Business Development, Computers & Technology, Personal, Politics & Culture, Religion, Writing, Editing & Journalism

Picture It: Spring, 2024

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Four-and-a-half months since my last update. The TL;DR: Life is good. This update will be lengthy, and organized in sections that appear in no specific order, so grab your favorite beverage and let’s get down to business.

The Winter That Wasn’t

So, uh, how about last winter, amirite?

In Grand Rapids, we had roughly two weeks of legitimate winter, which wasn’t terrible. But it wasn’t good, either. I was rather excited to drive a full-sized truck with new tires and four-wheel drive through many mountains of snow. But alas, most of the winter was snow-free and hovering within that awkward range of cold that’s too chilly for being coatless but not chilly enough to feel like winter.

That meant that a lot of green appeared unseasonably early — I saw trees budding in early April, when they shouldn’t have budded until the first week of May. Lucky for them, we didn’t experience a meaningful frost after that point, but still.

The view out of my home-office window, that one day we had snow this winter. 🙁

The upside? The Climate Prediction Center suggests that West Michigan will have a 40 percent to 50 percent chance of higher-than-normal temperatures through the November-through-January window, at which time (December-through-February) we’re back to equal probabilities of warmer or cooler weather through the second half of next winter. Also, equal probabilities or wetter or dryer than normal conditions through the summer, and a 40 to 50 percent probability of higher-than-normal precipitation from December through March.

I love Michigan’s climate. I love hot, humid, sunny summers and cold, snowy winters. And everything in between. It felt weird to not really have much of a winter this past season, but perhaps we’ll make up for lost time six months from now.

A Productive Lent and Easter

For several years now, it’s seemed as if I keep trying to have a spiritually enriching Lent or Easter or Advent or Christmas or whatever season. And then — poof. Nothing happens.

This year was different.

I decided to tackle Lent the down-and-dirty way: One day at a time, driven in large part by the gratitude I felt from Cade’s cancer being classified as Stage II instead of Stage IV. I started on Ash Wednesday, partaking of the noon service at St. Mary’s in downtown Grand Rapids. That Saturday, I attended Confession for the first time in a couple of years, at Sacred Heart. Then Mass at St. Anthony.

Holy Week split between St. Anthony for Good Friday and St. Isidore for Easter Sunday as well as for another stint in the penalty box confessional.

Given my weekend schedule as of late, I’ve settled on a routine of Sunday evening Mass at St. Isidore while also observing my normal First Friday Adoration schedule (midnight until 2 a.m., if anyone’s up for joining me!) at Sacred Heart. I’ve been reading the Bible cover-to-cover while in Adoration. I started in 2021 with Genesis and now I’m up to Micah, although I’m reading the RSV-2CE (the Didache Bible from Ignatius Press) so the Maccabees appear after the minor prophets instead of with the rest of the historical books. I figure in another couple of years, I’ll be through Revelation.

Oh, and I’ve been praying the Liturgy of the Hours much more frequently. I’m especially a fan of combining the Office of Readings with one of the major hours (morning or evening). The Psalms are growing on me, it seems.

I’ll probably be a three-parish Catholic going forward, depending on my schedule for any given weekend. I’m technically registered at Sacred Heart, but usually attend the Sunday evening Mass at St. Isidore. I love everything about Sacred Heart (the Extraordinary Form liturgies, the beauty and reverence, the preaching) but it isn’t an especially warm place; I don’t feel “home” there. I do feel at home at St. Anthony, but liturgical practice there is so trapped in the disco era that it’s rarely spiritually fulfilling. I also like the decor and the liturgical reverence at St. Isidore — and monsignor is a thoughtful homilist — but the evening Mass is very sparsely attended and their otherwise divine music director seems to favor the most kitschy folk tunes that the abysmal Gather hymnal can muster, set to organ and delivered operatically. Quite disorienting.

The Church of the Age of Aquarius

Oh! Speaking of the disco era, on a recent episode of The Pillar Podcast, Ed Condon made a point about the state of the Catholic Church in the English-speaking world that I think is profound.

He argues, in short, that a lot of the liturgy wars of the last 40 years have sprung not from disagreements about Vatican II but from “the spirit of the age” that infused the first round of implementation strategies for the Missal of Paul VI. That age was the early 1970s, and so it’s not a surprise that a lot of the trappings of “bad liturgy” are holdovers from that specific moment in time. It would be odd if it were otherwise! And now that the vanguard of that age are starting to die off, the fruits of Sacrosanctum Concilium may flower with the deeper authenticity that comes from its distance in time. Just as has happened after every major council of the Church from antiquity.

Consider all the cringeworthy guitar Masses, felt banners, hand-holding, and jokes from the pulpit. Or the “liturgical dance.” The absence of Latin and any ad orientem celebrations. Proliferating announcements in the middle of Mass. The vast, chaotic horde of extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion. The communal penance services and the whole “let’s let everyone wash everyone else’s feet” nonsense of Holy Thursday. And don’t get me started on the music, which in many parishes is stuck in ’60s- and ’70s-era folk tunes that are hard to sing but do a great job of either glorifying the congregation (Tom Conry’s atrocious Anthem) or audaciously acting in persona Christi (Toolan’s insipid I Am the Bread of Life).

None of the above was mandated by the Council. None of it. It flowered because a certain class of reformist-slash-hippie experts who surrounded the Council and the implementation immediately after it exercised a disproportionate influence on English-speaking Catholicism. They hard-coded a very “1972” ecclesiology and anthropology into their experimental new rites. It wasn’t for nothing that in November 1985 the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needed to explicitly ban the Clown Mass, after all. But the problem is that 1972 didn’t move forward in conjunction with the calendar. So now it’s 2024 and a large group of modern Catholics formed in the Ordinary Form of the Mass still worship as if it’s 1972. And when the Church moves on, they get mad; the Associated Press, in a much-heralded recent article, shows the resentment of these Age of Aquarius Catholics even as the more mature fruits of the Council — branded as “conservatism” or a “return to old ways” — begin to manifest among younger Catholics with no bone to pick about the Extraordinary Form. The Catholics who were active from the mid 1960s through the late 1990s and haven’t kept up with the times are being left behind even as they clutch their horrid Gather hymnals and natter on about female ordination and synodality and whatnot.

The problem with the “full and active participation of the Faithful” is that the word participation does a lot of quiet heavy lifting. In the 1960s and 1970s, a popular but hollow anthropology arose that equated doing something (speaking, singing, acting) with engagement. The idea that a person could engage quietly, through private prayer, to contribute to the Holy Sacrifice seemed like an outdated notion — an idea best left with the old babushkas toting their mantillas and their pocket missals and their rosaries. But that diversity of engagement is precisely what the Council mandated from the beginning.

Arts-and-crafts decorations and folk tunes and blessings by EMEs are not the authentic fruit of Vatican II. We’re only now starting to see the Council’s fruit blossom, after a transition period where the heralds of the new discover they’re fighting to sacralize the same pop-culture mentality that gave us bell bottoms and brutalist architecture. Parishes that close the door on the Age of Aquarius (e.g., Sacred Heart) will thrive; parishes that don’t will decline along with their Mainline Protestant brethren.

(Oops, sorry — I meant “along with their Mainline Protestant sisters and brothers.“)

Of Cats and Snakes

My four felines are a-purrin’ along. Team Orange (Murphy and Fiona d’Cat, at home) are aging but doing great. Team Grey (Theon and Kali d’Cat, at the office) have settled into a comfortable friendship.

Apollo d’Snek recently came out of brumation; he’s now hyperactive, looking for a mate, instead of burrowing in his substrate. We transferred him to a new, larger enclosure a few weeks ago and he seems to be digging it, although he needs some new branches to climb upon. And Athena d’Snek is growing rapidly. Despite being juvenile, she’s very chill and has responded well to being handled, including by children at the dojo.

Clockwise from upper left: Theon d’Cat; Fiona d’Cat; Murphy d’Cat; Kali d’Cat; Apollo d’Snek; Athena d’Snek.

Horsing Around

Joining me this month is Tyr d’Horse.

Tyr is a 4-year-old mustang from the Eagle HMA, which is just north of Las Vegas. He’s already 15.1 hands tall. He’s sorrel with a flaxen mane and tail as well as an elegant and controlled gait. He needs a bit more meat on his bones, but we can fix that. And somehow his tail and mane got chopped, but that’s also a solvable problem.

Photos really don’t do him justice, so here’s a video of him with the two-year-old that the trainer purchased in Cassopolis:

Tyr is curious and slightly cautious, but despite being an untouched feral gelding, he never freaked out and never showed signs of distress or anger. For the princely sum of $125 I obtained him through an Internet auction run by the Bureau of Land Management. He was shipped from Wyoming to Cassopolis, Mich., where my trainer and I signed for him. At the trainer’s facility, he got very close to me and Cade to munch a book of hay by our feet, and when the trainer entered the pen, he was alert but didn’t panic. All of this is a good sign that he’ll be calm and easy to work with.

He’ll be with the trainer in Big Rapids for two to six weeks for basic gentling (wearing a halter, allowing hoof inspections, allowing me to approach and touch, and being willing to trailer) before he goes to his “forever home” in Marne. From there, I’ll work with him (and also with a different trainer) to get him trail-ride ready. Of course, he needs to gain some weight and I need to lose some before you’ll see me on his back, but we have all the time in the world. He’ll have a mustang friend at the boarding facility in Marne — Cade’s gelding, Oliver, who followed the exact same path a year ago. (And now, Ollie is super chill and fun to work with. And incredibly smart: he knows which pocket contains the treats and he also knows when all the treats are gone.)

Oliver (L) and Kodiak, Cade’s horses. Ollie is a 5-year-old gelding from Divide Basin who arrived in Michigan last year, along the same trajectory as Tyr. Kodi is roughly 8, small, and dead broke — although he seems to have been a bit maltreated with his former owners, a problem that Cade is rectifying with some gentle care. And don’t let the photos fool you; Ollie is probably only around 14hh.

So stay tuned for equine updates, pardners.

Long Live the King of Statistical Improbabilities

Speaking of Cade — his chemo has been doing well. He underwent surgery in January to remove a large mass. After that, and after two (unnecessary and invasive) lung biopsies, he was cleared to begin chemo. He started on a potent fortnightly drug combo and recently stepped down to something more tolerable. He’s still on a treat-to-cure pathway, which we both see as a gift.

It’s been remarkable to watch his journey of “kicking cancer’s ass.” Since the new year, I’ve been with him through three surgeries, an E/R visit, a half-dozen imaging studies, and countless ambulatory appointments. Together, we’ve had fun (penguin feeding!) and experienced anxiety (a kidney crisis for Chloe the Elderly Leaky Chihuahua). We’ve worked with his horses, set life plans, visited a casino, taken road trips, cared for his mini-zoo, gone on picnics, and enjoyed date nights. Much of what’s happened to him and to Chloe has been highly improbable — which is why I want him to play the lottery! — but he’s kept up a good attitude. I’ve been impressed by his quiet courage, his determination, and his limitless empathy.

