I spent the last three days in Chicago, attending one of the full meetings of the board of directors for the National Association for Healthcare Quality. As NAHQ’s newly appointed chairman of its Commission for the Recognition of the Profession, I was able to sit in, as an invited guest, on the board’s late-summer meeting.
Interesting thing. One of the consultants who spoke kept repeating a slogan that resonated with me. He said: “You can do anything you want, but you can’t do everything you want.” He was talking about board strategy, but the point holds for everyday life, too.
In the grand scheme of things, many fail because they aim low and achieve even lower. But there’s a flip side to that coin — that you can try to do too many (or too disparate) things, and also fail to achieve.
I’m reminded of the need for balance by my boss and several of my co-workers, who often lament that when they’re on vacation, they still have to work, and they still have to burn the midnight oil to keep up on emails and whatnot. I can sympathize.
Sometimes it’s hard to let go of things we used to do, because they’re a “known known.” But to get to the point where you’ve done anything, you must first stop trying to do everything.
One of my most-viewed posts is “The Privilege of Existential Ennui,” written in September 2009. It’s the largest single driver of traffic to this blog from search engines, despite its modest length. In it, I mused that:
Part of me still vacillates between tiredness and motivation, between melancholy at what might have been, and zeal for what might yet be. I’m not yet ready to accept the prospect of a plump wife with 2.3 kids and a used minivan in the suburbs. Maybe I’m condemning myself to perpetual unhappiness. Or perhaps I’m prudently refusing to settle for mediocrity, and that my day will eventually come.
Interesting. I understand where I was, emotionally, at that point in my life: I found myself frustrated at why the Jason of the real world and the Jason of my mental world weren’t the same person, because I didn’t believe myself subject to any external constraints upon the range of life options then available to me.
Yet much of that angst has evaporated over the last six years, mostly because I’ve since accepted several encumbrances that, while not impervious to slicing, nevertheless offer real value to me. So my thinking has pivoted on several very big things. For example, I’ve transitioned from treating my employment as just a job, inherently fungible, to now valuing it as a career within the healthcare-quality industry, with a logical progression leading toward retirement. Likewise, I’ve largely cleaned up my financial act, such that I pay the bills on time and don’t make dumb choices about large purchases. And I’ve launched a whole different side career as CEO of Caffeinated Press, an enterprise that’s not just “me in the basement,” but includes real products and services and real colleagues in a real office with real invoices and taxes and contractual obligations.
So the interesting question, perhaps, isn’t why so many people feel purposeless, as I speculated in 2009. Rather, the question is why so may opt against anchoring their lives in a way that leads to long-term happiness and success.
The generalized ennui that characterized my late 20s and early 30s has long since vanished. In its place, I run a mile a minute on various projects. Between the day job, the night job, service in professional associations and sundry hobbies, I am not at a loss for things to do. And, significantly, the things I do, I find useful and rewarding. So in 2015 I have ties — a career, a car payment, cats, a mostly different cast of friends, a podcast, a small business — that I didn’t have in 2009. I recently reflected, in fact, at how many of the useless bad habits I used to enjoy faded from my life, displaced by tasks supporting a series of annual life goals.
Once upon a time, I believed that the key to success in life was keeping your options open. Although I still see the value in keeping more than one door propped wide, the problem with keeping all the doors open is that you cannot ever get far enough along a path of specialization that you develop an identity more substantive than “jack of all trades.” Perhaps the source of existential ennui isn’t the purposelessness I shared six years ago. Perhaps, instead, it’s rooted in a deep-seated fear of being just another blank face in the crowd — or worse, of seeing how blank your face is and instead of fixing it, you retreat into that tiny foothold of autonomy you have left, elevating it as a virtue when it’s merely a security blanket.
The only way to stand out in the sea of humanity is to be excellent at something. And that excellence requires diligent work and many long hours of dues-paying. If you’re disaffected, you might not pay those dues. You might keep your options open. But such a path is not with emotional cost.
Been thinking a lot lately about priorities. The things that matter most to me, or are genuinely important, aren’t necessarily enjoying the lion’s share of my time — the Tyranny of the Urgent, and all that.
Updates:
Enjoyed the wedding reception for Gary and Jessica yesterday. Held at Jessica’s parental-unit home in Grass Lake. Great time. Traveled there with Other Jason (who drove) and Jen, our resident Adventure Heroine. Happily, Lianne/Stephen and Mary/Ben also showed up. It’s clear the bride and groom spent a lot of time fussing about details — the whole event came together nicely and, as they say, “a good time was had by all.”
