Personal

Oh, 2017—At Least You Tried!

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After the giant national dumpster fire of 2016, I had hoped that the world would be a calmer and saner place in 2017. Yet once again, experience kicked hope in the nuts. As Dark Helmet says: Evil will always triumph because good is dumb. 🙂
That said, 2017 wasn’t personally horrible. In fact, it was a year of great learnings. Let me review the year, then offer some reflection, in this annual installment of my “year in review” blog series.

2017: The Timeline

January

  • Started the Grand River Writing Tribe, which had five people for most of the year and two additional candidates by December.
  • Began a two-year term as a member of the Kent County Republican Executive Committee.
  • Assumed the duties of board treasurer of The Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters, a literary non-profit based in G.R.

February

  • Attended the MI GOP state convention in Lansing as a full voting delegate.
  • Attended Commission Week, a three-night stay in Chicago as part of my duties as a member of the board of directors of the National Association for Healthcare Quality.

March

  • First complicated programming push for the Writers Squared program—a GLCL authors’ series funded in part by the Michigan Humanities Council. I was the fiscal officer on MHC’s grant, which covered the 2017 program year.

April

  • Get Published! 2017 conference at Herrick District Library, sponsored by MiFiWriters. I was a panelist, panel organizer and session leader.
  • NAHQ board meeting in Chicago.
  • Spoke about small-press publishing at the inaugural UntitledTown Book and Author Festival in Green Bay, Wisconsin—a great event keynoted by Margaret Atwood and Sherman Alexie.
  • Lord of the Rings trilogy watch party at AmyJo’s.

May

  • Took an extended Memorial Day vacation to focus on Caffeinated Press work.
  • Duane visited Grand Rapids, driving from Corpus Christi—and we got to have coffee, the first time I’ve seen him in years.
  • Spoke about health data analytics at the educational conference of the Illinois Association for Healthcare Quality in Naperville, IL.

June

  • Welcomed Tabitha to the CafPress board of directors.

July

  • Moved CafPress office up one flight of stairs in the Ken-O-Sha Professional Building.
  • Swapped rooms at home between my office and bedroom.
  • NAHQ Commission Week in Chicago.
  • Flight over Grand Rapids with Other Jason.
  • Photo hiking tour
  • New bed! Broken toe!
  • Cigar night with Tony, Matt and Scott.

August

  • MiFiWriters weekend retreat in Kalamazoo.
  • Family party for my cousin Callista, visiting from Colorado.
  • Kayaking trip at the Double R Ranch with most of my core and extended team from Priority Health (Brad, Brittany, Jen, Megan, Satish, Liz, Dom).

September

  • 41st birthday.
  • NAHQ board meeting and NAHQ Next conference in Cincinnati.
  • Home shopping spree: new PC, new bedroom furniture.

October

November

  • Story accepted for Division by Zero anthology; review of proofs for Christ’s Body, Christ’s Wounds.
  • Participated in—and won!—National Novel Writing Month.
  • Sedate family Thanksgiving at mom’s house.
  • CafPress launch party and poetry reading at Books and Mortar in Grand Rapids.

December

  • CafPress reorganization; four of six members of board of directors resigned or went on sabbatical, all for good/happy reasons.
  • Annual maternal-family Christmas with St. Dorothy the Matriarch.
  • Three weeks’ (almost) vacation.
  • Read a book for fun—A War Like No Other by Victor Davis Hanson.
  • Completed development of my life-long reading list.

Reflection

I took a peek at the 12 separate new years’ resolutions I listed just 12 months ago. I accomplished zero of them. But I’m not dismayed by this turn of events, because I’ve learned something very, very important this year: The things you want to do and the things you have to do aren’t naturally aligned—but happy and successful people discover how to turn the things they have to do into the things they want to do.
It’s not lost on me that a ton of what’s occupied my time over the last five or so years are the things I must do. Following the KĂĽbler-Ross model, I’ve noticed (as I look back at posts from years past) that I spent a lot of time whining in the denial and anger stages of “being busy.” Then I migrated to bargaining with myself about what magical solution could optimize my personal timestream and slice through correspondence clutter. Then I got stressed and depressed at the mountain of stuff ready to collapse upon me. Then I got to acceptance—of doing what one can do and not stressing about what’s left undone, or left delayed.
That acceptance stage was really the story of my 2017. Now, however, I realize I probably accepted the wrong thing, and I came to that conclusion this month as I reflected for the first time about whether I want to move on beyond my 17 years at Spectrum Health System. If I did leave the company, where would I go? What would I do? What about consulting?
See, those 12 resolutions from a year ago had nothing—not one damn thing—to do about work. Nothing about Priority Health. Nothing about Caffeinated Press. Instead, they were all focused on personal enrichment, good health and solid relationships. I had accepted that I had to prioritize the things I had to do so that I might squeak a few minutes of what I wanted to do somewhere into the mix. Those precious few things earned pride of place on my resolution list precisely because they were stretch goals; one rarely sets a goal to do the things one already routinely does.
But perhaps re-consideration is in order. Now that I’ve really turned my mind toward my day-job career, a whole lot of secondary considerations start to filter in, mostly around what fills the gap. And I’m aware that some opportunities to close that gap remained unrealized, because I was so occupied with what I had to do that I didn’t invest in what I want to do.
What, I wonder, might life look like if I turned the priority pyramid upside down? What if, instead of spending hundreds of hours developing and publishing books no one buys, I spent the time writing my own? What if, instead of attending events and office hours, I went running or hiking or kayaking more often? What if, instead of staying up consistently past 1 a.m., I went to bed earlier so I could wake up earlier and do cardio before heading into the office?
The things I want to do and the things I’m obligated to do remain misaligned. But that’s a fixable problem—and my only real resolution for 2018.

The Year Ahead

So. It seems 2018 will be the year of the pyramid flop. What might that look like?
For starters, I turn to my Roadmap. I’ve mentioned this document on this blog before. I started it on Dec. 2, 2009. I revise it every year, without fail, on Independence Day and Christmas Day. The contents shift over time, as you’d expect from a framework that now stands at revision No. 22. I learn a lot by looking at old versions of it!
The Roadmap begins with a section titled “The Fullness of Life,” which includes the following statement: “A man’s full measure reveals itself in the sincerity of his struggle to realize his natural potential—a capacity anchored in the development of wisdom, obtained through the bold and joyful pursuit of diverse experiences, meaningful relationships and new ideas. Steadfast nurturing of this potential leads to true optimism, the key that opens the door to a happy and virtuous life.”
It then offers my personal vision statement: “I will be a contented and healthy man who, on his 70th birthday, can look himself in the mirror without fearing the sting of regret.”
Then I offer 10 strategies for achieving this vision:

  • Cultivate serenity.
  • Nurture insatiable curiosity.
  • Remain excellent at the basics.
  • Favor action over study.
  • Foster relationships.
  • Reduce consumption.
  • Present an enticing façade.
  • Resist unhealthy entanglements.
  • Avoid comfort’s temptation.
  • Prepare for an uncertain tomorrow.