Clockwise from top left: Cade with the Snake Discovery people at Tinley Park; Cade enjoying a picnic lunch at Tyr’s trainer’s barn; Cade and I last weekend, at Secchia Meadows; Cade with my ball-python buddy Kovu; Cade feeding the penguins at John Ball Zoo; Cade helping Oliver realize that gloves aren’t edible.

Adventures in Zookeeping

After Cade’s surgery, he enjoyed limited use of one arm for a while so I helped him with the maintenance and feeding of The Menagerie. He cares for a dog, two cats, two horses, a rabbit, a chicken, a quail, two rats, a half-dozen mice, a toad, several frogs, a scorpion, a tarantula, an anole, a crested gecko, a couple of bettas, a guppy tank, and a goldfish tank. And did I mention the 29 snakes, ranging in size from a baby palmetto corn to a full-grown female boa constrictor?

Helping him tend to these animals has been eye-opening and incredible, as has working with him to help Chloe the dog with some kidney problems — e.g., by giving her subcutaneous fluids and injectable meds on occasion.

I suspect that starting an animal rescue will be in our future.

Settling Into Paris

For the most part, I’m completely settled at The Chateaux, my new home in the Heritage Hill district of Grand Rapids. One of the last things I needed to do was to attend to the basement. A previous occupant had left some miscellaneous boxes in the basement hallway, so I’m dispensing with those. I’ve moved my storage stuff to the storage room (shocker!) and the big main space has now been fitted with a 12-foot-by-16-foot half-inch foam mat system so I can practice karate down there. I even put up a mini shomen on the north wall, with pictures of our founding masters as well as my own lineage and a copy of my nidan certificate.

I’ve also set up my exercise bike, additional LED lighting, a side table, and a fan. I’ll soon order a treadmill and a cable-driven weight bench, as well as some smaller hand weights to work with my multipurpose bench and its elastic-band system.

The movement of the recumbent bike has led to a cascade of minor changes on the second floor. My Yamaha keyboard has relocated from my office to the Adventure Room, for example. I replaced the bookshelves in my office and bought a new reading chair, so the older reading chair has also moved to the Adventure Room.

I also finished smarting-up the joint. I installed two interior surveillance cameras, both pointing at the exterior doors. I added a video doorbell, an outdoor weather station, a smart door lock for the front door, and a smart thermostat, in addition to a half-dozen smart light bulbs. All of these are controlled through Apple Home. I’ve set several handy automations to instantly transform the lighting depending on my mood and the time of day.

A few things remain to wrap up (seating in the three-season porch; seating on the front porch and planters for my seeds) but the big stuff has been done for a while now. It’s a significant improvement upon The Fortress.

Truck Camping, & Sundry Other Adventures

A few weeks ago, my brother and I camped at Mud Lake State Forest Campground. It was the first time I had set up the truck tent in the back of the Silverado. With his help, I erected the tent and the rain fly, set up my 10-foot-by-10-foot popup tent, and got everything into good order. I even used a cot with a mattress pad and slept reasonably comfortably that night.

Everything worked out well. I brought a two-burner Coleman stove, a couple coolers of food and beverage, a comfortable camp chair, a folding table, and all the other little necessities that made for a much more pleasant camping adventure. We planned to spend three days and two nights there, but a band of severe weather passed through with extraordinarily high winds, so we called it off by mid-day Saturday.

However, on Friday night, we enjoyed a roaring campfire, plenty of bourbon, and a couple of cigars, as well as good conversation. And the next morning, we chatted about his own rig — a utility trailer that he can also use as a more rustic camping trailer.

We definitely want to get out more often. I’ve already scheduled a couple of long-weekend camping trips this summer. Plus, I’m thinking long and hard about Brian’s trailer setup. Ideas, ideas.

Adventures in Analytics

Life on the work front has been interesting. My two biggest clients have both used me for a combination of revenue strategy, analytics, and business-process management. Since I started independently consulting in 2018, much of my time has been spent as a virtual CIO.

One recent takeaway: The SMB market doesn’t use advanced analytics, and I’m increasingly skeptical of the claims that Big Data or Big Analytics (or, I suppose, Big AI) will prove meaningful at anything lower than an enterprise level. And even then, it’s more about the culture of the C-suite than the skillset of the analytic corps.

Give a company a well-designed, well-documented SQL server with a robust, normalized data model and an open-source visualization tool (Metabase, Superset, Redash, &c.), and they’ll do 95 percent of what needs to be done. The real question is whether that extra 5 percent is worth the time and expense to achieve.

In some — many? — cases, I don’t think it is. At least, not for SMBs.

Bookstore Growth …

The bookstore is taking off. I think I’m up to more than 4,000 books in stock and I’m still on deck for my plan to start investing in new local-author titles later this summer.

It’s nice to have a series of regular customers who come in, browse, shop, and chat. We’ve done no advertising — it’s all been word-of-mouth, plus additions to mapping tools — but the reaction so far has been great. And, the weekly seminar program has been a lot of fun. We have a book group, a game night, a writing-craft night, and a big-idea discussion night.

At the end of the month (May 29, to be precise) we’re going to have a community potluck and grill-out for writers and their families. Should be a good time!

… and Publishing Shrinkage

I’ve formally closed Lakeshore Literary, Inc., and have decided to stop publishing long-form fiction. (Some publishing operations, like a reboot of The Lakeshore Review, will restart in a few months under the Foundation as a purely non-profit undertaking.) Some of the admin stuff is still unwinding, but the State of Michigan has endorsed the resolution to dissolve and so I’ve been slowly spinning the company down since January.

The biggest reason is financial. Lakeshore Literary has never made money; in fact, it’s lost me considerable money, in addition to the expense of uncompensated editorial and administrative time. The small amount of revenue we received for published books and journals paled in comparison to the cost of actually running and maintaining the business. I don’t have the bandwidth to manage projects that need hundreds of hours of time, especially when the terms of those projects shift unexpectedly and the cost-benefit ratio is on the wrong side of green.

Relatedly, I’m also closing Diction Dude LLC, my writing consultancy. I haven’t really done much writing consulting and having yet another business entity floating out there, consuming resources without contributing revenue, makes no sense.

I’m kinda-sorta-but-not-really sad about this turn of events. Of all the things on my plate, publishing was the thing that took a heck of a lot of time for no discernible ROI. It was a pricey hobby that must now yield to more productive pursuits.

An Author Alliance

From October 2023 through April 2024, the staff of National Novel Writing Month (which eventually dwindled to just one person) experienced a catastrophic implosion related to a series of scandals involving shady sponsors, incompetent staffers, and the failure to take seriously some complaints about forum moderators who may (or may not) have abused their authority — including, in one case, a moderator alleged to have groomed minors to join a fetish-story community dedicated to adult baby diaper lovers. Over the last few months, all of the staff but one seem to have quit. And the one remaining staffer decided to fire all 800-plus municipal liaisons worldwide who manage NaNoWriMo regionally, with no good plan in place to bring them back aboard.

You can’t make this [expletive deleted] up.

Anyway, our NaNoWriMo region has elected to go independent. As of last month, we formally separated ourselves from HQ and have become the West Michigan Author Alliance, a loose writing group under the aegis of the Lakeshore Literary Foundation. More to come!

Writing Projects

My personal writing has been largely on hold given time constraints, but when I get the chance, I do spend some time re-constituting From Pencil to Print, a book I started in 2017 but then blew up into several smaller books. It’s a book about the craft and business of writing. My revised plan takes the content of two of my manuscripts (one published, one at 85 percent completion) then adds a bit and subtracts a bit to arrive at a more coherent final output.

No sense yet of how long it’ll take to finish; I’m simply taking time where I can to work on it without being driven toward an artificial deadline.

The 17th, Yet Again

I’m running unopposed for the Republican nomination for Kent County Commission for District 17. Although I’m sure to lose the race in the general election (this district is something like D+50), it’s a good exercise in civic engagement to “fill the tree” to ensure that people have options as they cast their ballots.

This is, I believe, my fourth run at this office. We shall see if, this year, I crack my P.R. of 22 percent in the general election. 🙂

The Last Tech Tweak

In my last post, I noted that I had migrated from Logseq to Bear. I didn’t stay on Bear long before migrating (again), this time to Obsidian. So far, Obsidian is everything I wanted from Logseq but with none of the vexing sync errors.

Fingers crossed, this incarnation of a PKM will stick around a while. Using Obsidian and Todoist together, and being more thoughtful about which calendars and email accounts I provision to which devices, has certainly streamlined things for me.

The Discovery Era Ends

As I write this, two episodes remain in the fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery. Nerds — especially Trek nerds — will quibble, but the popular reception of Discovery hasn’t been all that hot. There’s a lot wrong with the series; several gifted actors (Sonequa Martin-Green, Doug Jones, David Cronenberg, Tig Notaro, Jason Isaacs, Michelle Yeoh) did their best with uneven writing and myriad Mary Sue moments and a push from execs to boldly go (into trans and non-binary spaces) where Trek had never gone (so ham-fistedly) before. Basically, the same problem that Doctor Who experienced in the Jodi Whittaker years.

But I’ll admit: I really like Discovery. A part of it stems from its reboot of the franchise after so many years of dormancy. But another part is that the series brought me joy in a rough time. When Season 1 debuted in late 2017, I was going through a politically toxic patch at work. Weekly Disco drops gave me something to look forward to. Now that the show ends in just two weeks, I find I’m a very different person occupying a very different and much happier personal and professional place. But I will still miss the show, and I will miss Martin-Green’s Captain Burnham continuing to settle into her well-deserved center chair.

Making Time

Connecting over a campfire is more important than Inbox Zero. This picture captures the campfire at Mud Lake, where I enjoyed great companionship with my brother last month.

I’ll wrap up with an observation.

Longtime readers know I’ve had a running personal debate about time and communications. I tried an experiment in January and I’ve found it to be extraordinary helpful. To wit: Consolidating email accounts and calendars, limiting what accounts load on my phone, and suppressing notifications for most communications services (including email).

I’ve only been reading messages intermittently and on a per-account basis. This has been great for keeping me focused on what I planned to do instead of reacting to whatever came into the inbox. I’ve got a lot on my plate and compartmentalizing has been a solid success strategy.

Cade’s cancer diagnosis really whacked me over the head with the value of finding time for the things that are important and stopping things that aren’t. That process starts with getting control over a day. You can have all the insight into emails and task lists that you like; if your day is not yours to govern, then the odds you’ll make progress are greatly diminished.

I’ve found great comfort in having an up-to-date 50,000-foot view of what’s on my plate. But for a long time, other people could add whatever they wanted to that plate on any random day. It’s not visibility, but decisiveness, that frees up opportunities to do the important-but-not-firedrill things that make life worth living.