Tonight’s another board meeting for Caffeinated Press. Things are looking up; whispers of revenue tease us from across the autumnal divide. I’m wrapping up a textbook project today, then we have a few other items — including a very powerful collection of WW2 letters and a poetry collection — in the hopper. Should have two releases in September and two in October, plus one in November and one in January. Much-needed infusion of capital into a company currently funded by board members.
Later this month, I’ll be in Seattle for the Joint Statistical Meetings. Nothing to present, for once — just a pair of section-officer meetings. Emma is going, too, and I think she’s going to get us reservations for dinner in the Space Needle. My little intern is all growed up. 🙂
Enjoyed a great podcasting session with Tony and our friend John from PA last weekend. He was in the area for a conference, so he took the time to come to mid-Michigan. We dined, we drank, we enjoyed cigars at The Corona … good times.
In mid-July, the maternal family trekked to Indiana for a cookout and poolside recreation. That was pleasant. Learned that my cousin Nicole is pregnant — yay! I’m trying to convince her to hold the baby a few extra days so she can be born on my birthday, but I don’t think Nicole finds the prospect especially appealing.
Attended a day-long analytics conference in Mount Pleasant a few weeks ago. Hit-or-miss regarding content.
August, already? Cripes, where did the time go?
Been thinking a lot lately about priorities. The things that matter most to me, or are genuinely important, aren’t necessarily enjoying the lion’s share of my time — the Tyranny of the Urgent, and all that.
Updates:
Enjoyed the wedding reception for Gary and Jessica yesterday. Held at Jessica’s parental-unit home in Grass Lake. Great time. Traveled there with Other Jason (who drove) and Jen, our resident Adventure Heroine. Happily, Lianne/Stephen and Mary/Ben also showed up. It’s clear the bride and groom spent a lot of time fussing about details — the whole event came together nicely and, as they say, “a good time was had by all.”
Tonight’s another board meeting for Caffeinated Press. Things are looking up; whispers of revenue tease us from across the autumnal divide. I’m wrapping up a textbook project today, then we have a few other items — including a very powerful collection of WW2 letters and a poetry collection — in the hopper. Should have two releases in September and two in October, plus one in November and one in January. Much-needed infusion of capital into a company currently funded by board members.
Later this month, I’ll be in Seattle for the Joint Statistical Meetings. Nothing to present, for once — just a pair of section-officer meetings. Emma is going, too, and I think she’s going to get us reservations for dinner in the Space Needle. My little intern is all growed up. 🙂
Enjoyed a great podcasting session with Tony and our friend John from PA last weekend. He was in the area for a conference, so he took the time to come to mid-Michigan. We dined, we drank, we enjoyed cigars at The Corona … good times.
In mid-July, the maternal family trekked to Indiana for a cookout and poolside recreation. That was pleasant. Learned that my cousin Nicole is pregnant — yay! I’m trying to convince her to hold the baby a few extra days so she can be born on my birthday, but I don’t think Nicole finds the prospect especially appealing.
Attended a day-long analytics conference in Mount Pleasant a few weeks ago. Hit-or-miss regarding content.
It’s Sunday night. Tomorrow marks a return to the day job, after Facilities tore down half the cubes last week to install smaller workstations and our I.T. department upgraded Office and Windows for everyone. In other words: Tomorrow should be interesting. Apart from a five-minute drop-in today, I haven’t been at the Waters Circle office since Tuesday.
But the last week has been quite an adventure:
I bought a new car. Jimmy 2.0 — a 2000 GMC Jimmy — suffered another infirmity a while back. Fixable? Sure. But other problems loom. It’s an old vehicle and after the drama in January of a persistently misaligned belt, other failures are inevitable. So on Tuesday morning I picked up a 2013 Chevrolet Cruze. It’s small, but nimble, and relatively inexpensive. Great on fuel. And this summer I think I can rehab Jimmy 2.0 enough to keep it, and its solid 4×4 performance, for the worst of a Michigan winter. There’s something to be said for having two cars, even if the insurance is a pain.
2013 Chevy Cruze. New wheels.
We moved into our new office at Caffeinated Press. After much drama with Office Depot, I finally got all the desk stuff I ordered, as well as a sweet deal on furniture in storage from PeopleDesign (thank you, John). Looking good. My part of the office is mostly done. The main gathering space has tables, chairs, a café table, a futon, a huge white board, rolling bookshelves, coffee/tea makers, a microwave … the essentials, basically, and it too is largely complete. The editor room in the middle is, however, a bit under-loved for now. We’re working on it.