Then I look at my bucket list.

Which—let me interrupt this blog post with a special news bulletin!—I knocked an item off my bucket list last week. Yes. I did it. After five years of screwing around with it, and probably between 200 and 250 hours of development over those years, I’ve finally compiled version 1.0 of my Life-Long Reading List. It’s a roster of more than 550 titles that I think a person should encounter before he or she swirls the drain. It will obviously be open to re-curation over the coming years, but it’s basically a consolidation of different canon lists with some of my own judgment sprinkled in for color. Interested in it? I’ve published it. Visit the Life-Long Reading List page. Add your additions and questions into the comments on that page. And yes, the bucket-list goal was in developing the list, not in plowing through it. 🙂

Anyway.
So my bucket list and my list of intermediate goals tell me what I think are valuable. They’re not necessarily where I spend my time. When I abstract my short-, medium- and long-term goals into a concise list fit for reprinting here, I arrive at the following list of goals for 2018:

  • Get back to roughly ~160 lbs. by autumn and start weightlifting after I fall below 200.
  • Aggressive summer schedule for scuba and hiking—potentially a return trip to Isle Royale—and therefore, first, return to excellent cardiopulmonary condition.
  • Do at least one of the 360 Vegas vacations.
  • Meaningfully advance the profession of healthcare quality by over-achieving on our present work for the NAHQ code of ethics.
  • Upgrade my diving certs and upgrade my radio license.
  • Get the “registered parliamentarian” endorsement.
  • Apply to the master’s program at the Jefferson School of Public Health.
  • Finish and transmit to at least one agent, my non-fiction proposal for From Pencil to Print.
  • Submit at least one short story or poem each month.
  • Complete Wilderness First Responder training.
  • Join, and do stuff with, the Fortune Bay Expedition Team, RACES and Skywarn.
  • Obtain a private pilot license.
  • Make Caffeinated Press financially sustainable through distribution-network growth and the release of paid seminars.
  • Buy golf clubs and go golfing with people.
  • Consolidate my several secondary PCs and laptops into one device and sell/retire the rest.
  • Go to Rome.
  • Go back to church more reliably.
  • Visit Denton, Texas.
  • Keep Vice Lounge Online going strong.
  • Do monthly photo shoots.
  • Re-start the monthly cigar-and-cocktail nights at Grand River Cigar.
  • Re-join a dojo.
  • Apply for an artist residency for at least one national park.
  • Read at least one book per month for fun; first priority is on the published volumes of the Oxford History of the United States.

Notice, I say goals. I probably won’t accomplish many of these items—if I can knock out just two or three, a year from now, I’ll claim a major victory—and I dare not call them resolutions. But they are, in a way, a reproach. They interrogate me: Where am I spending my time, and in what proportions, such that these goals remain elusive? What more can I do to make my “wants” into my “musts?”
The 17th year of the first century of the third millennium wasn’t a bad period for me. It was a year of stability on most fronts and progress on a few.
Let’s see how we can improve that score in the 364 days ahead.

Personal

End of the Year Catch-Up!

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… and just like that, it’s the second half of December.
When I left the Priority Health office on Thursday afternoon, I began an extended vacation period that doesn’t end until the morning of January 4. So far, I’m off to a good start. On Thursday I had dinner with Chris and Sheri after work, then did a focus group for the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters at the Craft Beer Cellar. On Friday, I did some Christmas shopping, saw Star Wars: The Last Jedi and attended the annual holiday party of my social writing group—and I bought a Best Buy door-buster item, a 49-inch TV that will replace the sad 28-inch version that had been in my living room. Yesterday, I enjoyed the annual Christmas party hosted by my beloved grandmother, St. Dorothy the Matriarch.
Evenings have been consumed with reading, which is something of a novelty lately. Just finished A War Like No Other, a history of the Peloponnesian War by Victor Davis Hanson. The landlord re-cemented some of the bricks in my office fireplace, so I’ve been reading by the fire with an adult beverage and a lap cat. Very serene.
But despite the “vacation” label, it’s not really a time of vacation. I’m not going anywhere, save a one-night trek to Chicago for a NAHQ planning session. Instead, I’ll be at my home office (mostly) or the Caffeinated Press office (occasionally) to get caught up on all the stuff I intended to do in 2017 but haven’t yet managed to finish.
This year, I’m doing something different. Instead of just looking at my mile-long task list, I’ve affinitized my tasks (I use Todoist) into projects. What’s new is that I’ve scheduled these Todoist projects by day, so each project has an assigned day:

  • 12/15: Christmas shopping
  • 12/18: Professional associations and consulting
  • 12/19: Reading list curation & content/distribution strategy for my erotica novellas
  • 12/20: Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters
  • 12/21: Personal writing projects
  • 12/22: Politics and health & wellness
  • 12/23: Vice Lounge Online
  • 12/26: Personal hobbies
  • 12/27: Caffeinated Press (marketing, seminars, the lit journal, governance)
  • 12/28: Personal finance & home stuff (filing, deep cleaning)
  • 12/29: Caffeinated Press (finance, operations, editorial)
  • 12/30: Caffeinated Press (transition work for the lit journal)

Overlaying all of this is my current consulting work for DotDash and ongoing Caffeinated Press work doing manuscript reads and some editing/development work on our anthology and two novels in progress. And I’m taking the actual holiday-days off entirely as downtime.
I think my to-do list is eminently reasonable and will clear the deck for a strong start into 2018.
If you, dear reader, take some vacation, I hope it’s safe, happy, healthy and relaxing!

Healthcare Quality & Analytics, Personal, Writing, Editing & Journalism

An October Update

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After a brief stretch of unseasonably warm weather in late September, West Michigan has unambiguously slipped into autumn. I look out my home-office window—the air is nice, with that charming mix of cool and moist that suggests “tailgate season”—and I see more and more orange and red amidst the green. Squirrels scamper with earnestness. Bugs are vanishing. Things slow down.

“Winter is coming,” I’m told. And I hope it does. I’m excited for this year’s holiday season. In my head, it kicks off with my mid-September birthday, which marks for me the end of summer (Labor Day doesn’t do it for me) and the beginning of “winter Lent.” Then October sees the tree transitions and sweater weather and writing prep that culminates in Halloween—holiday season kickoff!—and the beginning of National Novel Writing Month. Thanksgiving re-grounds me with family and marks a pivot point for NaNo. And as soon as the mad-dash of writing is over, I pivot to Christmas and then take two or three weeks off from the day job to recharge, etc. It’s a great time of the year, even in years when I’m not “feelin’ it.”

So today seems like as good of a time as any to offer some updates, offered as usual in no particular order, but as always under the watchful gaze of my feline overlords.