When I was a hospital chaplain, I often visited the elderly who were close to death. Not one of them — not one — ever lamented having less-than-perfect credit or wishing their car was cleaner. Instead, they felt loss about relationships and about dreams not pursued. They regretted all the time wasted on things that seemed important in the moment but offered no meaningful strategic value. They felt shame about pursuing vendettas or punishing slights instead of just moving on and opening their hearts to other opportunities.

Dreams are real. To live them, you must seize control of your day to ensure you can give the right resources at the right time to manifest them in the universe.

Thanks for reading. May you have a happy and productive summer!

Business Development, Personal

Anniversaries

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May 2023 — all the anniversaries, it seems. Where to begin?

This month marks the 90th anniversary of the birth of my beloved grandmother, St. Dorothy the Matriarch. The 20th anniversary of my bachelor’s degree. The 10th anniversary of the arrival of Murphy and Fiona d’Cat into my home. The 5th anniversary of my departure from Priority Health/Spectrum Health System and my trip to Quebec.

Time waits for no one, although apparently I’ve made y’all wait 8.5 months for another blog update. So, with apologies, allow me to quote Sophia Petrillo: “Buckle up, slut puppies!”

Time to walk the plank.

Feline Fine

Isa (L) and One-Eyed Jack (R).

When last we spoke, I had been volunteering at a cat shelter. Long story short — I eventually spent two months as a very-part-time employee of the shelter (the Cat Care Manager) and then we went our separate ways at the end of January. I love the mission of that place; I do not love the culture there. Most of my work related to the clinical care of the cats — administering meds and certain vaccinations, assessing overall health, giving fluids when needed, alerting the veterinarian about emerging clinical concerns, overseeing medically supervised feedings, and such. I really loved those cats, including my dear friends One-Eyed Jack and Isa. Alas, Jack died shortly after Christmas, but Dr. Jen surprised me with his ashes, collar tag, and a paw print.

Closer to home, Murphy and Fiona are doing great. Hard to believe they’re sauntering up, at the end of this year, to their 15th birthday. Similarly, Kali d’Cat has been living her best kitty life on the back porch. All three are thriving.

Theon d’Cat, assistant office manager.

But now there’s a New Cat on the Block. Allison and I took in a stray at the office. His name is Theon, because he’s a joyful grey who came to us already snipped. He had been wandering around the buildings for more than a week, nesting beneath an overhang along our east wall. I brought him food and he loved it. Then, in early November, we had our first real cold snap of the season, so we decided to escort him indoors permanently. Didn’t take him long to decide he owns the joint. Dr. Jen gave him a clean bill of health in December.

Theon has been well-nigh purrfect. He doesn’t scratch anything. He demonstrates perfect litterbox etiquette. He has never been aggressive with humans, including those of the 7-year-old variety who instill a sense of terror in him. He’s really bonded with me, specifically. Lately he’s seemed bored, so Allison and I are considering another cat back here to keep him company.

The upside to our office building is that, because the back half was an addition, the front area and the back area are on completely separate HVAC systems. We keep the kitchen door closed, so folks who come for karate or to shop the bookstore haven’t demonstrated any signs of allergies, including Sensei Bill, who is very much allergic to cats.

Stacking the Tech

Slowly but surely, I’ve been moving to an all-Apple environment. I use an M1 iMac in the office and a beefed-up M2 Mac mini, with Studio Display, at home. I have two M1 iPad Airs (one each for home and office), an iPhone 14 Pro, an Apple Watch Ultra, two sets of iPods Max (home and office), iPods Pro 2, a few HomePods, and now an Apple TV 4K. Although I very much appreciate my Surface Laptop Studio (and my Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra), and very much am intrigued by the Phone Link app, the Microsoft/Android direct-to-consumer game just isn’t where Apple’s is, and I find I’d rather do other things than continuously tweak my hardware ecosystem.

And speaking of “4K,” a while back my friend Jason R. invited me over to watch a couple of episodes of Star Trek: Picard (season 3). ‘Twas a glorious experience, except I noticed that his TV was an order-of-magnitude clearer and nicer than mine. I was perplexed, so I looked at mine and realized it was “just” an HDTV. So I bought a new 4K TV, a 4K Blu-ray player, and a new sound bar. And a bunch of Blu-ray discs. All of a sudden, watching TV is fun again, although apparently it’s an expensive hobby.

On the software front, I’ve consolidated almost all of my email through a paid ProtonMail account. There are things about ProtonMail I don’t really like, but overall, One Email Service To Gather Them In And In The Darkness Bind Them has been well worth the tradeoff relative to certain forms of functionality.

Long-time readers know that I’ve been kvetching about personal productivity software since the dawn of time. For a long while, I used a mix of Microsoft OneNote and Todoist. Then I did everything in plain-text Markdown using Visual Studio Code; VS Code became my gateway to everything, all synced to my private GitLab server. Then for a hot second, I went back to Todoist, with Bear App. But then in late December I discovered an entire online niche for “personal knowledge management” and after some thoughtful deliberation, I migrated my notes and tasks to Logseq. It’s a logical outliner with built-in support for backlinking and (because it’s based in large part on Emacs Org-Mode) robust task management. Think of it like a personal wiki and to-do tool in one package.

A zoomed-out view of my current note graph.

The biggest reason for the migration is The Graph. Put differently, my previous approach depended on folder hierarchies. Although I could tag pages, I always struggled about the “where” in the tree any given bit of information belonged. With Logseq’s backlinks, everything connects to everything else, visualized as a giant graph that I can navigate with ease. These days, I don’t put things on pages; I rely on a daily journal and simply tag bullet points (i.e., blocks, which can be individually addressed!) as appropriate. If I need visibility into a given tag, I can click it and it turns into a page with every one of those tags listed. Clean and efficient, although a bit of a learning curve. Probably only recommended for folks who are already tech-savvy.

At this point, Logseq is my one-stop solution for notes, calendars, and tasks. I’m still fine-tuning my setup, but I’m digging the locally housed Markdown files that are encrypted but accessible across all my devices. Anything I’m doing longer-form, like a book, I’m still writing in LaTeX using VS Code.

Socially Speaking

Dawn the Snow Angel.

For the most part, my social life has been fairly sedate since last September. I’ve been so focused on work that apart from a few one-off events (dinner and a show with Tony and Jen; cigars with Scott; a Gilbert & Sullivan performance with Allison) I’ve kept on truckin’ that daily grind.

The biggest exception was mid-December, when I welcomed The Bot Wranger into my home for a week. Dawn, from Melbourne, visited the U.S. for an extended stay; thus, I enjoyed the privilege of playing host for a while. We made the most of it, including a quiet night writing by the fire as well as a winter trek to Frederik Meijer Gardens.

Oh, and I can’t forget February, when the members of the OG Tribe writing group (me, Allison, Andrew, and Theresa) enjoyed a three-day writing retreat at a rustic cabin well north of Cadillac. Highly productive, and also a reminder of how much fun group food preparation can be.

Healthy Living

Late December through early February was miserable. I managed, in quick succession, to get RSV, a sinus infection, and acute sinusitis — that last one, thanks (I later learned) to a pharmacy compounding error. So for about six or seven straight weeks, my sinuses felt like they’d been packed with pancake batter. This situation adversely affected a bunch of stuff, most significantly my sleep schedule, because the symptoms were most acute at night when I tried to lay down to catch some Zs. The week between Christmas and New Year’s was probably the worst of it, and I missed out on a trip to Las Vegas with Roux over that gunk.

One bit of interesting insight came from Zoe. Zoe is a UK-based health startup. I read a profile of them one day and decided to sign up. The TL;DR is that you provide them with a blood sample and a stool sample, and then you wear a continuous glucose monitor for two full weeks. During that CGM period, you embark upon various nutrition challenges. The upshot is that they crunch your gut-flora, blood lipid, and blood glucose data to provide a fine-tuned explanation of what foods are more-or-less good for you based on your own biochemical response to them. Every food is given a score between zero and 100, and scores vary between people. For example, a person with poor glycemic control might find that a banana scores a 47 while someone with good glycemic control scores a 73. Your goal with Zoe is to maintain a long-run composite average of 75 or higher. It doesn’t count calories or macros, just the composite food scores. Plus, you get an individualized report about your body’s reaction to fats and sugars in food and what those will do to your intestinal ecosystem.

Zoe also sends you a report detailing your precise composition of various bacteria (good and bad) in your gut. This information is super-useful in understanding why certain foods affect you in certain ways, and also, how to find foods that pair well for good overall gastrointestinal health.

Wax On; Wax Off

In other news — since January I’ve been teaching the Monday/Wednesday 9 a.m. karate classes. Those have been going well; I treat Mondays as overall curriculum review and Wednesdays as open floor. I believe I’ll be testing for nidan (second-degree black belt) in August.

In our style, Uechi-ryu Karate, it takes 18 to 36 months to prepare for shodan (first-degree black belt). After that, you must wait 12 months to test for nidan, 24 months to test for sandan (3rd), 36 months to test for yondan (4th), and then five years between belts for 5th and higher. Part of this is because the yondan test is the last “physical” test where you’re assessed based on specific curricular material. At godan (5th) and higher, the nature of assessment changes from physical competency to leadership, teaching effectiveness, and attitude. It’s not an accident that shihan (master instructor) is awarded no earlier than godan rank, and usually at rokudan (6th degree).

Funny thing — our dojo, given the long history of Uechi-ryu in Grand Rapids, is unusually top-heavy. Our “spiritual head,” so to speak, is Don Joyner (8th degree, working toward 9th). The on-site master instructor, Chris, is 6th working toward 7th. We have five 6th-degree black belts, a bunch of 4th and 5th degrees. After the August test, we will have three times more black belts at or above 4th degree than we do 1st to 3rd. Which is crazy, but great from my perspective.

Scribblin’

Mel and I led a successful 2022 NaNoWriMo season in November. With in-person events back on the table, we held Kickoff at a county park and the Day of Knockout Noveling at my office. The group is much smaller, but it demonstrated a remarkable esprit d’corps. So there’s that.

In terms of my own writing:

  • My Bear book is stalled. I really want to write it, but I know I need to tweak a few structural things and I have no real appetite for that at the moment.
  • I recently came back to Sanctuary, a short detective novel I wrote in 2013. I had actually forgotten all about it, but now I’m having a blast doing rewrites based on ten additional years of writing experience.
  • I spent the writing retreat focused on The 40 Strategies. This is a big project I love, but it’s so complex, content-wise, that I can only work it in small bites.

Right now, I’m really digging the Sanctuary revisions and may well turn the concept into a freestanding series of detective novels.

Working Stiff

The work front has seen some significant evolution.