A view of my part of the Caffeinated Press office.
Anthology edits galore! I’m running through author notifications for Brewed Awakenings 2. Lots of work — much of Friday and Saturday, and into Sunday, was spent doing detail reviews (again) with an eye toward compiling the final list of included stories. I’ve run through maybe 50 or so of the nearly 70 submissions and have accepted nearly 110k words over 11 (I think) contributions.
… Profiles galore, too! Have you checked out the current issue of Grand Rapids Magazine? Caffeinated Press has a brief write-up. And we were profiled last week in Awesome Mitten, too. As John remarked a few days ago: It’s starting to feel real.
The coming week should be peaceful: Priority Health will be mostly routine work, with just a handful of interviews for two of my open analyst positions. Wrap up the anthology notifications and then begin contracting. Work on our photo book, provisionally titled EN72. A meeting of the editorial board for The 3288 Review.
The summer may prove a bit more peaceful than the late winter and early spring. Next weekend, we have a board meeting and a visit to Indiana for a family picnic. Podcasting the weekend after. August should be quiet(ish), with maybe a brief Vegas trip on the horizon. September and October will be busy with book releases. Then, November for NaNoWriMo. But despite the stuff to do, things feel calmer. A big part of it is actually the new CafPress office, I think. I find it hard to work from home because Cats; there are, however, no cats in the publishing office to thwart my concentration or my productivity. So there’s that.
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.
The design blogs I follow trumpet the “tiny house” trend — that is, the growing popularity of very small houses, filled with the essentials but which otherwise remain quite cozy. Yet do they offer a material improvement in one’s quality of life?
Some of these micro-abodes do admit to a certain charm. One three-bedroom, two-story setup comes in at less than 850 square feet, but the floor plan looks sane and the conceptual art is really quite beautiful. Then there’s The Cypress, a house on wheels (not to be confused with a mobile home or a travel trailer!) between 130 and 175 square feet. Gorgeous! And don’t forget about the Ecocapsule, a miniscule egg-shaped habitat complete with solar panels, a rainwater catchment system and a wind turbine, so it’s billed as a completely off-grid home survivable for a full year. (But your mileage may vary.)
My first reaction to tiny houses was: Fricken’ hippies. But the more I think about it, the more intrigued I am. Buy a little lot on a small river somewhere, put in a tiny house, add a turbine or two and perhaps a small solar array, and … ? After the fairly modest initial capital investment, one’s cost of living declines precipitously. Sink a shallow well, or run cheap PVC piping to a drain field, and you could be good to go. If not for home, at least for a writer’s retreat overlooking some picturesque setting somewhere.
Then again: Some of the tiny-house designs I’ve seen are smaller than the square footage of my home office. Not kidding. So there’s that.
Then it occurred to me that tiny houses solve the “tiny” problem but struggle with the “house” part. Because with Ecocapsules and houses on trailer frames, the stuff you don’t see — wiring for electricity, water and sewer — is the deal-breaker. Even if you install composting toilets, you still have greywater discharge. And if you happen to park your tiny house in the middle of the California desert, water will not magically appear to refill your (tiny) reserve tanks and sinking a real, deep well runs well into five figures. Anyone who’s ever spent a week in a travel trailer at a state park in the summer knows well the challenges of managing septic, grey and fresh tanks as well as the propane cylinder and sometimes the battery bank. Now imagine that balancing act as a lifestyle choice.
So maybe the “tiny house” problem, when the details get resolved, transmogrifies into what we already call a cottage.
What surprises me, though, is that the tiny-house fanatics haven’t jumped on the ultimate in tiny-house living: Sailboats. A Valiant 42, for example, is a bluewater-capable sailboat that comfortably sleeps four in standard berths plus one in a quarterberth. A vessel on that boat’s class typically includes a watermaker and supports wind and water turbines and solar arrays. Waste discharge is permitted a reasonable distance offshore. Live-aboard sailboats really have solved all aspects of the tiny-house problem, with the added bonus that when you get bored with your current location, you can just weigh anchor and sail to more accommodating climes.
Plus, even really cheap fixer-upper 30-to-45 foot sailboats on eBay cost between $1,000 and $10,000 and, with a much smaller investment than with a tiny house, can be brought into pristine running condition again.