VLO’s Summer Vacation. Tony and I took a half-vacation (i.e., work slowdown) in late July and throughout August; as of September, we were back to a normal weekly podcasting schedule. The upside to VLO now rolling in its sixth year is that we’re stable and mature. And, of course, that we have thousands of downloaders and hundreds of engaged listeners on Twitter, Facebook, the blog, etc. Given that we don’t monetize this program—it’s a hobby and labor of love—the response by people all across the world has been fantastic. And for almost all of the shows for September and October, our alcohol segments came to us free of charge courtesy of gifts from our listeners. It’s a ton of work, but it’s a joyful thing.

NAHQ @ Cincinnati. On my birthday, I flew to Cincinnati for the back-to-back board meeting and educational conference for the National Association for Healthcare Quality. It was a professionally rewarding experience. Being a board member means that the conference is tightly scheduled for us. Six days, five nights. But what made it personally rewarding was the deep camaraderie among the current members of the board and the great cadre of seasoned, senior volunteers who work with us. NAHQ is about to go into a very tight period where the organization pivots from an association-management model (i.e., a separate company “manages” the association, hires the staff, provides the office, etc.) to a fully stand-alone model where the association itself handles all its own operations, leases its own offices, hires its own team, stands up its own I.T., etc. This is a huge deal. We’re bigger than most groups that make the independent pivot and we have only about a quarter of the time the average group enjoys to make the move … but our staff are awesome (almost all are leaving the management company to be hired by NAHQ outright) and our finances are rock-solid. It’ll be a heavy lift, but it’ll be done with finesse and—we expect—utterly transparently to our thousands of dues-paying members.

Jot That Down. I’m pleased to share that Jot That Down: Encouraging Essays for New Writers has been successfully released. I worked with A. L. Rogers, the book’s editor, to get it produced in print. It’s a great resource for new/aspiring writers, covering a variety of topics and genres in an easy-to-digest manner. Currently available for purchase for $14.95 from Caffeinated Press or by special order from your local independent bookseller.

Other CafPress books. And speaking of Jot That Down, I’ve wrapped up Isle Royale from the AIR, an anthology edited by Phillip Sterling that collects stories, poems and art from former artists-in-residence at Isle Royale National Park. I’m also in the production phase of Brewed Awakenings 3, our annual anthology, and Off the Wall: How Art Speaks, a collection of poetry and art co-developed by Elizabeth Kerlikowske and Mary Hatch. And final edits are due from the advance review copy for Ladri, a novel by Andrea Albright. Barring disaster, each of these books should be in-scope for a boost event we’ll host at the end of the month. Two more novels await this year—Kim Bento’s Surviving the Lynch Mob and Barbara David’s A Tale of Therese—plus Jennifer Morrison’s local-history book The Open Mausoleum Door, then I’m caught up with production across all of our lines of business.

NaNoWriMo. NaNo’s coming, so that means that I’ve had to (a) re-curate my author page and (b) think about what I’m going to work on. I think my technical focus will be on sharpening conflict and using that conflict to be the primary driver of the plot (instead of my usual, which is to let the plot drive the conflict). The story itself will be another bite at a Jordan Sanders murder mystery because I’m well-acquainted with the characters in this universe. But I still have three weeks to nail down my idea.

Grand River Writing Tribe. The Tribe has been together for 10 months now, and it’s been going gangbusters. People are participating. Getting published. Supporting each other. Without a regular, focused critique group, a writer stands at a significant disadvantage. GRWT meets twice monthly for three hours, combining critiques, focused education and dedicated writing time. And we still welcome potential new applicants!

Juicing. So this happened. On October 1, a scant week ago, I began a significant diet program. I had purchased a juicer and accessories. For several days, I had nothing but fruit and vegetable juice. Then, on the advice of clinicians at work, I’ve migrated to a part-juice, part-good-food regimen. So it’s been juices with a little bit of, e.g., shredded chicken or sushi or carrot/celery sticks. The thing is, I’m avoiding all processed sugars, alcohol, refined carbs, etc. Not even doing my traditional Lean Cuisines. It’s either juice I prepared myself, or plain shredded chicken or sashimi without the rice. (Tonight, I’m making a salmon fillet with asparagus.) Already down five pounds in a week. And although the diet part isn’t hard—I really like what I’m consuming—what’s been more interesting is the level of planning I’ve had to do. Actually preparing a shopping list (“I need this many swiss chard leaves, this many pears, this many ounces of blueberries …”) and planning my evening schedule around my dinner schedule has been both illustrative and challenging. And now that I bought an elliptical, which just got set up in my living room—whoa! Credit to my friend Tony who did a 30-day juice diet in May (and lost a ton of weight!) and who remains incredibly supportive even when I mock him unfairly for becoming a vegan.

The Great Outdoors. Tomorrow, a half-day kayaking trip beckons, with Jen, Brittany and Steve. Next Saturday, I’m doing a day hike on a section of the North Country Trail in the Manistee National Forest.

Home Shopping Spree. With the annual management bonus we received at the day job, I was able to pay off some bills, pay other bills early and invest a bit in both Caffeinated Press and my own home front. Of note, with the mid-summer swap of my bedroom and my office, I had to buy all new bedroom furniture. That’s done: Dresser, headboard, vanity with bench. Then some odds-and-ends, including the aforementioned elliptical, some knickknacks like candles and new lamps, a full-length mirror and a stool for the bathroom, and a replacement computer. My “normal” all-in-one home computer is very old and has been intermittently hostile, so it’s been retired to be a dedicated writing machine at my dedicated writing desk. The new machine—the first upgradeable tower PC I’ve owned since, I think, 2005—is an iBuyPower box with a quad-core i7-7700 processor, 16 GB of RAM and a 3GB GPU (GeForce GTX 1060). In all, a decent if not bleeding-edge machine. The only real hesitation I had with it is that it appears to have been designed by a 13-year-old boy, with proliferating LED lights (that I covered with electrical tape!) and a keyboard that looked like a l337 toddler toy. Picked up a 27-inch monitor for it; almost got two but I’m glad I didn’t because with it and the 17-inch aux monitor I already had, I’m literally out of room on my desk. I literally cannot fit two 27-inch monitors. Anyway, Duane, if you see this: “SIXTEEN GIGS OF RAM.”

Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters. It’s an exciting time at GLCL. The board has been discussing a very, very robust programming schedule for 2018 as well as rebranding and an expansion of the board. A ton of work, to be sure, but I think it’ll help focus the organization and promote local literary citizenship. More to come.

All for now. May your autumn Winter Lent warm your soul even if it chills your toes!

Personal

Birthday Retrospective, Part XLI

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Here I sit, on the 17th floor of a hotel overlooking (the admittedly interesting) downtown Cincinnati, having just returned from a traveler’s solo dinner —for the record, a tasty gin cocktail and a Cajun shrimp platter—which solitude afforded me some welcome opportunity to reflect on what I’d write here, in this decade-long tradition of writing about me on my birthday.