First, Gillikin & Associates has a new client — a direct-sales wine company. I’ve been performing virtual CIO duties for them for a few months now, in addition to my contract with the jewelry company. For the latter client, the bulk of my time has shifted to compliance management, and I’m functioning as the compliance officer for the company. It’s been a fascinating experience, all around. For the wine company, my initial portfolio has focused on implementing a complete corporate-analytics program, which I’m standing up with a mix of open-source tools and new negotiated features with the company’s back-end tech vendor platforms.

On top of all that, I recently joined the advisory board of a National Science Foundation grant regarding the incorporation of ethical reasoning into math pedagogy at the undergraduate and graduate levels. This is fascinating work that follows from my service on the working committee to revise the Guidelines for Ethical Statistical Practice for the American Statistical Association.

The real news, however, is on the literary front. I’ve had to break some things apart to better position different value propositions with various audiences.

Diction Dude has been quiet, by design. Diction Dude is the LLC I founded specifically for author consulting. It’s also the brand identity under which my publishing-focused books have been launched, and I’ve reserved a podcast for it. DD has been mostly on hold for the last few years; it’s the final link in the editorial food chain but also the one that I’d prefer to wait until the end to address.

On the publishing front, Lakeshore Literary has been going gangbusters. We held a well-attended launch event in late October for our anthology, Surface Reflections, and the first two issues of our literary journal, The Lakeshore Review. Issue No. 3 just came out; we’re in production for Issue No. 4 and the reading period for Issue No. 5 ends July 31. In January, we released What I Can Do, the memoir of Mary K. Hoodhood, who is the founder of Kid’s Food Basket. And we’re about to open the reading window for the next edition of the anthology.

Mary K.’s book.

And while I’m at it, I launched Lakeshore Literary Foundation. This non-profit organization is recognized by the State of Michigan, with 501c3 paperwork inbound to the Internal Revenue Service. The primary goal of LLF is to support readers and writers along all facets of their creative journeys. As such, we are (or will soon) offer nearly a dozen distinct programs. Of note, the Grand River Writing Tribe will be a Foundation program, under the leadership of my friend and colleague Andrew. A pair of us are starting a weekly podcast, to debut this summer, which will (in the autumn) also air on WYCE FM. My friend and colleague Lisa is going to spearhead an annual literary-awards festival. A lot’s on the docket, and I’m eager to begin recruiting for a board of directors that can help with funding. And so on, et cetera.

Last but not least, Jason’s Books and Coffee. This company is the result of people not wanting to buy books directly from a publisher. As of today, we’ve shelved nearly 1,000 volumes, mostly used books. (We sell all used books for $5 and we buy books for $2.50.) The goal is to build JBC into a regional destination for small-press and self-published books as well as high-quality but low-circulation literary journals. We’re also opening the doors as an events space. And don’t forget the coffee and snacks; I now make a mean latte, and we’ve had repeat customers off-the-street thanks to nothing more than our address being visible in Google, Bing, and Apple Maps.

I’ve joined the American Booksellers Association and hired a part-time office administrator, Cade. He’s been helping with inventory, shipping, and social media — we’re on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. He’s such a delight to work with.

The bookstore is open Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. These are sparse hours, particularly for a coffee shop, but for now, it’s a start. I’m usually the one working, although when I’m out of the building, Allison covers for me.

So that’s the update for now. I hope you are all doing well.

Business Development, Personal, Writing, Editing & Journalism

An Exercise in Plate Clearing

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In this year’s annual birthday reflection, I mentioned that I was engaged in a Great Purge. I didn’t, however, go into too much detail about what I meant. That reticence sourced from the practical need to ensure that every major stop-do activity had been fully considered, and relevant people notified before I dropped any bombs. But now, with all the important disclosures having been disclosed, I’m free to be more forthcoming.

I’ll share what’s winding down, followed by what’s continuing or starting in 2020. I will then wrap up with a handful of routine updates.

The Wind-Down/Stop-Do List

Caffeinated Press. Founded in 2014, Caffeinated Press published a dozen books, a dozen issues of The 3288 Review—a journal of arts and letters—and two volumes of the Brewed Awakenings anthology. However, publishing is expensive and time-consuming, and the original business model we developed was more aspirational than practical. The last few years, in particular, have been difficult, with various people coming and going and me, personally, bearing more than 90 percent of all operational costs over the last eight calendar quarters. We did some things very, very well. We also did some things very, very poorly. Caffeinated Press proved to be a tremendous learning experience, but one whose very structure proved an object lesson in how not to run a company. We’ve therefore announced that we’re ceasing business operations effective Dec. 31, 2019.

Write616. I had resigned in October from my board position, at the same time as my colleague Lisa. My understanding is that the organization itself has opted to dissolve.

The Wind-Up/Must-Do List

Delivering MIRACLES. Although Gillikin & Associates—the healthcare consulting company I established in early 2018—appears dormant, it’s not. In fact, it’s how I earn my daily bread! I’ve been working full-time with a New York-based client conducting documentation review. It’s fairly straightforward, work-from-home, set-my-own-schedule kind of stuff. However, my long-term strategy to evolve the consultancy requires a strong “thought leader” approach to programs and services, so as a professional legitimizer, I’ve been working on a book. Titled Delivering MIRACLES: Structuring, Staffing & Supporting a High-Performing Healthcare Quality Team Using the MIRACLES Model, this book addresses what its subtitle asserts. It identifies the industry imperative, then it introduces my own definition about the proper role of a Quality team in healthcare, then it offers a practical framework for both current-state assessment and pathways to arriving at a more ideal future state. I’ve got a ton of plans for growing G&A that have been sitting in reserve for the better part of a year while I complete this book. When it’s released, it’ll set my stake in the ground. But until it’s released, I see no value in chasing the rainbow when I’ve already got a long-term stable client that’s paying the bills.

From Pencil to Print. As of Nov. 30, I’ve written 114k words of this practical guide aimed at helping emerging authors and poets—the very people Caffeinated Press most often worked with—to better level-set their expectations about becoming a commercially viable literary professional. As with Delivering MIRACLES, this book also serves as a legitimizer. It’ll pave the way for ….

Diction Dude. After From Pencil to Print is ready to go, I’m launching a replacement media/publishing company. Something akin to Caffeinated Press, but without the complexity of business partners and the not-very-profit-oriented community service model that CafPress had adopted. It’ll consist of a distribution arm, publishing arm, and author-services arm with a podcast and a paid newsletter. I don’t expect to launch it completely until Spring 2020, when my book is finished. I’ve put some infrastructure in place, but until this last piece of the puzzle is ready, I’m not inclined to launch this endeavor, given that a huge part of it is externally focused. One thing I learned from Caffeinated Press is the value of getting your ducks in a row before you start paddling upstream.

Church. This past summer, I joined Sacred Heart parish and have been attending the 12:30 Missa Cantata of the Extraordinary Form (that’s Catholic-speak for “a sung High Mass, in Latin, from before Vatican II”). I like it. I may start volunteering at the parish; I’ve already been contacted about becoming an usher. With that, I’ve also been re-exploring the structured prayer of the Church. I spent October and November in the 1961 Breviarium Romanum, and now that Advent has arrived, I’ve been back into the current Liturgy of the Hours. From a purely liturgical perspective, I think I like the EF better than the OF for Mass, but LotH better than the BR for daily prayer; regardless, I have printed 2020 Ordos for each. But that’s a topic for a different day.

Sabbath of Books. Beginning in October, I restructured my week to make Sunday a genuine day of rest. My routine is pretty simple. I get up, make coffee, recite morning prayers, read a while, bathe and put on a suit, go to church, stop somewhere for a late lunch, come home, read some more, eat dinner, light a fire in the fireplace, read some more, recite evening prayers, go to bed. I do no work whatsoever—not even light household chores or complex meal preparation—and I don’t touch my computer, tablets, phone or TV. It’s a day of total disconnection. I’m taking a page out of the stricter Jewish tradition. Since the first one of these Sundays, on October 6, I’ve managed to read all three unabridged volumes of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Face of God by Roger Scruton, and Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality by James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky. Plus, I finished a few other books that just needed a nudge to get over the finish line. It’s amazing how much I can plow through when I have six or seven hours in a day, just one day per week, to rest the body, renew the spirit, and challenge the mind.

Weight Loss. I’m down roughly 25 pounds since my birthday and am doing the things I need to do to not become a tragic medical statistic. Much of the last few months have been quiet and heads-down because in late summer it became obvious I wasn’t on the right track. Now, however, I’m trending in a more favorable direction. With continuing weight loss, exercise, and “forced” occasional hikes and kayak excursions, all of this is a good thing. I’m actually riiiiiight on the cusp of being at my lowest weight since mid-2016, which itself is a stone’s throw from my weight in late 2012. It’s truly amazing what happens when one substitutes distilled water for an 1,100-calorie fishbowl of a martini each evening.

Magic Eight Ball Says ‘Signs Point to Yes’

Vice Lounge Online. The podcast that Tony and I started in mid-2010—”where casino gaming, premium cigars and fine adult beverages genuinely equal bliss”—sees Tony hanging up his Golden VLO Microphone at the end of December. Whether VLO continues into 2020 will depend on whether listeners want to participate as on-air talent. If I don’t receive enough offers, the show will wind down the first weekend in January. But given early responses, my guess is that the show will soldier on. A half-dozen people and counting have volunteered to guest host or do special segments, so that’s good.

Grand River Writing Tribe. My writing groups? Still there. Those aren’t going anywhere.

A Summation

So what am I doing right now? I suppose I could call it, with a touch a mirth, a winter of hibernation. Apart from various wind-down activities for Caffeinated Press, my week is fairly routine. I put in 40 hours of document review, Monday through Friday. Evenings, I sit at my writing desk, working on one or the other of my books, distilled water at the ready and a cat close at hand. Saturdays are for errands and whatnot. Sundays are my Book Sabbath. Every now and then, I get invited to dinner or lunch, so that interrupts the week, but I’ll progress in stretches of three or four days at a time where I never leave the house. Just me and the feline overlords. And now that it’s Advent, I’ve also been doing the full daily LotH.

Meanwhile, the pounds roll off my frame, the words roll onto my books, my stress levels plummet, and my tranquility skyrockets.

Come this spring, when the books are ready—well, I’m excited to pivot my dual-career lifestyle to the next level of intensity.

Miscellaneous Updates

A few other things.

Looks like I’ll be soon giving up my social-media fast. It was fun while it lasted, but if VLO is to continue without Tony—who had been handling the Twitter and Facebook stuff—then I guess I gotta saddle up again.

Thanksgiving was fun. My Indiana relatives and my grandmother, St. Dorothy the Matriarch, all showed up at my mother’s house. As if by a miracle, no one spilled food or wine. A dozen people around the table, and the all-too-familiar scene of the Lions heroically snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, made the day complete.

I had been a bit sad that my long-time outdoor companion, Ziggy d’Cat, had been absent for most of November. I saw him a few days after Halloween, then not again until last week. When he showed up, he was skin and bones. Then he came yesterday, again. Still skinny. But then today, too. I’ve been giving him some shredded rotisserie chicken breast, which he wolfs down, as I sit beside him and give him some gentle scratches. I don’t know if he got sick, or maybe lost one too many territory fights, but the future isn’t looking good for him, so chicken and affection he gets, for as long as he continues to paw at my windows.