Most marinas in the West Michigan market offer monthly slip fees (including shore power and often, cable TV runs and potable water lines) of less than $250 per month, lower than property taxes on a bigger suburban lot. Some folks down south don’t even bother with slips, choosing instead the free option of protected anchorages.
Tiny House Culture
But pay attention to the culture surrounding tiny houses. The ethos, I think, marks a partial repudiation of the McMansion phenomenon. You find the usual suspects — aging ’60s radicals, environmental activists, communitarians — in the mix, although the usual suspects seem even more interested in things like straw-bale houses and mud-earth adobes. Which is fine. Perhaps it’s selection bias, but the upscale design blogs most enamored with tiny houses see them not as “living on the cheap” but rather as a more responsible mode of living whereby a person’s assets can channel toward projects other than perpetual home improvement of a palatial suburban manor. The blogs promote college grads and New Urbanists who would rather focus on lifestyle augmentation than infrastructure maintenance, so exquisitely tailored tiny houses with bespoke accessories present as a more attractive option than a 50-year-old starter house in the inner-ring suburbs of a gentrifying metropolis.
That part, I get. I presently pay $850 per month for roughly 1,200 square feet of living space in a 120-year-old house in the South Hill neighborhood of Grand Rapids. I rent, so I don’t directly pay property taxes, but I do pay electricity, gas, phone and TV/Internet charges each month. Put differently, my total cost of living just for the roof over my head runs probably $1,200 per month. That’s roughly $14,400 per year — an amount that could purchase right now, on eBay, a Herreshoff H28 sailboat (30-foot design) in excellent condition, plus a year of dock fees along many of the smaller marinas on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. With some quick back-of-the-napkin math, if I were to spend $10k on a sailboat on Jan. 1, 2016, and park it at a marina for $250 in monthly slip fees, my five-year cost savings would be roughly $35,000, assuming an extra $200 per month on average for insurance, upgrades, boat maintenance, etc.
So the question is: What would you do with an extra $7,000 in tax-free extra spending money each year? Invest it? Use it to buy a new car? Go back to school or pay down student loans? Take annual “big” vacations like tours of Europe, Africa or Asia? Invest in a pricey hobby like scuba diving or skydiving? Build an emergency fund?
The value proposition of a “tiny home” isn’t the tinyness. It’s the freeing up of capital that otherwise goes into the rabbit hole of big houses and big property. And the constraint of not having a billion places to put stuff means that acquisitions must be thoughtful: You could splurge on a foosball table you find at the local Goodwill, but if you have a tiny home, you have literally nowhere to put it, thus blocking the impulse buy. Indeed, the acquisition of crap has an effective upper limit. When I moved into my current domicile four and a half years ago, I walked in the door with almost nothing. I had my bed, some clothes, and a few boxes of books and kitchen supplies. Nothing for the dining room. Nothing for the living room save a TV and a wicker rocker. But now? I’m drowning in stuff and most of it wasn’t exactly cheap.
Tiny homes, whether they’re on wheels or on the water, make us rethink our consumption strategy such that we can focus our resources on the things — the experiential things — that matter.
Well, the last few weeks have certainly been eventful. Where to begin?
New Orleans
I co-presented a session about the emerging professional competencies for health data analytics at this year’s RLPalooza, the annual vendor conference hosted by RL Solutions. I had been invited by the leadership of the National Association for Healthcare Quality to attend, given that I had co-led the rapid-cycle performance-improvement team that developed the HDA competency framework. Great professional experience, and I really enjoyed returning to The Big Easy. Haven’t been there since before Hurricane Katrina.
I give RL Solutions a ton of credit: They know how to throw a party. Not only did they bring in some really engaging speakers, but the food was excellent and the open bars served top-shelf spirits. The “Secret Dinner” — an annual tradition whereby they transport the entire group of conference attendees to an undisclosed location for an evening of revelry — was at the Superdome. RL bought out the Superdome, erected a sound stage and a dozen food and drink stations … then brought in Drew Brees, quarterback of the New Orleans Saints, for a brief talk and then photos. Plus a local band, plus the hilarious 610 Stompers performers. Each of us had our picture taken; the photos were edited by RL staff and then displayed, in rotating alpha order, on the jumbotron. Rather fun, especially as the vodka tonics flowed freely. The alligator sausages were extra tasty.
The scene as we entered the Superdome. A sound stage and food/alcohol stations circled the screened seating area.My photo card, as it appeared on the Jumbotron display.