Lawd a-mercy, it’s been a day. I got up at 7 a.m., aided in large part by Fiona d’Cat deciding that my bladder made for a great trampoline. So I got up, took a shower, grabbed a bit of breakfast, then hit the road for pre-trip errands. First, to drop off consignment copies of Jot That Down: Encouraging Essays for New Writers (edited by A.L. Rogers, published by Caffeinated Press) to Baker Book House. The book launches tonight at the 10th anniversary Jot Writers Conference. So, yay for that! Then I went to the Secretary of State’s office to renew both my plates and my driver’s license. Which was good, because my DL photo still had me with long hair and TSA is really not amused by ID pictures that don’t look like the person bearing the credential. Then I went to Meijer to buy assorted things. Then I went home to pack and make the house cat-friendly while I’m away. Then I went to the Caffeinated Press office to drop off the rest of the Jot That Down order I didn’t consign to Baker. Then I went to the airport—and holy cow, the new unified security screening at GRR is actually quite impressive—then off I went upon the wings of American Eagle. The flights were fine (better than fine; both legs were on an Embraer 145 with a 1×2 configuration and for both I sat on the “1” side of the aircraft). We connected through O’Hare, so of course my journey to CVG was delayed an hour. Then I Uber’d it to the hotel—great driver, so I tipped him, which is a thing with Uber now. Unpacked. Ironed my clothes; sent my navy suit and black jacket to the dry cleaners. Grabbed dinner. Now I’m blogging. I’ll probably re-read my NAHQ board book before I go to bed, for I do NOT want to disappoint my colleague Andrew tomorrow.

It’s been a week. In the last seven days, I’ve released the advance review copy of Isle Royale from the A.I.R. (edited by Phillip Sterling, forthcoming next month from Caffeinated Press) to Phillip. I joined a mini board meeting with my colleagues at the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters to discuss administrative stuff plus, significantly, marketing and rebranding. Cool things are coming on that front. And I retrieved our print run of Jot That Down from Color House Graphics. I’m pleased with CHG’s speed, quality and cost. Oh, and I released another of my pseudonymous erotica novellas to Amazon. Plus pushed the most current episode of The Vice Lounge Online which—holy hell—is now at episode No. 333. Icing on the cake: I received notification that I’ve been admitted to WMU’s Graduate College on a non-degree track; I think I want to start a grad certificate in applied stats and then transmogrify that into either something related to healthcare administration or the interdisciplinary PhD in evaluation.

It’s been a month. Finished the re-architecting of my home office thanks to an equipment swap with my mom: She took the recumbent bike, I took the recliner and its plush rug. We’ve gotten a ton of major work efforts tidied up at Priority Health, in anticipation of the long slog of budgeting-and-pricing season, which officially begins today. I gave a second-to-last pass on edits to Conversion Therapy, a novelette I wrote in August at the MiFiWriters retreat. I completed the advance review copy of Ladri (a dark urban fantasy novel written by Andrea Albright and forthcoming next month from Caffeinated Press). I got the GLCL membership database synced up. And, I got to see my cousin and her husband and two children, including newborn baby Athena!

It’s been a year. We moved to a different office space at Caffeinated Press; I re-did much of my home’s interior layout because of this consolidation, including bringing my big U-shaped desk home. I’ve gotten my own personal writing slush pile increasingly honed and ready (almost!) for more vigorous shopping. My team at PH has, in many ways, set the gold standard for my division’s new operational focus—I’m immensely proud of them. I’ve survived two leadership transitions at the day job and picked up a side consulting gig for my old mentor, the infamous RL. My two indoor feline overlords have been joined by two outdoor feline fellow travelers in the form of Ziggy and Tiger. I launched the Grand River Writing Tribe, which is hummin’ along great. I spoke, this spring, at the Illinois Association for Healthcare Quality conference as well as the inaugural UntitledTown authors’ conference in Green Bay, Wisconsin. I joined the board of directors of the GLCL—and saw it lose its gorgeous building. I’ve gone hiking and kayaking. Last fall, I went to Las Vegas for VIMFP and to Orlando for NAHQ.

It’s been a decade. My early 30s weren’t all that hot. But it got better. Inasmuch as I had dreaded (perhaps too melodramatically) the arrival of The Big Four Oh, I find that there’s a certain charm in things like having a positive net worth, a reliable and modern vehicle, insurance and the means to do stuff like hire movers instead of begging family to bring trucks over. I joke with Brittany that #AdultingIsHard, but after you crack the code, it’s surprisingly charming.

It’s been a life. My mother visited me on Wednesday to give my my birthday card. During the course of conversation, she inquired—in a roundabout way—whether I’m happy, in a big-picture kind of way.

My TL;DR answer? Yes.

How could I not? This post has taken twice as long to write than it needed to, because every minute or two my phone dings with a text message, Facebook post, LinkedIn message or tweet wishing me a happy birthday. Dozens of people think kindly enough of me to take a moment to send a brief message of support.

Perhaps that’s the biggest accomplishment of all.

Personal, Photography, Writing, Editing & Journalism

Bidding a (Fond) Farewell to July 2017

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July is about to bow its sayonara. Interesting month. Got a lot accomplished. Moving into August on an upbeat note. Let me talk a bit about photography, then I’ll segue into professional and then personal updates.

Photography

I perambulated yesterday around Kent Trails, near Millennium Park, along a 4.1-mile loop. I brought my trusty Nikon D3100 camera (I know, I know—antique body at this point) with my Nikkor 70-300 mm lens. The goal of the walk wasn’t to hone my technical skills with manual-mode shooting but rather to just work on framing with this lens. Haven’t used it much yet. Had some fun with it — my favorite 29 photos are captured into three Tumblr photoset posts organized by the themes of park, flora and fauna. And it was great to get into the relative peace of the park.

After I left the trail, arms wickedly sunburned, I stopped for an unannounced visit to my mom. That was nice. I’m thrilled that Gunner the German Shepherd is doing well. He’s a whopping 110 lbs now. Yikes.

On my way home from my mom’s house, I visited the new nature walk that used to be The Highlands Golf Club. In the summer of 2000, I worked course maintenance at The Highlands. The Great Lakes Senior Golf Association wrote up the course by saying:

In the early 1900’s Donald Ross, one of the world’s most renowned golf course architects, designed one of the best golf courses in West Michigan. In 2008 we celebrated our centennial year at The Highlands in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Now you too can play and walk the fairways that Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Lee Trevino, Chi Chi Rodriguez, Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Sam Snead and hundreds of other PGA, Senior PGA, and LPGA stars have played.

I myself had played there, with my grandfather, in the 1990s and early 2000s. Earlier this year, the 18-hole, 121-acre site was acquired by the Land Conservancy and added to the Blandford Nature Center. So far, they’ve done basically nothing but remove the hardware for the course (flags, cups, ball washers) and mow a few meandering paths through it. Otherwise, it’s being reclaimed by nature. I’ve documented the effect that just one season’s worth of quietude has wrought on what used to be a nationally respected course. See the photoset. Beautiful, but also sad. When you see a place you worked so hard to maintain now overgrown and wild, you cannot help but reflect on the impermanence of things. Even things like a 109-year-old golf course.