Speaking of tragedy: In late September, roughly 15 square feet of my dining-room ceiling collapsed. No major structural damage, but when 40 pounds of plaster comes down at 4 a.m., it’s a rude awakening. Believe it or not, the contractor my landlord hired is still working on it—he decided to simply drywall over the entire dining-room ceiling instead of re-plastering the hole. So for the last six weeks, all the stuff from the dining room has been in my living room, rendering it unlivable, and my dining room is a dusty mess with rock-hard joint compound littering the floor, the cabinetry and my rugs. Amused, I am not. At the rate this work is progressing, I’m skeptical it’ll be done before Christmas. But given all the dust, I’ve learned that when I’m not watching, the cats tread in mysterious places.

Last week, I enjoyed cigars and cocktails with my college friend Matt, who’s now a state representative. It was delightful to get some insight into how the wheels of gummint have been turning in Lansing lately.

Finally: In November I hosted my usual Saturday-morning write-in for National Novel Writing Month. Our stats were pretty good given that I had to cancel two of the five Saturdays on account of region-wide events. We were just a few thousand words short of clocking in at a half-million words earned at this write-in since it started in 2012. I’m guessing I’ll hold it at least one more year—to cross that threshold—and we’ll see what happens in 2021 and beyond.

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Business Development, Personal

Six Fruitful Weeks

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Where to begin?

Over the third week in March, I traveled to the Crescent City for the 2019 New Orleans Bourbon Festival. Had a great time — stayed with Tony at the Harrah’s N.O. hotel/casino then welcomed the opportunity to meet with a dozen friends from as far away as California and Manitoba. A wonderful time, with wonderful people, and wonderful brown spirits, and wonderful culinary delights.

But here’s the thing: In an attempt to be clever, I opted to save a few hundred bucks by flying out of Chicago O’Hare instead of Grand Rapids. So to maximize my time working, I figured I’d take the Amtrak from Grand Rapids to downtown Chicago, then the L straight into O’Hare. In theory, it was a plan of unparalleled brilliance, foiled only by the fact that the train engineer suffered a heart attack, prompting a three-hour pause in St. Joseph, Michigan, and a sad Jason rebooking his flights to (a) arrive later than planned, and (b) to cost more than just flying outta G.R.

On the way back, given that I had plenty of time both on the train and at the (lovely) Metropolitan Lounge at Chicago Union Station, I waxed internally philosophic about the Big Meaning of Life questions.

Some conclusions:

  • I’d rather experience now than plan to experience later.
  • Bootstrapping big things isn’t a wise idea. To paraphrase my late, beloved grandfather: Anything worth doing is worth appropriately resourcing before you start. Seat-of-your-pants business development is a recipe for mediocrity.
  • My arch-nemesis, the Jonah Complex, thrives in those little minutes when it’s easier to surrender to acedia than to hone one’s game. Yet — just as with training a cat to avoid the near occasion of sin — it’s better to create an environment where the defaults are configured to channel good behaviors rather than indulging in self-flagellation at the point of failure.

In light of those reflections, I’ve spent a large amount of the month of April taking new stock of my portfolio of assets and liabilities — financial, emotional, experiential — with an eye toward (as they say) defecating or abdicating from the throne.

So here’s what’s happened this month:

  • I’ve paid off my car, heavily invested in my business enterprises and wiped away all my credit-card debt. (In fact, I’m writing this post from the Starbucks on Alpine Ave., while said car undergoes a much-needed interior and exterior detailing.)
  • I booked a week-long vacation to Italy for late summer. Never been to Europe, and don’t want to wait until I’m 70 to go. Itinerary includes Rome (my home-base hotel is a stone’s throw from the Vatican), Naples, Assisi and Capri. May take a brief side trip to either Florence or Venice, if time permits. Been doing some Duolinguo lessons to prepare.
  • I wrapped up my notes and paperwork for a paid speaking gig I’m doing in June in D.C.
  • I started flying lessons, out of West Michgian Regional in Holland. Went on my first flight last week and have two more flights scheduled this week, plus I attended a “how to pass your checkride” seminar with an FAA examiner. Cool stuff. On track to earn my private pilot license by the end of the summer, and I’m grateful to the support from my friends Patrick and Jason (both pilots) for their encouragement and advice. I’ve got a great, engaged instructor, which really makes a difference.
  • I replaced the BCD (the air vest) for my scuba gear and registered for enough specialty courses this summer to potentially earn Master Diver certification by the end of the season. I’m already booked for Feburary 2020 to visit Bonaire, a little Dutch island off the coast of Venezuela, for a dive trip with two diving friends.
  • I fleshed out and resourced Lakeshore Literary Logistics, a company that compliments Caffeinated Press. L3’s purpose is book-and-lit-journal distribution, not publishing. Although I still am active with Caffeinated Press, I’ve gotten almost completely out of editorial project management and am instead focused on L3 and distribution planning. On the CafPress front, John is focusing on the lit journal and Brittany is now handling editorial project management in addition to her work as CFO.
  • I’ve developed one of the books I’m working on, From Pencil to Print: Practical Advice for Emerging Authors, to roughly 50 percent complete. The manuscript presently stands at about 65,000 words, and I’ve already enlisted the support of one of my interns as well as a few writing colleagues to examine sample chapters. I might even have a guest author for a special-topics chapter lined up. A complete first draft will likely be ready to go by the end of the summer. Still haven’t decided whether I want to shop a proposal or self-publish, but I have time to figure it out.
  • The other book I’m developing, Introduction to Health Data Analytics, is now fully fleshed and I’ve got a kitchen cabinet of healthcare industry colleagues on board to review sample chapters. I’m expecting to be first-draft ready sometime over the upcoming winter.
  • My work with Gillikin & Associates is going well, albeit quietly. I’ve got a part-time client in New York that’s prompting me to be a bit less aggressive with marketing right now. I recently joined the Grand Rapids Chamber, the Small Business Association of Michigan and the Economic Club of Grand Rapids. Look forward to lots of professional networking over the next few months.
  • Although my travel schedule is fillling — right now, I’m booked for Chicago, Washington DC, Dallas, Las Vegas (twice), Rome, Phoenix and Louisville — I’m slotting in time this spring to do a kayak trip and, I think, an overnight backpacking loop.
  • A confluence of events conspires to draw me back into more regular church attendance. Part of it relates to just shifting priorities, and part of it relates to a dive into the minutiae of the Extraordinary Form (for both the Mass and the Divine Office) that migrated from curiosity to intrigue.
  • The podcast is going well. Vice Lounge released a 4-inch-by-six-inch flyer with basic strategy guides on one side and tasting trees on the other. A nice touch for long-time friends of the show.

So, yeah. I’ve been busy. And although I did pull a back muscle a few weeks ago that laid me up for a while, all is well. The feline overlords are content, and no immediate crises seem to be brewing.

It feels like things are coming together nicely, and that 2019 will be the year that several of my bucket-list items cross off the list.

Business Development, Personal, Social Media, Marketing & Privacy

From Inbox Zero to Inbox Infinity? Or, Why I Learned to Stop Stressing About My Unread Message Count

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The last three days have been focused, to remarkable degree, on communicating. Mostly catch-up stuff. Monday and Tuesday were spent, 10 hours each day, just responding to accumulated messages. Whilst munching dinner yesterday, I came across an interesting article in The Atlantic by Taylor Lorenz titled “Don’t Reply to Your Emails: The Case for Inbox Infinity” that triggered some introspection about all of this effort.
Lorenz’s argument, in essence, is that one ought not waste the time trying to keep abreast on communication because it’s a never-ending fight that offers relatively little return on investment. In fact, responsiveness invites additional unnecessary correspondence that adds to the load, in a never-ending spiral of slavery to inboxes and social dashboards. The more responsive you are, the more people send to you, thus the more you have to deal with. Thus, choosing to not read and respond to messages is a healthy life choice and a savvy business strategy: Embrace Inbox Infinity.
I get it. But the Midwestern Nice guy in me thinks that a one-sided screw-you policy borders on the sociopathic.
So I crunched some numbers:

  • On any given day, I receive anywhere from 300 to 500 emails. Of those, about one-third are personalized-yet-unsolicited messages that don’t get caught by spam filters, one-third are notifications of some sort that I inspect and then (usually) delete, and one-third incur some sort of response — a reply, a forward, a follow-up task. So I must engage in some way with anywhere between 100 and 150 emails daily. And that’s across four actively trafficked email accounts and an additional five lightly trafficked ones. I’ve occasionally kept an Inbox Zero-like state for a week or two. Consistently, I need to spend 90 minutes per day in Outlook to make that happen, and just for email.
  • On average, I receive roughly 100 social notifications each day, across Facebook (personal), Facebook Messenger, six Facebook Pages I administer, two Facebook Groups I administer, eight Twitter accounts I singly or jointly own, my personal LinkedIn account, two LinkedIn company accounts I administer, my Instagram account, two Instagram company accounts, and one mostly dormant Tumblr account.
  • I receive between zero and 50 text messages per day.
  • For Caffeinated Press, Write616, and Vice Lounge Online, we’ve deployed a ticketing system, so those websites incur additional messages (between zero and a dozen, each day) that almost always require non-trivial follow-up. Some of the CafPress tickets are editorial queries, which on average take 15 minutes each to resolve for the easy ones and 30 minutes for the hard ones. In addition, both CafPress and Write616 provide community forums that include segments with more-or-less active communication. For the CafPress forums alone, over 2018, I lodged more than 300 new messages. And probably 12 of the last 20 hours I’ve spent cleaning up comms has occurred in the CafPress ticketing system, where I’ve personally touched or closed roughly 120 tickets over the last three solar cycles.
  • For Caffeinated Press, Write616 and Gillikin & Associates, all of which use the Zoho One platform, we use Zoho Projects, and most project-related correspondence happens in the context of per-project forums or discussion threads.
  • Some of the editorial consulting work I do relies on a private Slack channel — not high traffic, though, which is good.
  • Telephony? I can be reached (“reached,” he jokes) over 10 different possible phone numbers associated with three physical telephones and five voicemail boxes.