My flights connected through Dallas. Although I did text Roux with a good-natured “complaint” that DFW needed to mow the lawn around the runway, I was saddened to see the flood devastation in north Texas — even now, the carnage is obvious, with entire structures still just poking their heads above engorged lakes and scenes like golf courses where half or more of the landscape remains underwater. Surreal, and a reminder to be grateful for what you have, while you have it.
Chicago
The week before Memorial Day, I flew to Chicago for a NAHQ focus group dedicated to optimizing the relationship between the national group and the various state-level affiliates across the country. As president-elect of the Michigan Association for Healthcare Quality, and as NAHQ’s co-lead for its State Leaders Team, I enjoyed the opportunity to review and then suggest improvements to the current legal murkiness of affiliation agreements, 501(c)(6) requirements and transference of liability to the folks with the deepest pockets. The day-long meeting was quite useful and utterly fascinating.
Other Travel Plans
The rest of the year looks calmer. I believe I’m going to the Joint Statistical Meetings in Seattle in early August. I am also aiming for a Vegas trip in late August, to see my friend Jared who’ll be back from overseas. I opted at the 11th hour to skip the Bonaire diving trip because the conference in New Orleans presented an intriguing professional opportunity, and because flights to and from the island, on the weekdays, connect through Amsterdam. So, yeah. Plus a Middle East trip is still on the table, and I have toyed with the idea of doing VIMFP in Sin City in October, but October abuts, at present, several scheduled release events for Caffeinated Press as well as a CafPress-related speaking engagement. Speaking of which ….
Caffeinated Press Update
The house anthology for Caffeinated Press, Brewed Awakenings, passed its May 31 deadline for new submissions. We’ve received 67 unique contributions from about 60 authors. Fun stuff. Now the review work begins! Progress continues for The 3288 Review; our submission deadline is June 30 and we’ve got design work underway plus we’ve already received our ISSN from the Library of Congress.
Speaking of the LoC: Inasmuch as it’s easy to mock the relative incompetence and/or inefficiency of government, I’ve had to work with the LoC twice this year, and both times, they delivered early and gave me everything I needed to know in one comprehensive and accessible package. Perhaps librarians (or archivists) ought to run the world?
Oh, and the big news: We’ve leased an office. Later this month we move into 1,150 square feet located off Ken-O-Sha park, at the intersection of Kalamazoo Avenue and 32nd Street. The walls and carpet are being redone. We’ll have space reserved for the board of directors plus a few of our more high-volume editors, then open collaboration space for other editors and for any local authors who want a place to decamp for a writing session. We’ll have a coffee station, snacks, a microwave and refrigerator, some futons, etc. We can use the space for small writer gatherings and for getting work done. I’m excited.
And if you support our mission, consider a financial investment. We’re currently accepting short-term funding from our allies in the community. Write us a check, we’ll pay you back quarterly — plus 10 percent. Better than a savings account!
Quick Hits
Other thingies:
Enjoyed a tasty breakfast last Sunday at Wolfgang’s in Eastown, with Steve, Brittany and April. Mmm, breakfast.
Took my first Uber ride. My flight from New Orleans landed well after midnight, so I fired up the app and off I went. Much cheaper than a taxi. Plus, the driver was already at the airport, so I literally walked non-stop from the jetbridge to his Escalade. Driver was a semi-retiree who liked to keep busy. Charming fellow. I fully expect that future G.R. trips will feature me getting to the Gerald R. Ford International Airport by municipal bus, then home by Uber, to avoid parking fees.
Tony has lately managed our podcast edits, and he’s done a good job with them.
Planning for the October conference of the Michigan Association for Healthcare Quality continues apace. Looks like a solid program is shaping up.
The Jimmy is down, and perhaps for good this time. The search for a replacement vehicle begins again. *sigh*
I think I have a cold. If I do, it’s one of the mildest I’ve ever had.
A Reflective Postscript
You know the old saying: You can’t shove 10 lbs. of manure into a 5-lb. sack. As far as conventional wisdom goes, this slogan is fairly conventionally wise. But when you have 10 lbs. of “stuff” and just a 5-lb. sack to put it in, whatcha gonna do? Because shrugging your shoulders and quoting homespun maxims really isn’t a viable long-term solution.