And one last photo thing—all this picture-taking impelled me to get my portfolio organized. So my major shoots are up on Tumblr and are accessible, along with my Instagram feed, on this blog’s Photos page. Remember, folks, I make no claim to being a professional photographer! 🙂

Sundry Professional Updates

From the work front:

  • At Priority Health, I have a new boss in the form of my former fellow manager, Sheri. I like her. This should be good. And the major work of the summer—vetting 175 different corporate initiatives totaling more than $80M in cost savings, in time to support the annual budgeting and pricing process—was delivered in full and on time, which is huge given that our VP didn’t think my team would be done until November. I’m rewarding my core and extended team with a kayaking trip next Friday. We’re going to the Double R Ranch for a light lunch, then spend 2 or 2.5 hours on the Flat River, then return to the ranch for dinner and drinks. Folks are excited. Kudos to Jen, one of my senior analysts, for coordinating the kayaking festivities.
  • At Caffeinated Press, our newest board member, Tabitha, is going gangbusters to impose some project-management discipline on projects I was too thinly stretched to manage myself. Our office move is now mostly done, so I can focus on distribution, book production and the third volume of our Brewed Awakenings anthology. With the move (and corresponding rent reduction) and Tabitha’s arrival, I think things are beginning to even out a bit. Which is good. The last nine months or so have been a real drudge at times.
  • Two weeks ago, I hoofed it to the Windy City for our summer Commission Week meetings for the National Association for Healthcare Quality. Professionally rewarding but also exhausting. Spent a fair amount of time on my newest NAHQ project, which is to co-lead the initiative to revise NAHQ’s code of ethics and standards of professional practice, from scratch. A ton of work to be done, but on the bright side, I can put that degree in moral philosophy to use! Next up for NAHQ is the board meeting and annual conference in September, in Cincinnati, but the ethics work will likely occupy the bulk of my NAHQ time for the remainder of 2017.

Sundry Personal Updates

And on the home front:

  • I broke a bone. First time ever. Whacked my foot against the living-room table whilst chasing a fly. Broke my right pinky toe, jammed the next toe in and managed to pull a back muscle as I contorted to break my fall.  And did something to temporarily injure my right wrist. But I got that winged demon. I got it good.
  • I bought a new bed. After nearly 15 years, my Select Comfort dual-chamber queen-sized bed finally had one chamber fail. Which meant that for a few weeks, I slept on half an air bed while the cats just geeked out over their ability to play hide-and-go-stalk in the valleys of the deflated side. Because cats. Anyway, I tossed the Select Comfort and temporarily replaced it with an air mattress from Meijer while I plotted the switcheroo between the bedroom and the office (because of the Caffeinated Press move). Now that the moves are all done, I bought a Casper mattress on the recommendation of my NAHQ colleague Andrew. He was right—I love it. It’s a 10-inch queen mattress with several different foam layers. It came in a box, vacuum packed and rolled up like a sleeping bag. I opened the vacuum bag and *woomph* it almost immediately restored itself to its full shape and size. So far, so happy.
  • Enjoyed a fun cigar night with Tony, Matt and Scott this past Wednesday. I arrived around 7p. Didn’t leave until a quarter to midnight. Long after Tony and Scott left, I sat with Matt and with Rob (the owner) talking politics and enjoying a Nat Sherman 85th Anniversary cigar and sipping a Perrin Black Goat beer.
  • My 4.1-mile expedition to Kent Trails yesterday, plus comments from my colleague John, suggest that the hiking trip to Hodenpyl Dam would make more sense in October, at the height of color season. I cannot find room to disagree, so I’ve rescheduled accordingly. Plus, it’ll give me a chance to actually use the recumbent bike that I own but studiously avoid. Hiking goes better with some degree of cardiopulmonary fitness, I guess.
  • My personal writing has picked up. I’m wrapping up another of my pseudonymous erotica novellas intended solely for Amazon. I recently wrote a short story, Ashes of Another Life, which at 2,350 words was constructed to meet a very specific writing prompt from one of my writing groups. My other writing group is firing on all cylinders. And I’m looking forward to the writers’ retreat next month, a weekend event in Kalamazoo. Also, the essay I wrote that’ll be included in the Catholic anthology won’t be released until late 2018, which is a shame but also, as a small-press guy myself, I totally get it.
  • On the Vice Lounge Online front, Tony and I have again concluded that summer is a real pain to get together given our opposite schedules. So for August, we’re on an every-other-week rotation. Normal programming resumes in September. That said, you’re welcome to catch us on iTunes or listen on the Web if you’d like to check out recent episodes or browse the back catalog. It’s all good stuff, people. All of it.

OK, all for now. Hope you had an equally satisfying July … and here’s to a kick-buttocks August.

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Jason’s 10 Life Strategies

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In December 2009, I started a document called Why I Bother. It was intended to be a one-page personal life roadmap, which is why at some point I renamed it Roadmap. (Simplicity, FTW!) Every year since then, at Christmas and Independence Day, I re-curate that document, removing the old, adding the new and tweaking the current.

I won’t pretend that I do everything I tell myself I’ll do. But I also won’t sugarcoat the truth that without this document, and my self-imposed semiannual revision to it, I wouldn’t have gotten as far as I have.

The paper consists of several discrete text blocks: A short paragraph about the meaning of life, a one-sentence personal vision statement, a list of 10 bucket-list goals, a list of 10 life strategies, a set of high-level monthly achievements planned for the next six months, a reminder of the things I must do every day within a typical week to meet my semiannual targets, and finally a few meaningful quotes about why the whole exercise matters. I ruthlessly trim it to ensure it fits on a single 8.5-inch-by-11-inch sheet of paper (single sided!).

From time to time, I share parts of this framework on this blog. Today, I offer a revised look at the Ten Life Strategies I try to honor. Here goes:

  1. Cultivate serenity. Find the path of least drama and reserve personal time to recharge your batteries—whether through prayer, or meditation, or hiking in the forest or petting a cat. When the going gets tough, smile and exhale and remember that all of this has happened before and all of it will happen again. There’s no such thing as an unfixable problem, so there’s never a need to panic.
  2. Nurture insatiable curiosity. Always ask why and always poke one level deeper than everyone else. No matter how bad it is, most of us can deal with what we can understand. Understanding, however, only follows when you probe from what appears to be, to what a thing really is. Aristotle’s theory of causation helps to guide the relevant questions.
  3. Encourage excellence through focus. To be conspicuously excellent requires that you set aside trivialities to emphasize the thing you want to be excellent at. As such, you must focus, putting aside the minor activities that often consume the bulk of one’s time. Do fewer things with greater care. The risk of being a jack of all trades is that you never become a master of one.
  4. Favor action over study. It’s tempting to think too deeply before committing to something big. Better, I believe, to think quickly, then do something, then re-evaluate what you did from a more experienced position. A person can spend a lifetime preparing for a major goal then find that by the time he’s ready to pull the trigger, the opportunity has vanished. When in doubt, do. Scientific method, and all that.
  5. Foster relationships. “Other people” aren’t a distraction; they’re the whole point of living a fruitful life. Take care, then, to keep friendships alive and to avoid burning family bridges. Traversing the high road can sometimes be unpleasant, marked with bitter compromise, but it’s a damned sight better than always being right and therefore always being lonely.
  6. Reduce consumption. Do more with less. Spend less money, eat fewer calories, drink less booze, make fewer bad choices, engage in less-conspicuous materialism, suffer through fewer empty one-night stands. Et cetera. A spartan lifestyle brings benefits beyond mere simplicity.
  7. Present an enticing façade. People are naturally attracted to beauty. We aren’t all gifted with Hemsworth genes, but we can all pay attention to the minor details—behavioral as well as physical—more likely to incur social approbation. Even a perfectly ordinary person can rise through the aesthetic ranks by paying careful attention to manners, grooming, wardrobe and comportment.
  8. Resist unhealthy entanglements. Bad habits and negative people rob you of time, energy and often money. Put negative influences aside, ruthlessly. Avoid the desire to be “right” and thereby fuel others’ needs to reciprocate. When you find a bad apple, chuck it into the field and grab a fresh one, because no matter how hard you try, you’ll never completely eat around the worm.
  9. Avoid the fire hydrant. Things that are truly important rarely demand immediate attention. It’s seductively simple to fall into the trap of always responding to a deluge of “daily drama”—email, arguments, unplanned deliverables, maintenance activities—that constitute the tyranny of the urgent. But not everything requires your attention or response. If you prioritize the important, and ignore the urgent-but-unimportant, eventually your plate will rebalance in a much healthier way.
  10. Plan for an uncertain tomorrow. Be bold in the face of risk, but don’t be an idiot. Prepare for retirement or emergencies—not just financially, but also in terms of the skills you master, the experiences you enjoy and the love you’ve shared. Tomorrow might be bright, or it might be black. You don’t know. But if you treat each day like it’s the last, you’ll find that when the last day finally arrives, you’ll face it with quiet dignity.

I sometimes honor them more in the breach, but nevertheless, I try to leverage these ten life strategies to help me realize my long-term goals.

Personal

Jason's 10 Life Strategies

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In December 2009, I started a document called Why I Bother. It was intended to be a one-page personal life roadmap, which is why at some point I renamed it Roadmap. (Simplicity, FTW!) Every year since then, at Christmas and Independence Day, I re-curate that document, removing the old, adding the new and tweaking the current.
I won’t pretend that I do everything I tell myself I’ll do. But I also won’t sugarcoat the truth that without this document, and my self-imposed semiannual revision to it, I wouldn’t have gotten as far as I have.
The paper consists of several discrete text blocks: A short paragraph about the meaning of life, a one-sentence personal vision statement, a list of 10 bucket-list goals, a list of 10 life strategies, a set of high-level monthly achievements planned for the next six months, a reminder of the things I must do every day within a typical week to meet my semiannual targets, and finally a few meaningful quotes about why the whole exercise matters. I ruthlessly trim it to ensure it fits on a single 8.5-inch-by-11-inch sheet of paper (single sided!).
From time to time, I share parts of this framework on this blog. Today, I offer a revised look at the Ten Life Strategies I try to honor. Here goes:

  1. Cultivate serenity. Find the path of least drama and reserve personal time to recharge your batteries—whether through prayer, or meditation, or hiking in the forest or petting a cat. When the going gets tough, smile and exhale and remember that all of this has happened before and all of it will happen again. There’s no such thing as an unfixable problem, so there’s never a need to panic.
  2. Nurture insatiable curiosity. Always ask why and always poke one level deeper than everyone else. No matter how bad it is, most of us can deal with what we can understand. Understanding, however, only follows when you probe from what appears to be, to what a thing really is. Aristotle’s theory of causation helps to guide the relevant questions.
  3. Encourage excellence through focus. To be conspicuously excellent requires that you set aside trivialities to emphasize the thing you want to be excellent at. As such, you must focus, putting aside the minor activities that often consume the bulk of one’s time. Do fewer things with greater care. The risk of being a jack of all trades is that you never become a master of one.
  4. Favor action over study. It’s tempting to think too deeply before committing to something big. Better, I believe, to think quickly, then do something, then re-evaluate what you did from a more experienced position. A person can spend a lifetime preparing for a major goal then find that by the time he’s ready to pull the trigger, the opportunity has vanished. When in doubt, do. Scientific method, and all that.
  5. Foster relationships. “Other people” aren’t a distraction; they’re the whole point of living a fruitful life. Take care, then, to keep friendships alive and to avoid burning family bridges. Traversing the high road can sometimes be unpleasant, marked with bitter compromise, but it’s a damned sight better than always being right and therefore always being lonely.
  6. Reduce consumption. Do more with less. Spend less money, eat fewer calories, drink less booze, make fewer bad choices, engage in less-conspicuous materialism, suffer through fewer empty one-night stands. Et cetera. A spartan lifestyle brings benefits beyond mere simplicity.
  7. Present an enticing façade. People are naturally attracted to beauty. We aren’t all gifted with Hemsworth genes, but we can all pay attention to the minor details—behavioral as well as physical—more likely to incur social approbation. Even a perfectly ordinary person can rise through the aesthetic ranks by paying careful attention to manners, grooming, wardrobe and comportment.
  8. Resist unhealthy entanglements. Bad habits and negative people rob you of time, energy and often money. Put negative influences aside, ruthlessly. Avoid the desire to be “right” and thereby fuel others’ needs to reciprocate. When you find a bad apple, chuck it into the field and grab a fresh one, because no matter how hard you try, you’ll never completely eat around the worm.
  9. Avoid the fire hydrant. Things that are truly important rarely demand immediate attention. It’s seductively simple to fall into the trap of always responding to a deluge of “daily drama”—email, arguments, unplanned deliverables, maintenance activities—that constitute the tyranny of the urgent. But not everything requires your attention or response. If you prioritize the important, and ignore the urgent-but-unimportant, eventually your plate will rebalance in a much healthier way.
  10. Plan for an uncertain tomorrow. Be bold in the face of risk, but don’t be an idiot. Prepare for retirement or emergencies—not just financially, but also in terms of the skills you master, the experiences you enjoy and the love you’ve shared. Tomorrow might be bright, or it might be black. You don’t know. But if you treat each day like it’s the last, you’ll find that when the last day finally arrives, you’ll face it with quiet dignity.

I sometimes honor them more in the breach, but nevertheless, I try to leverage these ten life strategies to help me realize my long-term goals.