In other words, I get a ton of correspondence stretching over nine email accounts, five social platforms, five voicemail boxes, three ticketing systems, three project-management platforms, two community forums, a slack channel and iMessages. And a partridge in a pear tree.
I understand that I’m an unusual use case. I lead two small businesses, run a freelance editorial gig off the side of my desk, co-host a long-running podcast with a vibrant listener base, volunteer on a non-profit working board and have my own hobbies and personal writing endeavors. And believe me, I’m not complaining. I’ve made my choices and even though I’m scheduled (really) from 7a to 11:30p Sunday through Saturday, I’m doing what I want to do, and I own the trade-offs I’ve incurred to split my time in so many diverse ways. “Living your best life,” or whatever the kids these days hashtag.
So, even though I’m inundated with communication, it’s not like I’m a victim of it. Yet to keep abreast of everything and to be highly responsive in the short term, across all communications channels, I’d have to dedicate 2.5 to 3.5 hours, 7 days a week, to do nothing but communicate. Not to work. Just to communicate. Assuming that the prompt engagment wouldn’t generate additional engagement that opens that window even wider.
So in most cases, I elect to not spend that much time managing communications, and instead pursue work that can lead to better financial outcomes for me and for the initiatives I support. There’s always a balance, of course, and I don’t always get that balance perfect, but if given the chance to do something of value, or to talk about doing something of value, I’ll prefer the former to the latter.
And that’s the rub.
I think people who have invested their time differently — e.g., folks who work one day job and reserve evenings and weekends for friends, family and a hobby or two — mosey up to the communications table with a very different set of expectations. When they send emails, they expect responses within a day or two. When they leave a voicemail, they expect a call back. When they reach out on social media, they expect acknowledgement. For them, timely reciprocal engagement is a default framework for viewing interpersonal communications.
Which, you know, ain’t exactly unreasonable.
Yet it’s not terribly unusual for me to incur read-and-respond lags of 90 days or more. Some of my pending tickets are nine months old. None of this delay is a function of me hating the sender or deciding that my needs are more important or not caring a whit about others’ good-faith reach-outs. It’s a function of being swamped. Having decided that 2.5 to 3.5 hours every day managing inboxes and dashboards isn’t in the cards, then every day I fail to keep up accumulates a debt that swells and swells and swells, interest compounding relentlessly until eventually — and I do this two or three times per year — I take a day or two off, decamp to coffee shops, and do nothing but play communication catch-up, triaging what I can, deleting what I can’t, and moving forward as best as I can.
So what’s the solution? How does one bridge the gap deep cultural gap between timely reciprocal engagement and inbox infinity?
Some attentive blog readers may have picked up, over the last year or so, on this theme of me writing about the tyranny of the inbox. I went astray, I think, in originally trying to be omnicompetent. So I set expectations that, as they slipped, didn’t help. I recognize that others have legitimate needs to which I should respond, so I’ve been working hard over the last year to erect a bridge that crosses that gap while minimizing (never, alas, eliminating) the attendant friction for both sides. In some ways, it’s like learning a different language or navigating a foreign culture.
I think — I hope! — I’m making some progress, though:

  1. I’m focusing more and more on getting people out of my email inbox. The use of ticketing systems and project-management tools means that others can swoop in as needed. (I’m still working on getting the “others” to actually swoop in, which is a conversation for a different day.) It’s easier for me to schedule time to view a project’s notification history or a ticket queue than to pick apart disparate emails amidst a sea of email noise and then magically plot the projects in my head.
  2. I’ve been much more aggressive lately in telling new-to-me people that (a) I don’t do status reports, and (b) expect long delays in routine correspondence. Most people understand and offer the attendant grace. A few people don’t seem to believe me when I tell them as much, so I’m continuing to refine the message so that expectations are set up-front.
  3. I’m going to start being more aggressive in redirecting communication to the right channel. For example, I cannot conduct business conversations on my personal social-media channels. Not because I’m trying to be a dick about it, but because Facebook and Twitter aren’t part of a task-based, discoverable workflow.
  4. I’m committing in 2019 to hold more frequent and available open office hours. If something is so important that it requires immediate attention, the door is open to an in-person conversation. If it’s not important enough for a direct chat, then the priority clarifies itself.
  5. I’ll continue to ignore the bullies who hector, cajole, demean and dismiss in their escalating attempts to get attention. This phenomenon happens more often than it ought with authors, who (despite early level-setting) nevertheless have persuaded themselves that I’m at their beck-and-call then become angry when their beck isn’t called. I will never justify myself or give in to digital bullies. Ever.
  6. I accept that some things that might warrant a response, in the abstract, don’t rise to a return-on-investment level in the real world. Therefore, I won’t beat myself up if I can’t attend to everything.

I used to get stressed about falling behind on communications. (I don’t talk about my mental health on my blog, but if people understood what havoc Caffeinated Press hath wrought, emotionally —.) I don’t stress anymore. I suppose I’ve embraced the Serenity Prayer. Part of the “doing many things” lifestyle is that I accept that not everything that should be done, can be done. At least, not by one person. And scaling back — to only do those things where you can guarantee you can get 100 percent done on a highly predictable schedule — presents its own set of risks, mostly financial; the more tongs you pull out of the fire, the more dependent you are on just a few investments, and if any of those dwindling investments dry up, the result is catastrophic.
I’ll admit, though. For a while, I really did toy with saying, “Damn the torpedoes! Full Inbox Infinity ahead!” But I just couldn’t. I might not be perfect, but I do try to not be an asshole.
Yet as I continue to stumble on, doing the best I can, I’ll at least take some solace in not feeling as bad about myself as I used to.

Business Development, Personal

A Master Class in Horrible Customer Service from @OfficeDepot [UPDATED]

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UPDATE: Progress! See the bottom of the article for details.

I was well and truly excited to move into the new Caffeinated Press office on Saturday. I’ve got a five-day weekend coming up and a metric ton of work to accomplish related to the next volume of the anthology, so on Friday afternoon, I went to Office Depot’s website and ordered a U-shaped desk, a matching hutch and an office chair. Then I requested in-store pickup and was guaranteed next-day availability at one of the local retail locations.

On Saturday morning, I went to the store and picked everything up. Got to the office, unloaded everything, and started work with setup — except, after I tore down the first box, I realized that the desk ships in two boxes. Irritated, I drove back to the store and waited 15 minutes while the clerk searched in vain for the second box. So he took my information — this was around noon — and promised a call back within four hours.

No such luck. On Sunday afternoon, I called the store and spoke with the manager, Fernando, who told me that there was nothing he could do except pass me off to Office Depot’s toll-free number. So I called that number and spoke to someone in, I believe, India, who was quick to “sincerely apologize” but told me the only thing she could do was issue a refund credit on the order so I could re-place it online. They have “no way” to ship me the missing second box, which was all I ever wanted for them to do.

So I reluctantly agree to engage in the song-and-dance about the return and reorder. Except the phone lady neglected to tell me she was issuing a credit-card refund that would take five to seven business days to credit. Apparently, I’m supposed to pay twice for a product the company didn’t deliver and hope that eventually they reimburse me? Track record isn’t so good. And when I can have my card immediately debited to pay, why the bloody hell does it take a full week to reverse a charge? That’s ridiculous.

I used the online chat tool and dealt with two different agents. Both “sincerely apologized” and basically refused to do anything else. One agent offered to escalate the matter with someone at corporate and he guaranteed me a call back in “no more than four hours.”

You can guess where this is going: No one ever called.

On Monday morning, I emailed with my concerns and within a few hours got a reply; the replying agent clearly had no clue what my problem was — it didn’t appear she even read the substance of my note — but she assured me that my credit would be applied “within three to five days.” Dissatisfied, I called the toll-free number again and got yet another agent who told me that the manufacturer of the desk doesn’t allow them to ship partial shipments (newsflash: I didn’t order a partial shipment; I ordered a whole shipment, which Office Depot failed to deliver on). But she assured me that she would escalate the matter about my credit and after offering a “sincere apology” she promised … wait for it … that I’d get a call back within four hours with an update.

(Need I even tell you that the call never came, the credit isn’t processed, I’m still without my desk and I’m staring down a ton of work with no where to work from?)

Here’s what I don’t get:

  • How could a store agent responsible for accepting a product shipment fail to notice that half the shipment didn’t arrive? And then have that store agent give a customer an incomplete shipment without saying anything?
  • Why can’t a national retail giant just ship a part that didn’t make its way where it belonged?
  • What kind of horrible customer service training drills people into saying “sincerely apologize” and “four hours” when it’s obvious that neither statement is true?
  • Why can I be debited immediately for a sale but have to wait a week for a credit? And for that matter, why can’t a credit be applied immediately to my online account with the company instead of pushing back to my card?

My long, sad ordeal is still underway. I’m angry at Office Depot for caring so little about customers and for fundamentally screwing up a long-planned work session. But you, dear reader, can rest assured: Never again will I buy anything from this incompetent horde of disinterested hacks.

UPDATE:

A resolutions person from Office Depot’s corporate office read this post and contacted me directly by email. Sent me a replacement desk at $0 (both parts). The delivery driver arrived around 6 p.m. on Thursday and was promptly irritated that he only needed to give me the second box, because he had to give me the box, label the delivery as “refused,” then return the first box back to the warehouse. His irritation wasn’t with me, it was with Corporate; the delivery person was quite helpful.

Anyway, this saga is concluded. I have been made whole. The challenge, I think, isn’t so much Office Depot, per se, but rather the problem of multi-part shipments from warehouses. A friend remarked that he has much the same problem with Amazon — if an order is only partially filled, Amazon is (apparently) at a loss to make up the difference.

Business Development, Computers & Technology, Personal

Rejoice! I’ve Created the Ultimate Daily Tracking System with @MSOneNote

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For many long, bitter years I’ve lamented the utter lack of harmony among my various personal-organizational systems. I’ve tried paper. I’ve tried smartphones. I’ve tried an Outlook-only solution. I even tried to put everything into a giant Access database with a Web front-end, only to be stymied by a back-end discontinuity. Never could get any solution to work, though — the stuff I wanted to record, in the way I wanted to record it, in all the different form factors I might want to access it, never seemed to align in satisfactory manner.

Until now, that is.log2

The solution I’ve developed squares the circle that connects data tracking, idea-gathering and journaling into a single front-end solution that synchronizes natively across three screens. I use Microsoft OneNote (although presumably Evernote would work too) with a separate notebook called “Chron” containing a tab called “Daily.” I’ve saved the template shown to the left as the default template for this tab, and my Windows Phone 8 links to the template page (I’ve pinned it, so I can open it up to today’s notes with just a single tap.)

The section contains the things I care about recording, but with only as much detail as I’m interested in gathering. The form includes a “focus” bar, which is simply a phrase or sentence that summarizes something I need to keep top-of-mind; it might be task-oriented or it might just be a song quote to provide inspiration.

The “Today’s Deliverables” list marks all the deadlines I have to get done — I refresh it every morning by scanning my task list in Outlook and picking the that that I need to keep in front of my face.  By design, this list doesn’t sync directly to Outlook; I sometimes include quick tasks or short-term lists here that really don’t warrant the time/effort of adding it to Outlook. I also sometimes schedule myself to do things before their Outlook due date if I know I have the flex to get it done.

The “Schedule” list provides a skeleton of my appointments — both on-calendar and in-the-moment — and beneath each item I can then add my meeting notes and (as needed) create Outlook tasks for anything I need to do as a result of that meeting.