I cast my mind’s eye back a full decade. I was about four months into life after grad school and the newspaper, and five months into a spartan diet-and-exercise regime. My existence at that point consisted mostly of a 40-hour day job at the hospital and nothing else. So I’d come home, exercise for an hour, then retreat to my desk to mindlessly surf the Web or tinker with the online political simulations I had joined. I’m astonished, in retrospect, at just how little of my time was occupied with meaningful, strategic pursuits in the period of roughly 2005 through 2012. In 2006/07, I did karate and ran a lot. In 2008 I got my dive certification but the only diving I did was into the dating pool, with sitcom-like results. From 2009 to 2011, I went through a rough patch and foundered on the shoals of self-inflicted helplessness dotting the Sea of Ennui, bouncing from domicile to domicile and going nearly two years without a car after the disaster of totaling my Grand Cherokee.
It wasn’t until 2013, when I got more involved with professional groups and got more serious about writing, that things picked up. By Thanksgiving of that year, I had reached capacity. I thought the tide of busyness would recede, but it never did; November 2013 was an inflection point of sorts. By focusing on a “win” for National Novel Writing Month — and succeeding! — I threw many of my long-established habits to the wayside, and my old way of doing things never really recovered. Instead, more task-generating opportunities came into the mix: Additional contract writing. NAHQ and MAHQ and the ASA. The WriteOn! writing group. Podcasting. Caffeinated Press. Cigar nights. &c.
For a while, particularly last year, my stress levels remained fairly high. Too much to do, not enough time to do it. Then I’d get people asking me to do social activities on short or no notice, and my default response was irritation: Don’t they know how busy I am? Those rare days when I had a “night off” with no fire drills usually translated into me ordering pizza and crashing with Netflix for hours on end, just to recharge. There’s an upper limit to how long, and how intensely, you can burn the candle from both ends, until all you have left is ash.
But being busy is a choice, not a condition. The solution to the 5-lb. sack problem is to downsize or otherwise reconfigure your 10 lbs. of stuff. As Lady Thatcher said: “There. Is. No. Alternative.” We must always cultivate the serenity to accept the world as it is and to adapt our response to it in light of our natural capacities. Trying to be all things to all people, or over-committing and under-delivering, marks an untenable strategy that inevitably leads to failure, depression and curmudgeonhood.
Life is a lot like the weather. One day, you have fair skies and favorable winds. The next day, the skies darken and the gentle breeze transform into a whirlwind. An immature person gets caught in the whirlwind, letting circumstance control his destiny, until he’s been so bruised and battered that he cannot endure. A mature person, by contrast, throws a saddle on the whirlwind, trying to direct it as best he can but knowing that his real goal is to avoid being bucked off and then trampled underneath.
We can only do what we can do, and we either need to surrender those other things that don’t fit into the 5-lb. sack, or delegate them. I think I have been slow to accept that I’m not really omnipotent. So now, as I look at my Roadmap and think about the second half of 2015, I have to think about what’s important, what’s an optional good and what’s an unnecessary distraction.
I’ve been busy, but I’ve let myself become busy for no good reason, such that important but not time-sensitive goals keep getting kicked down the road in service to the tyranny of the urgent.
But like I said: “Busy” is a choice. Time to saddle-break that whirlwind.
With a dram of Glenmorangie at hand and a cat on my lap, gather ’round, kiddies, cuz grandpa’s gonna tell you about his last few weeks. National Quality Summit
Wednesday through Friday, I attended the National Quality Summit sponsored by the National Association for Healthcare Quality. The event, held at Penn’s Landing in downtown Philadelphia, focused on transitions in care. Credit to the NAHQ planning team: The event packed a lot of good information shared by top industry experts like Dr. Eric Coleman and Cheri Lattimer. The more intimate venue — the Summit replaced the longstanding general conference this year — gave in-person and virtual attendees more time to network and more time to think through the QI implications of managing a whole person across every setting where clinical services get rendered.
Health care, as an industry in the U.S., really sucks at transitions; the subject is probably the next big area of improvement on a national scale. Glad to see NAHQ taking a leadership role in setting the agenda.
While I was there, I enjoyed the chance to re-connect with colleagues I’ve gotten to know over the years, because of the small-group lunches, the general reception and the invite-only president’s reception. I met new colleagues, too, thanks in part to a focus group with Abbott Nutrition (and what a learning experience that was — we too rarely include dieticians in our care-planning teams despite the effect of nutrition on readmissions and complications).