Personal

Celebrating America — from 2,500 Feet

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Late yesterday, my friend Jason R. emailed me with an intriguing proposition. He’s a private pilot and he had time reserved in one of the Cessna 172 Skyhawk planes available for rent through the airport. So he invited me along for a ride. I eagerly accepted his kind offer, even knowing that I had to reveal my far-too-depressing weight so he could do his pre-flight math.

We took off from West Michigan Regional Airport (formerly known as Tulip City Airport) in Holland, Mich., around 2:45 p.m. today. We headed north, then east to Grand Rapids. After getting an up-close view of my hometown, we swung back east and kissed Lake Michigan just south of Muskegon, then hugged the shoreline until we were south of Holland, to return to the airport from the southwest.

With clear skies and calm winds, our hour-long trek remained quite peaceful — almost no bumps to speak of. I took some pictures with Jason’s camera (he wanted a photo of his house from the air; he lives just a couple of miles from the airport) but otherwise I just enjoyed my first time in a plane where I had the chance to look out the front window. And because we traveled at roughly 2,500 feet the whole time, we occupied the sweet zone where we were “high enough” but still low enough to clearly see the world below.

Some in-the-moment observations:

  • My friend makes it look easy. Flying a plane — even a single-engine piston plane like the Skyhawk — takes practice and concentration. He made it look as casually effortless as if he were tootling along in a moped with wings.
  • Fun fact: The propeller spins so fast that you literally cannot see it. The view from the windshield is completely clear. Jason tells me that if the sun glints just right and you’re oriented in a certain way, you can sometimes see ghosting of the prop. But while we were airborne, it was if the plane were being pushed by invisible flying monkeys. (I looked behind us, but couldn’t see my mom’s minions at work, hahaha.)
  • Our headsets allowed for clear conversation while minimizing engine noise. As an added bonus, I got to listen in on the fun air-traffic-control stuff, including Jason’s friendly conversation with Grand Rapids Approach.
  • West Michigan Regional Airport is a beautiful facility.
  • That little plane takes off in like five feet. And we had a smooth landing despite light crosswinds.

Two more-significant observations:

First, from 2,500 feet, America looks like America. Not “red vs. blue,” not “white vs. black,” not “rich vs. poor.” Just America. It’s pretty, really. You see cities, and farmland, and boats on the lake, and families on the beach. We often underestimate the vitality and the resilience of our Federal Republic. Yes, we have problems, and a bucolic trek into the clouds cannot and should not obscure them. We’ve always had our struggles and we always will. Yet when you see your community from the air — the roads you drive, the stores you shop, the churches you visit, the trails you walk — you realize that far more unites us than divides us. That, I think is the real lesson of Independence Day: No matter how much we squabble, America still represents the best hope for free peoples everywhere. And whether you love Trump or you hate him, or whether you see oppression lurking around every corner or are blinded to inequity by your privilege, we would do well sometimes to set aside the heated rhetoric and just celebrate the fact that we’re still, 240 years later, a nation dedicated to a proposition.

A proposition worth celebrating, I believe, even if we live that proposition imperfectly.

Second point. It’s long been a bucket-list item to get a private pilot’s license. Jason’s invitation reinvigorated that bug. I really enjoyed the flight, and from what he tells me, the time and expense of getting a pilot’s license aren’t really that onerous. The thought of taking off for a day to visit places for which driving would be prohibitive, strikes me as rather fun. In the Skyhawk, for example, you’re tooling along north of 110 mph or so, and you’re going in a reasonably straight line with no traffic snarls or signal lights. So the 2.5-hour drive to Traverse City becomes a 1-hour flight. Or my frequent trips to Chicago, which sometimes take five or six hours when traffic’s not favorable, is basically an hour between West Michigan Regional Airport and Chicago Executive Airport.

On my list for things to prioritize for 2018!

Personal

Zen and the Art of Home-Office Relocation

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Over the last few weeks, we at Caffeinated Press have slowly migrated up a flight of stairs. Our two-year lease in Suite 104 at the Ken-O-Sha Professional Building expired June 30. Instead of renewing, we opted to move to a smaller unit within the same building — Suite 102, which comes at roughly a third of the space and roughly 40 percent of the per-month rent. Given that we previously enjoyed a very large office that two people used for less than half time, this change frees working capital for the publishing company while preserving a central hub for files, inventory, a workstation and a small conference space. We paid a heck of a lot of money for a space that would sit vacant for days or a week at a stretch, so this transformation is fiscally prudent.
Good change, right?
The caveat is that I had a large U-shaped desk there, with a filing cabinet and sundry other things (like a reading chair, a microfridge, a whiteboard) that couldn’t fit in the new suite. So I had to bring them home. But as configured, I didn’t have space at home, either.
Long story short, I hired a moving company (Quick & Careful Moving, a Local First member) to schlep the big furniture from the old suite to the new suite and to bring my stuff home. To accommodate it, I flip-flopped my bedroom and my office. Until yesterday, my office was a long, narrow room overlooking the front porch, filled with “temporary” furniture I built and stained myself. And also until yesterday, my bedroom was the house’s original solarium, with a fireplace and built-in cabinetry and terra-cotta tile flooring.
So yesterday I moved rooms. Fascinating experience — not least, because of how much trauma such a move inflicted upon the feline overlords, who are not accustomed to change. But also fascinating in the sense of how one choice leads to a cascade effect:

  • To accept the desk from the movers, I needed to clear out the solarium
  • To clear the solarium, I needed to partially clear the front room
  • To clear the front room, I needed to relocate roughly 80 linear feet of books from the front room to the solarium
  • To relocate the books, I needed to move the stuff from the solarium cabinets to the front room.

Et cetera. It’s like playing a game of Jenga: To do X, Y must be moved first, and Z has to be yanked out before Y’s in play. The living room — the no-man’s-land between the two rooms — can only hold so much stuff as a staging area, so a lot of this move required sequenced swapping of items in fixed spaces.
But after about 15 cumulative hours’ effort, and the muscle of the movers, I got ‘er done:

Some conclusions:

  • I have a heck of a lot of filing to do, some of which reflects holdovers from when I left my apartment in Kentwood nearly a decade ago. Yikes.
  • I need “real” bedroom furniture, so I’ll keep my eyes peeled for a small dresser and perhaps a tiny secretary’s desk and chair. I relied on the cabinets, before, but the new bedroom features a shelved alcove and a closet but not much else.
  • I think I want a recliner for my reading chair instead of my more spartan cushioned wooden chair.
  • Holy hell, I need curtains with blackout fabric instead of just blinds. I have no clue why the neighbors think the nighttime outside requires 1 billion candela of auxiliary lighting.

And on the bright side, although I still have to deal with cats, they have more places to sleep and play in the new office, so at present, they’ve left me mostly to myself. Except for that one time Murphy jumped off the desk hutch, without advance warning, and used the back of my neck as a landing strip. It took a full 15 minutes for the bleeding to subside. Anyway — now, all my stuff is put into one convenient room, so regardless of what work I’m doing, everything’s concentrated within the same four walls. There’s something to be said for efficiency.
I’ll miss being able to decamp to the CafPress office to work long periods without feline interruption, but I’ll adapt.