If I did something special worth preserving, it’s listed as a “Significant Accomplishment” — helpful if I wanted to look back over the last few months to see progress on life goals. Many days, this line will be blank, just to preserve its value of highlighting the things that matter.

Then I record data about myself — how many calories I’ve consumed, how much exercising I’ve done and how much money I’ve transacted. Weekly, I record “body metrics,” including regular weigh-ins and blood pressure checks with an “other” category for other health milestones worth documenting. Like my sketchy Vitamin D levels. At the bottom of the list, a section for “Ideas/Reflections” permits free-form recording of ideas or longer journal entries. Consider it a form of diary integration.

One of my biggest peeves with existing third-party life-organization tools is that (a) data often aren’t portable, and (b) you’re at the mercy of the vendor. With my solution, I own my data and don’t need to give private information to a company that may or may not be in operation six months from now.

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a “tag” line beneath several of the sections. This little sentence identifies a specific data-recording paradigm. Under “Calorie Counts,” for example, I’ve reminded myself to record today’s date, the meal — breakfast/lunch/dinner/snack — and the meal’s net calories. If I need to add a comment, I can do so. Each piece of information is comma-separated. Then, I can highlight the row of data and use one of OneNote’s tags (I have CTRL+4 hot-keyed as a “calorie count” tag). For example: “1/1/13,breakfast,120,Greek yogurt and coffee with creamer.” Quick and easy to type — something I could do on my phone at the Starbucks counter, even. If it’s easy to record, it’s more likely that it’ll be recorded. Notes are optional. If you’re in line at Panera, how hard is it to tap your log button on the phone and type “1/1/13,lunch,350,Panera” if you’re enjoying a 350-calorie meal? If you can’t log something that succinct ….

But why do it this way, instead of using a third-party service or a spreadsheet or something? Because a uniform method of recording, coupled with OneNote’s heavily customizable internal tags, lets me do a tag search and dump all instances of a specific tab to a summary page. The upshot is that I can just copy/paste the “calorie count” data and dump it into Excel if I want to track/trend/graph my data over time; the uniform mechanism of tracking individual records, separated by commas, permits painless sorting into columns. For example, if I wanted to measure my average daily gross calorie count for all of January, and subtract from it my gross calorie burn from exercise, to arrive at net calories by day, I can just search for the “calorie count” and “exercise record” tags, do a quick copy/paste into Excel, and arrive at the results in less than a minute. No need to try fiddling with MyFitnessPal or Livescape, or a separate mobile version of a spreadsheet; the data’s your own and you can manipulate it how you wish.

So. I now have an electronic solution that allows for daily metrics tracking in one tool, synced over three screens, with a data-collection and tagging infrastructure to permit fairly simple longitudinal analysis of performance. Not bad, eh?

Business Development, Computers & Technology, Personal

Rejoice! I've Created the Ultimate Daily Tracking System with @MSOneNote

No Comments

For many long, bitter years I’ve lamented the utter lack of harmony among my various personal-organizational systems. I’ve tried paper. I’ve tried smartphones. I’ve tried an Outlook-only solution. I even tried to put everything into a giant Access database with a Web front-end, only to be stymied by a back-end discontinuity. Never could get any solution to work, though — the stuff I wanted to record, in the way I wanted to record it, in all the different form factors I might want to access it, never seemed to align in satisfactory manner.
Until now, that is.log2

The solution I’ve developed squares the circle that connects data tracking, idea-gathering and journaling into a single front-end solution that synchronizes natively across three screens. I use Microsoft OneNote (although presumably Evernote would work too) with a separate notebook called “Chron” containing a tab called “Daily.” I’ve saved the template shown to the left as the default template for this tab, and my Windows Phone 8 links to the template page (I’ve pinned it, so I can open it up to today’s notes with just a single tap.)

The section contains the things I care about recording, but with only as much detail as I’m interested in gathering. The form includes a “focus” bar, which is simply a phrase or sentence that summarizes something I need to keep top-of-mind; it might be task-oriented or it might just be a song quote to provide inspiration.

The “Today’s Deliverables” list marks all the deadlines I have to get done — I refresh it every morning by scanning my task list in Outlook and picking the that that I need to keep in front of my face.  By design, this list doesn’t sync directly to Outlook; I sometimes include quick tasks or short-term lists here that really don’t warrant the time/effort of adding it to Outlook. I also sometimes schedule myself to do things before their Outlook due date if I know I have the flex to get it done.

The “Schedule” list provides a skeleton of my appointments — both on-calendar and in-the-moment — and beneath each item I can then add my meeting notes and (as needed) create Outlook tasks for anything I need to do as a result of that meeting.

If I did something special worth preserving, it’s listed as a “Significant Accomplishment” — helpful if I wanted to look back over the last few months to see progress on life goals. Many days, this line will be blank, just to preserve its value of highlighting the things that matter.

Then I record data about myself — how many calories I’ve consumed, how much exercising I’ve done and how much money I’ve transacted. Weekly, I record “body metrics,” including regular weigh-ins and blood pressure checks with an “other” category for other health milestones worth documenting. Like my sketchy Vitamin D levels. At the bottom of the list, a section for “Ideas/Reflections” permits free-form recording of ideas or longer journal entries. Consider it a form of diary integration.

One of my biggest peeves with existing third-party life-organization tools is that (a) data often aren’t portable, and (b) you’re at the mercy of the vendor. With my solution, I own my data and don’t need to give private information to a company that may or may not be in operation six months from now.

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a “tag” line beneath several of the sections. This little sentence identifies a specific data-recording paradigm. Under “Calorie Counts,” for example, I’ve reminded myself to record today’s date, the meal — breakfast/lunch/dinner/snack — and the meal’s net calories. If I need to add a comment, I can do so. Each piece of information is comma-separated. Then, I can highlight the row of data and use one of OneNote’s tags (I have CTRL+4 hot-keyed as a “calorie count” tag). For example: “1/1/13,breakfast,120,Greek yogurt and coffee with creamer.” Quick and easy to type — something I could do on my phone at the Starbucks counter, even. If it’s easy to record, it’s more likely that it’ll be recorded. Notes are optional. If you’re in line at Panera, how hard is it to tap your log button on the phone and type “1/1/13,lunch,350,Panera” if you’re enjoying a 350-calorie meal? If you can’t log something that succinct ….

But why do it this way, instead of using a third-party service or a spreadsheet or something? Because a uniform method of recording, coupled with OneNote’s heavily customizable internal tags, lets me do a tag search and dump all instances of a specific tab to a summary page. The upshot is that I can just copy/paste the “calorie count” data and dump it into Excel if I want to track/trend/graph my data over time; the uniform mechanism of tracking individual records, separated by commas, permits painless sorting into columns. For example, if I wanted to measure my average daily gross calorie count for all of January, and subtract from it my gross calorie burn from exercise, to arrive at net calories by day, I can just search for the “calorie count” and “exercise record” tags, do a quick copy/paste into Excel, and arrive at the results in less than a minute. No need to try fiddling with MyFitnessPal or Livescape, or a separate mobile version of a spreadsheet; the data’s your own and you can manipulate it how you wish.

So. I now have an electronic solution that allows for daily metrics tracking in one tool, synced over three screens, with a data-collection and tagging infrastructure to permit fairly simple longitudinal analysis of performance. Not bad, eh?

Business Development, Politics & Culture

Meaningful Health Reform: Emphasize Cost Reductions First!

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Recent debate about the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — better known as Obamacare — spins along an interesting but ultimately incoherent central axis: Namely, that access to insurance marks the most significant problem requiring federal intervention within the health care sector.

You hear the lament from President Obama himself. In comments delivered last week in the Rose Garden, he said: “People’s lives are affected by the lack of availability of health care, the unaffordability of health care, or their inability to get health care because of pre-existing conditions.”

Read that again. Now pay attention to several rhetorical sleights-of-hand that too often pass unremarked:

  • “…the lack of availability of health care…” — except, what Obama really means is the lack of affordability of health insurance.  Health care is generally plentiful; in fact, access to it through emergency rooms is enshrined under EMTALA, and communities across the country sponsor government- or church-run free or low-cost clinics. The only places with a lack of specific services result from local problems — e.g., communities with runaway tort awards that makes malpractice insurance for specialties like OB/GYN cost prohibitive for practitioners.
  • “…their inability to get health care because of pre-existing conditions.” Well, no. Again, it’s insurance and not access that’s really under discussion. In any case, people forget that insurance is a financial hedge against a potential future problem. When that problem materializes, ongoing insurance no longer makes sense, as the risk you’re insuring against isn’t theoretical any more. (Hint: That’s why some insurance companies didn’t “insure” against pre-existing conditions, which is much like trying to buy collision insurance the day after you wreck your car.)

In fact, the major problem with the whole debate is the focus on insurance coverage instead of cost reduction. It’s not entirely clear why employer-provided health insurance should be the primary mechanism by which individual citizens gain entry into the high-cost health services market. Nor is it clear why it’s constitutional for the government to require insurance companies to engage in specific behaviors that creates a regulatory regime that later justifies massive market intervention. Justice Kennedy had it right when he asked whether it makes any sense to create commerce just to regulate it. Treating “health reform” as simply expanding the insurance pool fundamentally misunderstands the real problem with health care costs today.

Which is this: As a distressingly large number of patients remain almost entirely disconnected from the actual costs of the services they consume and because they services are covered by third-party payers, the tendency is for prices to increase well above the rate of inflation. This trend makes a degree of sense; if you are sick and directly pay for little or nothing for the care you receive, then of course you want every test, every procedure, every intervention. And why not? Not your dime, after all. Rhetorical emanations from the Progressive Left elevate medical care to the level of a civil right that shouldn’t require anyone to pay out-of-pocket for anything. In a climate where the average person pays little and some activists demand that they pay nothing, it’s not a surprise that most people don’t put a lot of thought into the real cost of the services they consume. And as any marketer will tell you, people want more when they’re not thinking about price — which is basically the same economic model as the iTunes app store and Redbox kiosks.

Funny thing about health care. Contra Obama, you don’t need insurance to access health services. You can pay out of pocket. Doctors and hospitals don’t require insurance before delivering care — you can simply write a check, swipe a credit card or even negotiate a payment plan. Indeed, routine care isn’t really that expensive. An annual physical for someone in good health may cost less than $250 with labs in many markets. And before the wage-and-price controls of World War II, employer-provided health insurance was unheard of. We survived before benefits packages; we can survive when those packages are de-emphasized.

To really get health spending under control, we need to get consumers actively engaged in what health services they receive. The first step involves tort reform — physicians need to be free to recommend the various tests and procedures that are medically indicated without worrying about the lawsuits that lead to expensive “defensive medicine.” A regime that pre-screens medical malpractice claims against a board of physician advisers may well cut off the spigot of dollars flowing from the largess of a medically unskilled jury.