The only downside? I wish I would have planned to do some sightseeing. Looks like a lot of fun things to check out in Philly, but I didn’t allot myself enough time to take it all in. Planning for The 3288 Review
Last week Friday, John, Elyse and I met at John’s charming front porch to start our detailed planning for The 3288 Review, the forthcoming literary journal sponsored by Caffeinated Press. John’s obvious enthusiasm for the project is infectious, and Elyse’s practical wisdom keeps our ambitions on the straight-and-narrow. We’re targeting a mid-August release. Next planning meeting is this coming Monday; I expect (ahem!) Alaric to grace us with his presence. The Merry Widow
Last Sunday, I trekked to the East Side of the Mitten for a full day of merriment with April. We did brunch at the oh-so-tasty Pantry then drove to downtown Detroit to catch The Merry Widow, an opera featuring famed soprano Deborah Voigt and tenor Roger Honeywell, conducted by Gerald Steichen. We had excellent seats (close enough to peer into the orchestra pit!). The excursion marked my first, but surely not my last, visit to the storied Michigan Opera House.
Funny aside: After the mid-afternoon event, I took April home, but we stopped at American Grand Coney for a quick, informal dinner before I dropped her off. I wore grey dress slacks, a burgundy shawl-collar sweater and white shirt with a burgundy paisley tie (same shade as the sweater, mind you). She wore a stunning black-and-white dress. We sat down in the restaurant and the waitress said something to the effect that she’s never seen such well-dressed customers before, a compliment that made my hot dogs extra tasty. Célébration au manoir Dimondale
But before the opera, I spent the evening with Tony, Jen, Joe, PPQ and The Good Doctor at Dimondale Manor. We first dined at a local roadhouse, then retired to the palatial estate in the sticks for an evening of snacks, Tony-style mixology and darts. The revelry continued until after 3 a.m., but the chance to spend time with such amazing people was well worth suffering through my 7 a.m. alarm. And although I was displaced from The Blue Room, the air mattress in Jen’s office was astonishingly comfortable. The Community Welcome
On April 6, the board of directors and a few of our anthology authors enjoyed a “community welcome” sponsored by Schuler Books and Music. We had more than 40 attendees and Schuler sold more than half the stock they purchased. The enthusiasm of the SBM team and the way our guests were so engaged with our presentation and the Q&A session really inspired me. We done did good — and my mom and my nephew even made an appearance! Sic Transit
Seasons change, and people too. I learned of one workplace transition on my way to Philly. Just before that, I learned that my primary section editor at Demand Media Studios was departing. I wish both of them the very best as their careers take exciting new turns — even as I weep to myself over all the forthcoming changes. Cards Against Humanity … With Thy Family
On the 3rd, I dined with Jen, Dave and Tawnya as we settled up on our arrangements for our forthcoming diving trip to Bonaire later this spring. It’s going to happen! So that was fun. But on my way from Lowell, my brother texted me. That day was his birthday, and he and my sister-in-law and my mother were at mom’s house, enjoying snacks and beer and playing Cards Against Humanity.
I showed up, and had fun — but wow. You learn a lot about people by playing that game. 🙂 … And With Thy Friends
But at the infamous “sushi night” at Steve and Brittany’s — wherein the Lady of the House learned that guzzling an entire bottle of wine on an empty stomach makes for a poor life choice — we also played the game. With a table full of gamers, only one of whom was a paragon of virtue. Anyway. A quiet(er) week awaits.
I took a vacation day today. The last few weekends were packed with agenda items, and the evenings have been larded with sundry activities that leave me wishing for a few extra hours each night. Now I need to do a little catch-up, which is harder to do when you’re sitting in your office chair with a tasty cup of coffee and a cat gently snoring on your lap.
Updates follow. Workplace Transitions
Life in the office has been interesting. My department — Quality Improvement Analytics — is now simply called Clinical Analytics, because the QI function has been pulled from my boss and given to a different leader in the organization. So instead of having a subject (QI) and a competency (analytics), we are now simply a competency. I lost two current staff members in the transition, but I am hiring a new senior analyst right now and can hire a new entry-level analyst in July.
The upside? I can still do QI, but subsumed under the larger umbrella of care-model transformation. If we play the cards right, my boss and co-manager and I will re-shape our shop into a clinical analytics center of excellence. I mildly grieved for the loss of the “quality” designation, but in the long run, this transition may free us to do more work of greater significance than when we were boxed into the QI space. Caffeinated Press Launch
Our first publication — the Brewed Awakenings anthology — has already turned a small profit after its March 2 launch … despite not yet even being widely available on the Ingram catalog. So we’re pretty happy about that. If you haven’t yet purchased your copy, go here. 🙂
On April 6 at 7 p.m., we’re holding an event co-sponsored by Schuler Books and Music, the area’s largest independent bookseller. All are welcome to join us at the 28th Street store. We’re planning a roughly 90-minute session targeted mostly to writers. We’ll also have a book-signing table.
