, we’ve got the cover, we’ve got the narrative, and we’ve got the sales blurb. That means it’s time to race over to Amazon and get this thing published, right? Well, the answer there is more of a “sort of” than a yes or no. I’m not ready to pull the trigger today, but as always I have a roadmap laid out in my head of what I think the way ahead looks like for Retribution.

Sometime between tonight and Friday I’m going to load it onto my Kindle and read the thing from cover to cover one last time. I’ve discovered through a lot of trial and error that just because you think you followed all the formatting rules for e-readers, there’s a pretty good chance that you screwed something up. Unfortunately that mostly shows once you have things loaded onto the actual device itself. Yet another of the minor pitfalls and annoyances of self publishing that in the end will be worth the trouble. Fixing those will be the main event for this weekend.

Sunday, if all goes according to plan, is going to be the great day of reckoning. That’s when I’ll sit down in the morning and start uploading the final product to the retailers. I’m going to work primarily through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but also fall in on Smashwords to get access to their own storefront as well as take advantage of their “special relationship” with Apple’s iBooks. By the time everyone’s long weekend is ending, Retribution: Chasing Heart’s and Minds should be going live. That’s the roadmap, anyway. How close that comes to reality remains to be seen.

Variations on a theme…

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The week to date has been all about variations on a theme. Unfortunately, the theme of the week has been “everything is going to turn to a giant steaming pile of shit in your hands.” Today’s example comes in the form of a not inconsequential event in the life of a typical big government organization. It’s not uncommon to start planning for something like this many months in advance. HellBy the time you get down to the few days before the thing actually kicks off, you should mostly be down to making sure the details are covered.

What you shouldn’t be doing three days before the big show is deciding that while the plan to do everything indoors has been well and good for the last two months, what we really should do is throw most of those plans over the side and instead plan on doing it outside, open to the weather, and subject to whatever nature decides to throw at you that day. That’s a fine enough approach if you’ve had months to do all the extra planning that goes into having an outdoor event, but it rarely leads to good things when it’s sprung on you with way, way less than a week to go. What you end up with under those circumstances is a Frankenstein’s monster tossed together with whatever parts and pieces you’re able to get your hands on without prior notice. Those pieces are generally not ideal.

So, we spent most of the day today inventing Plan B as we implemented it, making up details up as we went along, and having a vague hope that it all might hold together just long enough to get through the next few days. If history is any guide, the wheels will come flying off sometime late Friday afternoon, so there’s that on the horizon. It would certainly be in keeping with the week’s theme.

The only up side that I can see is that by this time next week it’s all going to be over no matter how badly we botch the implementation. Many years ago, one of my fellow teachers was fond of saying “the important part is setting your goals low and achieving them.” If his advice doesn’t apply here, it doesn’t apply anywhere.

Reaction…

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I consider myself lucky to rarely be afflicted with the trouble some people seem to have when it comes to making decisions. I might not always make the “right” decision, but I’ll make one on the fly if for no other reason than even a wrong decision feels more productive than dithering back and forth about what to do. I’m a great many things (some of them even good), but a ditherer I am not.

Under normal circumstances, I don’t see that as a weakness, but the problem comes when I find myself in a position of having too many moving parts demanding attention at once. That leads me to making reactionary decisions about everything. Jumping from one issue to the next with no real rhyme or reason behind it is not exactly the recipe for great decision making. It is, however, the recipe for making a metric shitload of otherwise easily avoidable mistakes. Easily avoidable mistakes make me sad.

I’m not asking for an endless buffet of free time, but a few minutes now and then to evaluate, plan, and analyze would go a long way towards letting me churn out a product that’s not halfway embarrassing. Absent the time to do the required leg work, I’d advise everyone to go ahead and get ready for a lot of checking off whatever box needs checked without giving any actual thought to how any of it relates to the bigger picture. Look, I’m fine playing it that way, as long as we’re all willing to concede that running half blind from reaction to reaction is a piss poor way of getting anything done. Really, I just want to make sure I’m on the record as having said that here in print.

Six P’s…

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Ninety-nine times out of a hundred when you see me, I have a plan. It may not always be a good one, but it’s there informing the decisions I make throughout the course of the day. Even if I know the plan is going to be blown to hell and back by 9AM, I feel better starting the day with a semblance of an idea about where I want to be when the day ends.

That’s true except in the one part of my life where it feels like a plan is currently most needed – the writing part. You know, the part I really, really like. More days than not I find myself sitting at the keyboard after dinner flailing around hoping to strike on a decent topic for the night’s post. That stroke of good luck feels like it’s getting harder to come by lately. That’s pretty much how I know it’s probably time to sit down and look at this thing like an actual professional – planning out posts in advance, working to deadline, and generally not waiting for the good idea fairy to drop ideas in my lap at the last possible minute.

I think I’ve always worried that having posts pre-planned might take away some of the ebb and flow around here. It could make me less responsive to the breaking news of the day that’s just crying out for a heavy dollop of cynicism. It’s getting to the point, though, that I’m feeling like that’s an acceptable level of risk to take so I can try to get the most out of the limited keyboard time I have available. So from here on out, I’m going to do my best to see if the Six P’s are still true. I’ve I’m lucky, I’ll find all these years later it’s still a stone cold fact that proper planning prevents piss poor performance.