The second step requires patients to have financial skin in the game. Instead of taking refuge in free-lunch insurance programs, health insurance should more accurately reflect the original concept of risk mitigation that undergirds insurance programs as a whole. The best solution — and one that seems to work in hospitals across the country — lets consumers elect high-deductible plans that cover catastrophic illnesses but require patients to front the money for most low-dollar costs up to a specific threshold. These plans generally cost less and make patients think twice about demanding unnecessary care when the funds come directly from their own pockets.

Put differently: If get a nasty head cold, do you tough it out or do you make a trip to the doctor and demand antibiotics (even though antibiotics don’t work on viruses)? With free-lunch insurance, you’ll visit the doctor, get your scrip, maybe offer a token amount as a co-pay, and move on. If you knew you had to pay for the office visit and the drugs, would you bother? Probably not. You would only seek medical services when you believed you really needed them. The Washington Post recently addressed the trend of higher-deductible plans. Although the story may be faulted for assuming that it’s an outrage that people should actually pay for what they use, otherwise the account presents a fairly well-balanced summary of the trend away from gold-plated coverage and more toward consumer-driven health care.

The researchers at RAND Corporation’s health unit have complied extensive and diverse statistics about the long-term trends in health services; the publication is well worth perusing. The reasons for today’s exploding cost model are many, but some of the major contributors include:

  • Increased regulatory burden by governments that drives up costs by as much as 25 percent of the entire sector
  • Increased cost of ancillary services unrelated to the provision of care (e.g., marketing departments, education teams, etc.) — a 2003 New England Journal of Medicine study suggested that administration alone costs more than $700 for every inpatient visit
  • Increased utilization of expensive services like MRIs that may not be clinically warranted but protect the ordering physician from malpractice claims if the patient isn’t happy with his treatment, may raise costs by 5 to 9 percent
  • Cost-shifting from protected patients to non-protected patients — case in point: because Medicare or Medicaid reimburse at less than actual costs, the “gap” is made up in higher prices for everyone else, to the tune of more than $6 billion per year
  • Fixed infrastructure costs — primarily IT — drive up institutional expenses, which are then passed along to patients
  • HMOs and other insurers negotiate separate contracts with providers, and if one insurer gets a sweeter deal patients covered by a different provider may make up for it with higher prices

Health reimbursement theorists look at medical care as a three-legged stool of costs, quality and access. There’s a relationship among these variables: As costs increase, access declines. As quality increases, costs increase. Radically increasing access will make costs skyrocket.

That’s the fundamental problem with Obamacare — it emphasizes increasing access to free- or low-cost medical care, but as costs increase, there’s no obvious payer. Hence the “individual mandate.” If everyone pays into the system, then free-lunch coverage for everyone becomes a more viable option. Without a mandate, there just isn’t enough money to fund all the services that will be demanded at free-lunch prices by the U.S. population. And a single-payer solution won’t fix the problem. The dollars have to come from somewhere, and if individual consumers of health services have zero personal incentive to responsibly align their utilization against their genuine medical need, the system as a whole will suffer from significant and costly inefficiencies that make the entire infrastructure unworkable in the long run.

To really fix the problems with today’s health care market, we should focus on cost reduction. If costs go down, premiums will go down and access will naturally increase. And while we’re at it, we should scrap the antiquated WWII-era model of financing health services through “insurance” and instead open the market to actual costs borne by actual people.

Disclaimer: The writer is an experienced revenue-cycle analyst for a large Midwestern health system. The opinions expressed in this blog post reflect only the writer’s opinions and do not speak for, imply or endorse any position on behalf of the health system.

Business Development

How to Succeed in Business Without Selling What’s Left of Your Soul

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Graduation season is upon us once again, and as myriad starry-eyed new grads eagerly leap into the bog that is today’s job market, this tired old man shall shower upon them a few choice words of advice on achieving lasting workplace success.

I assume, of course, that as you enter the workforce, you took sufficient advantage of your years of schooling to obtain a certain depth and breadth of experience in a number of economic pursuits that are a wee bit more substantial than “burger flipper,” right?  You did internships, you volunteered (yes, you can include that on a resume!), you worked jobs that provided experience in your industry while demonstrating that you are capable of discharging responsibilities effectively.  Right?  Please tell me you aren’t going to an interview for a $50,000-per-year job with “cashier” or “short-order cook” or “A&F model” as your main selling point.

And in terms of job search:  Do you have a well-done resume, prepared by someone who understands how to sell you to a prospective employer?  Do you have customized cover letters?  A suit for interviewing, and a stylist to cut off those dreads and pull out all those facial piercings?  Have you sat down with someone in your chosen industry to think through your answers to common interviewing questions?

Anyway, enough of the prep.  Here are some tips for surviving in the workplace after you complete your first day of orientation.

  1. Never miss a deadline. Ever.  Even if you have to stay in the office until 11 p.m.  If you commit to delivering something, then deliver it when you say you will. On those occasions when an external factor affects your ability to achieve a deadline (e.g., a re-prioritization of tasks from your supervisor), make sure that you quickly communicate the delay, with reasons, to your affected customers, with a revised due date; don’t make them track you down after the fact.  Missed deadlines — especially when there’s no good reason for it — erode credibility more quickly than any other workplace bad behavior.
  2. Be self-sufficient. The only person responsible for your success is you, so don’t harass the departmental secretary with mundane tasks or seek validation from a superior at every turn.  Take ownership of your contribution to the company, and carry your own weight on projects and in group efforts.
  3. Don’t make excuses.  Failures are always your fault, even when they aren’t. If you messed up, admit it quickly and apologize. Don’t struggle to find reasons why the failure wasn’t really your fault.  Even if you could fairly parcel chunks of responsibility to others, don’t.  You will get more respect in the long run if you take your lumps and move on with your head held high, than if you scurry about like the last rat off the sinking ship.
  4. Avoid office gossip and keep confidences. Gossip is the lubrication that keeps the social wheel turning. You can’t avoid it — but try not to get caught up in it. Walking the high road, keeping confidences and squelching rumors goes a long way to improving a person’s social standing in the office.
  5. Learn how to confront others in a respectful way. Cubicle neighbor plays his music too loud? Have a team member who consistently fails to perform?  Take the time to learn how to have serious conversations with others that touch on tough subjects. Many people don’t like conflict, but avoidance is not a success strategy. There are several different approaches to having a “crucial conversation” with someone — time invested in learning this skill will pay handsome dividends.
  6. Be humble.  No one likes a know-it-all. Even if you know the right answer to a problem, you will do better to engage and persuade than in laying out your own solution.  People like to feel consulted with, so swallow your pride and structure a conversation so that your ideas feel like everyone’s ideas. And when it comes time for credit — take your fair share of the blame, but don’t hog more than your fair share of the credit.  Recognize those who contributed to your success.
  7. Don’t commit to what you can’t deliver.  It’s tempting to promise the world on the basis of a dream, but people-pleasers end up pleasing no one.  Be honest about what you can and cannot do, and if you can’t do something, volunteer to help find a solution by another means.
  8. Exceed expectations. Always go one step farther than someone expects. For example, if you own the schedule for a conference room and someone asks if it’s free, instead of saying, “No, it’s booked,” take the time to research an alternative and then say, “I’m sorry, the room is booked, but I took the liberty of reserving this other room for you instead — is that OK?”  Delighting your customers by demonstrating superior service is always a career-enhancing strategy.
  9. Keep your work and home lives separate.  Don’t argue with your significant other on the phone all day. Don’t bring confidential documents home. Avoid littering your work space with large amounts of personal memorabilia. It’s best to keep a wall of separation between office and living room.
  10. Watch your Web browsing.  Office computers are great — but use them only for the office.  More and more companies are monitoring everything that employees do on company hardware, so it makes sense to completely avoid using company resources for personal or non-work activities. Want to read news sites during lunch?  Great — bring your own laptop.
  11. Dress the part.  Each industry and office setting has its own unique culture, but in general, dress a half-step more formally than your peer group.  In a general office setting, this might mean wearing ties when everyone else is “business casual.”  In an art studio, it means making sure your jeans aren’t ripped and stained like everyone else’s. Better to be at the upper end of proper than the lower end.
  12. Follow policies and procedures.  Even when others cut corners, always follow a documented process flow. If something goes wrong, your adherence to policy will be a saving grace. A policy doesn’t exist to irritate you, it exists to fill a need — if a policy seems problematic, then seek changes to it.  Don’t merely ignore it.
  13. Ask questions properly. When in doubt, ask.  Seek assistance.  If something doesn’t make sense, obtain clarification.  That said, avoid using questions as a way of being Mr. Smartypants.  Don’t pass judgments when asking questions.
  14. Be entrepreneurial.  Look for ways to improve processes. Pitch new project ideas. Pursue professional certifications in your off hours.   This sends the message that you care enough about your job to do more than just react to incoming work requests.
  15. Stay organized. If you master nothing else, learn how to maintain an effective filing system and a seamless task-management environment. Your files should be clearly labeled and comprehensible. You should be able to convert notes and assignments into a workflow that reduces the odds you will forget something important.  If your boss wants to know what you are doing, you should be able to turn around a complete inventory of assignments within three minutes. Don’t be that guy who agrees to do something in a meeting, writes it on the top of the agenda, puts the agenda on a stack, and never looks at it again.
  16. Don’t be the Lone Ranger.  Even if you work independently, consistently obtain the advice of people affected by your work product. Don’t give naysayers a reason to torpedo a major project simply because you failed to communicate with them. Involve as many stakeholders as is needed in your work so that (as much as is practicable) you are known for delivering consensus-driven work product, and not “mad genius” work product that people resent because they had no hand in shaping its development. Many a brilliant project was shelved because some of the affected customers felt like they weren’t engaged in the planning process.
  17. Be accessible — within reason.  During working hours, people should be able to reach you. Return email and voice mail promptly, and avoid the temptation to wander to strange places to work “in peace.”  People will notice your absence, and generally not in a good way.  However, think carefully about just how accessible you are during non-work hours. 24×7 availability can set you apart, but it can also create unrealistic expectations and lead to early burn-out.
  18. Keep a tidy desk.  Silly?  Maybe.  But how many CEOs have cluttered desks, compared to the mailroom clerks?  A clean desk is a public statement that you are on top of things and well prepared.  Perhaps this is more illusion than truth, but in the end, people can only interpret what they can see.
  19. Generate polished work product.  Fact: People are more likely to believe the printed word than the spoken word, and people are more likely to trust a document that is aesthetically pleasing compared to one that isn’t. Always take the time to make sure your work product is visually pleasing with solid content.
  20. Don’t game the system. If the office has flexibility about when you come and go, don’t abuse it by consistently coming in significantly later than everyone else, or leaving earlier. Match the standard set by the most-respected member of the department. And you really don’t want to be the person who ruins a good thing for everyone else by taking it to its absurd conclusion.

There.  Twenty solid tips.  Enjoy!