And our literary journal, The 3288 Review, is starting to get a masthead. Yay for that. John has done yeoman’s work in researching the current state of the literary-mag universe. Travel
Spring has sprung, and with it, my travel schedule begins to blossom. In about three weeks, I’ll be looking forward to dinner with Tony/Jen and PPQ/GoodDoctor at Dimondale Manor, followed by an afternoon at the opera in Detroit, with April. I’ll be in Philadelphia for a few nights, the week after that, and plan to be in Bonaire over Memorial Day week for a diving trip with Tawnya, Dave and Jen. In theory, I have the 360Vegas Vacation II in mid June, but I’m not sure whether I can attend given other priorities stacking up around the same time. Then Seattle in early August for the Joint Statistical Meetings and likely the VIMFP in mid October in Las Vegas. Somewhere in the middle of all that is an overnight trek to Chicago, too. Mid-May, I think.
And lest I forget: I have an invite for an autumn visit to see Jared and Sarah in Abu Dhabi. Fitness
The Bonaire diving trip reminds me that strapping a steel cylinder to your back and plunging 100 feet into the ocean is a much more pleasant experience when you’ve got adequate cardiopulmonary function. I’ve been hitting the exercise bike several times each week. I’ve discovered that my normal evening routine of “cigar + cocktail + news” actually has one element that’s truly important to me: the news. And hey, guess what? I can read the news whilst cycling away the pounds. Burning 800 calories is preferable to consuming 300 calories, I guess.
It’s actually pretty easy, now that I have a new routine locked. I can log 25 or so miles in about an hour on the bike and not even think about it, given how my attention is focused on the content scrolling across my tablet. I shall not be “that guy” on the dive team who forces everyone to the surface because he’s sucking down the nitrox like it’s candy. What I’ve Been Reading & Watching
I rarely watch television. I cut the cord with Comcast in late December and haven’t looked back. On Netflix, though, I did catch the 13 or so episodes of the first season of Helix. Interesting program.
Books, though? I’ve resumed reading more than just the day’s headlines, usually grabbing a book while enjoying dinner. In the last few weeks, I’ve finished Roll the Bones by Dr. David G. Schwartz. “Dr. Dave” is a leading academic expert about casino gaming, from UNLV; I purchased a copy of his book from him in 2013. He even autographed it for me. Anyway, I’m done with it. Fascinating historical survey of gambling, from pre-history to today. And last night I finished a re-read of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
Oh, and I also wrapped up Political Order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama. Fascinating theoretical construct there. I am, I think, largely persuaded that the biggest political challenge in the contemporary United States isn’t “partisan gridlock” or “ideological warfare,” but rather elite repatrimonialization of state institutions by conflicting groups of elites. If you enjoy political theory — and who doesn’t? — I recommend this book, plus the first volume of the two, The Origins of Political Order. Sundry Observations
And for your grab-bag of short takes:
Looks like our friends from Denton, Dallas & Beyond will be a headliner at the 2015 VIMFP! 🙂
Tony and I had an unrecoverable glitch that affected two of the podcasts we recorded in late February, but now we’re back on track.
The Michigan Republican State Convention went well. It was held in February in Lansing. I was pleased that Dave Agema doesn’t seem to be a mainstream character. Now, if only he’d resign or get removed ….
Much of my free time has been spent on CafPress stuff, but I’ve had the chance to do some fun things, including hang out with Scott and Jeremy at Logan’s Alley for the KBS tapping a few weeks ago, and visit Tony and his wife at their new palatial estate in Dimondale, Michigan. Also got to enjoy a premium cigar with Matt at Tuttle’s and crash the “bestie date” with Brittany and April for South Pacific a couple Fridays ago. (I really should attend more performances at the Civic.)
The 50-year-old Grand Rapids Press building is now tumbling down. A once-iconic brand is now outsourced to MLive Media Group, thus guaranteeing that we really don’t have a newspaper anymore in this town. It’s sad, really.
Still planning — I hope — to do a weekend backpacking hike with my brother this season.
Easter is coming. Already. I had some aspirations for Lent, but tempus fugit.
I’m trying to write more. And partially succeeding at it.