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The Relentless Pursuit of Attention

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In theory, I should be in Las Vegas right now, celebrating Tony’s 40th birthday and revving into the festivities of 360 Vegas Vacation IV. In practice, I’m at home, in the first half of a six-day vacation from the day job, using that time not to vacay but to catch up on all the stuff that’s been piling up since, literally, Christmas.
Piling up, and in a sense, serving as a canary in the coal mine. Because a significant part of this six-day extravaganza involves the consolidation and the transitioning of stuff that’s occupied time on my calendar but to no good long-term end, while things that ought to be on that calendar (lookin’ at you, exercise!) keep slipping because other fires flare up worse than the morning after a midnight run to Taco Bell. I haven’t been feeling well lately (not Taco Bell’s fault, to be fair) and the number on my scale has been creeping upward, which is a sign that I need to make some structural adjustments. Happens every five years or so, actually, and it’s happening now. Accordingly, much curation of the to-do list has been unfolding, which has occupied time now to free up time later. A normal and healthy activity, to be sure, so I’m not complaining, but one that — when you’re in the middle of it — feels as much of a slog as flying through O’Hare.
The last six weeks witnessed a haze of mile-marker posts:

  • I spoke on Health Data Analytics at the educational conference of the Illinois Association for Healthcare Quality in Naperville, IL. My old friend Tony H. is the president of IAHQ; he spoke in Michigan when I led the Michigan association’s conference, so turnabout was fair play. Plus, I had the chance to see my NAHQ colleagues Sarah and Karen, which always makes me smile.
  • I spoke on the subject of risk management in publishing — framed as a discussion encouraging emerging authors to look to small presses rather than the agent market — at the UntitledTown Book and Author Festival in Green Bay, WI. The UT folks did an excellent job, and I enjoyed the serenity of St. Brendan’s Inn on the Fox River in the heart of Packers territory.
  • The Get Published! 2017 conference in Holland went well. Four panels, each of which was followed by a craft workshop. I led one panel and participated in another, and I co-led the day’s general-fiction workshops. The event, sponsored by MiFiWriters, has not failed to impress me, two years running. They do an excellent job with the conference.
  • My friend Duane undertook a brief excursion to Grand Rapids — he was here, I think, for less than eight hours — to clean out his storage locker. He now resides in Corpus Christi, TX, which means that he drove from there to here and back, just for an hour’s worth of packing. Yikes. But he and I had the chance to sit down for coffee for 90 minutes, which was nice. He’s the guy who pushed me into fiction writing, plus he’s just a fascinating human being, so connecting in person, albeit briefly, warmed the shriveled cockles of my soul. (Or something like that.)
  • Caffeinated Press is moving: We’re relocating to a different suite in the same building. And we’re partnering, at least in the interim, with the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters, which lost its space in the bookstore at Wealthy and Eastern.
  • Most other things on my plate have been on track. Tony and I are still podcasting. GLCL is still doing the Writers Squared events. Life continues.

Given all my driving back and forth to the far side of Lake Michigan, I reactivated my XM Radio subscription. Turns out, I really enjoy the BBC World Service. One special report, about people who poorly adjust to fast-paced professional working environments, proved enrapturing because of the arguments made by one of the research scientists interviewed for the segment. In short, she said that the biggest problem most people face isn’t being too busy in the sense of having too much work, but rather of having too many competing demands for attention that creates a second-level need for time to orchestrate and prioritize these demands. In other words, it’s not that employees are given 60 hours of work in a 40-hour week, but that we’re given 40 hours of work but because each stakeholder for a unit of work isn’t transparently aware of the priority queue for the other units of work, the employee must work 60 hours to get the 40 hours of tasks done. That extra 20 hours of non-value-added effort results from the need to coordinate competing demands for simultaneous attention while addressing what’s important vs. what’s falsely urgent.
I can certainly relate, says the guy who has spent probably one-third of the total writing time on this post, so far, dealing with feline demands for affection. Including Tiger, the outside cat, who has figured out that if he sits on my air conditioner and meows loudly, that I’ll come outside to pet him. In true Pavlovian fashion, he slaps that button like his furry little life depends on it. But I digress.
For a while, I started to second-guess my work-estimation skills, because every time I agreed (or did not agree) to take on some project due by some date, I figured that I’d be fine — plenty of flex in the schedule to accommodate — but more often than not, timeframes slipped. In retrospect, and after listening to that BBC segment, my thinking has recalibrated: I did plan effectively. What I didn’t consider, however, was the relatively recent (“recent” being, oh, the last 18 months or so) explosion in demands for my immediate attention when such attention isn’t truly required, flowing from both the increasing complexification at Caffeinated Press and the changes to my portfolio at Priority Health. I haven’t built enough slack time to extinguish all these myriad fires, yet planning for the fires means I won’t have time to devote to the work unless I just plan to do less than I can actually deliver. Chicken, meet egg.
I don’t think, looking back on things, that the problem is that I’m inherently too busy, although I know I’ve complained about it in the past. I think the problem is that a small tail of people who want what they want, when they want it, and the noise they make in demanding it, tends to suck the much of the oxygen away from everything else. Right now, it’s a particular author I’m working with, but a few weeks ago it was a colleague on a volunteer project, and a few weeks before that it was a friend, and a few weeks before that it was a stakeholder at work. So if on Sunday afternoon, I were to plot my week in detail (which, as it happens, I always do), that plot only lasts until the first time I get sidetracked by someone demanding my attention through behaviors that, in some cases, are … astonishingly bold. And then the plot unravels. But the work doesn’t go away, so I have to re-plot, this time with more to do in the same amount of hours. Rinse and repeat, until either I have to take a six-day vacation to catch up or some item on that to-do list explodes out of control.
Claims for attention can adopt an interesting ethical flavor. Assume I tell someone that I will do some activity on the first day of each month. Further assume that the other person prefers that I do that activity every Monday. The middle ground really isn’t semimonthly; one person’s preference wins, the other’s loses. Generally, the person whose preferences win is the person who must perform the act. So the other person must accept that his or preferences will not be satisfied, and one would hope, to do so with grace. When, however, the other person engages in aggressive or passive-aggressive bullying in order to get his or her preferences satisfied, the outcome is usually conflict. Which blows up. Which consumes unbudgeted time to resolve.
Anyway.
This six-day “vacation” is proving helpful in that I have some time to address a few outstanding big-ticket items, mostly for Caffeinated Press. That’s good. And I’ve had a bit of mental space these last few days to reflect on the systems (people, process, technology)  that must be in place to manage demands for immediate attention, which is also good. Between the transitions at GLCL, a logistically complex summer at CafPress and a triple-digit queue of magnitude-and-impact studies at Priority Health, the summer is going to be jam-packed.
But given this current catch-up and curation exercise, I nevertheless look forward to it.