Preparations for getting underway…

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You’d think after spending four Christmases fighting my way home across 900 miles, a quick hop from on side of a small mid-Atlantic state to the other could be accomplished with a minimum of fuss. If you thought that, however, you would be exactly wrong. Traveling with Maggie and Winston in tow is a task table_3_supply_classesso complex that it makes even the planning for Normandy look like amateur hour. Beds, food, fuel, clothes, sundries, health and welfare items, medication – if I added barrier material and ammo I could cover down on all the classes of supply getting loaded into the truck in preparation for getting underway.

There’s a fair percentage – maybe 30% – of what’s getting packed that I won’t actually use or need. Still, I like knowing that I have it. You could fill warehouses with things I like having along “just in case.” For me, apparently it’s just in case I need to rebuild my life from the ground up starting only with what I have on hand with me in the truck. Almost disturbingly, that’s only a bit of an exaggeration. I don’t travel as much as I use to, but when I do, I travel heavy. After all, you never know what just in case might pop up requiring you to rebuild civilization using only contents of your luggage.

Off to the races…

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Unless something incredibly stupid happens between now and the 31st, I’ve worked my last day for 2013… and that feels incredibly good. Maybe I should modify that statement a bit, though. What I really mean is I’ve finished working for wages this year. I’ll still be doing plenty of work – giving the house a good mid-winter scrub, bringing order to the piles of random junk in the basement, a few days of dashing hither and yon across the state, and finally ending up back where I started from a few days of legitimate R&R and maybe, if I’m lucky, a little bit of writing.

My 12-days of vacation aren’t exactly off to a slow start, having closed on a new mortgage for the Condo de Jeff this afternoon and then promptly dragging Maggie to the vet for half-priced Friday evening vaccinations before even getting to my first official day of vacation. It should get better from here on out, though. If nothing else, the timing will matter less.

Sure, I’ll probably still reflexively wake up before dawn, but I’m going to do my level best to turn off the little voice in my head that’s constantly screaming at me to hurry up, do one more thing, and stop wasting time. That will probably last about three days before I make myself crazy trying to “just relax”… and after that I’ll be off to the races.

The Routine…

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Hard experience, training, and too many years working a job that involved thinking about all the boogymen out to get us have left me with a decidedly pessimistic streak. That’s probably why long stretches of good things happening tend to make me edgy – or rather they make me edgy when I’m paying attention and not letting myself be hijacked into some kind of irrational exuberance. It doesn’t happen often these days, but from time to time I still let blind optimism drive the train. Historically, those are the moments when I get an abrupt reminder from the universe that it’s patently ridiculous to expect the future to be much more than an extension of the past.

It’s an angst filled lesson. Every. Single. Time.

I’m always a guy with a plan, even though like most plans, mine rarely survive first contact with the enemy. Fortunately, when The Plan slides off the rails, my system defaults back to The Routine – those things that happen week in, week out, day after day, that keep me focused, keep me busy, and keep me from dwelling too much on issues where I clearly don’t have any influence. So yeah, today is going to be about slipping comfortably, quietly back into The Routine, because pondering limitations of The Plan isn’t getting me anywhere.

Too dead to care…

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Writing a will is one of those things I know I’m supposed to do as a responsible adult. I’ve pondered it off and on a few times in the past, but the Navy Yard shooting last week got me thinking that perhaps I’m not actually invulnerable and that it was time to actually sit down and put pen to paper.

On the advice of counsel, I’ve started conducting an item by item inventory and deciding if there’s anything of significance I want to account for specifically. What I’ve discovered during this process is that while I have a house full of random crap that I’ve accumulated over the last 35 years, there’s not much in it that would mean a thing to anyone else. For the most part the house is full of objects that are sentimental to me personally, but don’t necessarily have much real world value. There are a few items that have a very specific final destination when I’m finished with them – a few trinkets and shiny baubles, a bit of furniture hand built by a grandfather I never met, and other odds and ends that should find their way to a good home eventually. Those bits were easy enough to tick off and allocate in what seemed like an appropriately fair way.

What I’ve actually spent the most time considering is the disposition of whatever animals I might have when I shuffle off the stage for the last time. While I’m certainly planning on outliving both Maggie and Winston, it seems reasonable to assume at this point that there will always be dogs in my household. There’s also the issue of a Russian tortoise named George who could very easily be around a few decades after I’ve begun my career as a daisy pusher. I don’t think I’m going to cash out and leave everything to the critters, but it’s safe to say that there’s going to be a provision that accounts for their health and wellbeing in my absence.

Your own mortality is a ponderous thing to spend any serious amount of time considering. I know it’s the right thing to do, but so far the effort has left me with more questions than answers… and everyone can guess how I feel about such ill-defined murkiness. It seems that the best one can manage under the circumstances is stating their druthers and then hoping someone actually follows through with them. Of course the up side is that by the time any of this is particularly important, I’ll simply be too dead to care what happens anyway.

I suppose it sounds a touch morbid, but I have to admit I find it strangely comforting to know the circus will go on even if I’m no longer part of the big show.