Life has a lot in common with flying. Both involve a series of small corrections to get to your destination. There will be unexpected weather, other aircraft that cross your flight path and there will be times when you have to land to let some nasty stuff pass. Staying calm in those situations will get you out trouble more so than panic ever will.

I just got back from a business trip to Minnesota. One of my kids asked me what it looked like. I told her “Imagine Oregon after someone ironed it”.

I took my kiddo to the hospital for a scheduled CT. She is fine. When we got there, the low tire pressure alert kicked on. As it turned out, I picked up a nail in one of the tires. Good weather and in a parking lot are a set of conditions to teach her how to change a tire.

I wrote on my Conduit connection that I had worked out a way to change my task management system to handle 11 different projects for two different manufacturing locations with team members scattered across 8 time zones. Some people have asked me to explain this a little further. I should probably start off by saying that I really didn’t change any of my tools. As I started to put together some ideas as to how I wanted to tame this beastly set of tasks, I went back to my program management days and dev died that a Gantt chart is a must. A Gantt chart is a 30,000 foot view of all of the actions for each project applied to a timeline. It is great for being able to see how all of the actions line up in a given time period. This sort of chart is a common tool used by program managers to track the progress of a project based on how the tasks are completed. For me, I am using the tool to make sure that I am doing the stuff that I am supposed to do in the right order. Also, it gives me a chance to see where schedule conflicts may be so that the managers of the different projects can be made aware of them and give them a chance to agree on what the priority is. I did look to see if there are any task management apps that would take the tasks across multiple projects and plot them in a Gantt chart. Sadly, it appears that there isn’t one on the market. There are Gantt tools that are used for managing teams. I am basically a team of one. I solved this problem by finding a Gantt chart template that I could use in Excel. As much as I don’t like to have to enter the same information anywhere more than once, it is a comparatively small price to pay for having this view of all of the tasks. At the 10,000 foot level, I reorganized my projects in Todoist so that I could take advantage of tags and sub tasks. This change allowed me to be able to easily focus on a specific project as needed. This is helpful during meetings tasks can be added and due dates can be changed with no warning. I can use that information at the end of the day to update the Gantt Chart. The 500 foot level is what is going on in a given day. For that, I use the Sidekick Note Pad to deal with the work day ahead. One of the things I have to do, as part of my job is to track how much time I spend on a given project. As far as how I use the Sidekick, I put the day’s actions due that day on the far right side of the page that is set up for a to do list. To the left of the to do list, I have an informal column where I record the times I am working on a given project. The times are rounded up to the quarter hour for easy math. I am glad that I don’t need to track to the second. The rest of the space on the sheet of paper I use for notes that I take over the course of the day. At the end of the work day, I transcribe the meeting notes into the appropriate file in OneNote, update the Gantt chart with any changes and take a look at what is due over the next couple of days. Once all of the is done, I don’t think about work until the next day. While there are things that I wished I could find to make things a little easy on myself, I think that this process is working well for me. It came from stuff that I already have or I could find something easy to modify to suit what I needed. The most important part is that I am keeping stuff going that I am depended on to do and I don’t need to be concerned about having forgotten something. My time is really limited and any advantage I can find to keep from drowning in tasks is a good thing.

Because of some new requirements at the day job, I am becoming an armchair Microbiologist.

I think I need to stop going to therapy without some notes. I have been thnking of things that I wanted to talk about, but forgot during my session today.

I have been working on writing somerthng for a while and I feel like it is coming together in pieces. I think I am looking forward to seeing what it become as much as anyone.

I need to spend some time this weekend working out how do deal with a lot of stuff going on in life. Any suggestions on how to achieve not balance, but more pressure equalization.

I am trying to figure out ways to minimize the distractions while I am working at home. I think I need to start with actually cleaning up my office.

The family and I watched Die Hard this evening. The Christmas season has finally started.

It seems like it took an emergency for my neighbor to finally connect my computer to the printer my wife bought a month ago. I print so little these days.

Occasionally, I will say something funny or thought provoking and my wife says in need to put it in a book. This is something that we have started to call The Book. I wonder if there is an audience for this sort of stuff beyond the 6 people in my house.

My daughter and an example of how things change. A few years ago, she wouldn’t go outside because that is where the bugs are. Now, when it come to it, she is the brave one of her sisters.

I have spent a couple of hours working on my Python programming skills. I can understand why the author of the book I am learning from emphaizes practicing all of the time.

When the work memos are sent out, I get confused between exempt and non exempt. What are some staff exempt from?

I have deep admiration for those who have a strong sense of self discipline. I had that for a while and it is very difficult to get back, even though you know that you have been there before.

I have had my driver’s license for over 30 years. I got my first and only ticket act the beginning of the year and it was issued by a traffic camera and a computer.

I went for a run in the rain this morning. It has been a while since I have done that and I didn’t realize how much I missed it.

Tomorrow at work, they are providing lunch. For 600 people, it will look like a feast. Hopefully, something will be there that I can eat.

When you have 4 children, it is hard to figure out the monthly budget. When you have 4 daughters, wedding budgets become the stuff of nightmares.

My wife was trying to use a Shark stick vac and it wasn’t working well. She took it apart and cleaned out the stuff that didn’t make it to the receptacle and cleaned out the filters. She went from using a vacuum cleaner to being the vacuum cleaner.

I stumbled across a blog post I wrote a while back and didn’t publish. It is written in Markdown and my current platform doesn’t support it. I need to move into this decade.

When I was a kid, I was told that I had horrible handwriting and that I needed to work on my penmanship. The problem was that no one explained how to work on penmanship. I have been journaling by hand, in cursive, since the beginning of the month. I am not writing for speed or on a deadline. I am just letting my pen flow with the words. Turns out, my writing is not as bad as I always thought.

Often times, people think that their jobs are mundane. I know that I have had that thought about my work at times. I have been working in my career for 25 years. Sometimes, I cannot believe that I am old enough for that to be the case. The airplane that crashed in China last week is an aircraft model that I worked on. Even though I personally didn’t work on any system on aircraft that would have caused the crash, it triggered a perspective change. My wife and I were talking about the accident and she asked me if I think about how the stuff I have worked on has impacted other people’s lives. Getting people to where they are going to see a baby relative for the first, or in time to say last goodbyes. A couple starting a new life after the stresses of getting married. Newly graduated high school students on their way to the next page of their stories. I am not working in aerospace anymore. I have moved on to a new industry now where how people are effected is more directly realized. I have come to realize that it is important to look for areas where one makes a difference as opposed to wishing that they were apart of making changes elsewhere.

I keep hearing that people use the mobile phones as their primary computer. I found out today that my mother in law is doing it since her laptop broke. I am thinking of trying it for a month. Has anyone tried this? Were there any pitfalls?