Sprint "Snowman In Summer"

Greetings and Salutations,

As any stay-at-home parent, and many non stay-at-home parents will tell you, the end of the school year brings a whole slew of extra activities, such as but not limited to:  Graduation Ceremonies (these are also called "Promotion Ceremonies" by the more modern, hip schools), Open House, Class Party, Finals, Dance Recitals, Spring Sing, Talent Show, the inevitably poorly timed Birthday Party of Mandatory Attendance, Llama Fights, Class Plays and more.  Add this to the regular juggle of keeping them fed, clothed, doing their homework/studying, and trying to not go insane and it ends up being quite A Challenge.

Thus I have dubbed it The End of the School Year Push.  

The Push is something that caught me a little off guard this year, most likely because I am still a low level Domestic Engineer, despite my clear and obvious knack for such things Domestic.  Next year I vow to not plan anything else beside handling The Push during this one month period.  Of course, just to make things fun, this is also exactly when my birthday is as well.  Oh well, we'll just include that as part of the "Inevitably-Poorly-Time-Birthday-of-Mandatory-Attendance" I referenced above, and call it all good.

Well, I ran the gauntlet, got Indigo to all her rehearsals, Promotions, graduations, llama fights, and even baked cupcakes and lemon bars for all of the above as well.  Now it was time for Summer!  I at least had the wear with all to realize I needed to get ahead of Summer before it hit me in the face.  Specifically what I was worried about was having my girls hit their first unstructured day and think:

"Wow, a whole day with absolutely nothing to do!  This must mean there are no rules, and I can sleep in til noon, then get up and watch youtube all day!"

So, I gave them both cupcakes (reference Management Tip #1 from previous posts) and sat them down and asked them what our rules for Summer should be, notably before it was actually Summer.  The rules we came up with, with only minimal nudging on my part, were as follows:

• Get up by 8:00
• No media until:
• After lunch
• After your 'Work' is compelted
• Whichever of the above is more restrictive
• Breakfast
• Family Walk
• That's right, walk with Dad!  Make sure to complain!
• 'Work' from 9:00 to 12:00
• More on this below
• Lunch
• Free Time
• Media is now allowed
• Dinner
• Evening Family Time
• Bed time
• Slightly later than normal, but not super late.  10:00ish

I liked these rules.  The basic plan is to have the girls do some responsible self-improvement 'work' for the morning, the exact same time I should be writing or working on narration.  My work.  Each girl was given a Summer Journal to write their ideas for their work in, as well as track their progress.  This is where the magic happened.

At our first Sprint Planning meeting for the Summer, just last night in fact, my daughter Indigo hit upon a wonderful idea.  What if the girls planned their weeks in their own journals, just like Daddy plans the two week Sprints in the Family Journal?  OMG!  She came up with it on her own, and I couldn't be more proud.  If I had tried to force this on them, I don't think there would be a Snowman's Chance In Summer of it working.  However, since it was their idea, I think we stand a chance.  

As a result, we are now having the Family Journal be the master task list (think of it as the primary JIRA/Rapid board), with each daughter having their specific boards to track tasks individual to them.

So, overall I am thrilled.  I will report back as to how much progress we make, and what other adjustments I have had to do in order to take into account Summer, but I feel that for once, I have managed to get out ahead of it slightly.  I am sure this means I must be missing something BIG.

Talk soon!

~~Your Humble Domestic Engineer

Sprint or Slog?

Hello again.

As you can see, I have not been able to keep up with the pace of all of my writing commitments.  The good news is that I have still managed to shuffle all of the little people in my life to where they needed to go, and get them fed in the process (yes, sometimes while shuffling them, crazy right?).  Like all ambitious projects, there comes a time where the shiny newness has worn off, and now its time to do the actual work.  This has been my last Sprint - Sprint "Solo Daddy".

My wife was in China last Sprint for 10 days for a Bioinformatics Conference where basically really smart people go to run their brains together in hopes of spawning even more brainy brain children.  This left me with running the household, which was not that bad actually, but it was a lot of balls to keep in the air.  Almost immediately after she got back one of my best friend's youngest child had an emergency and had to be hospitalized for a week (he is better now - yeah!).  I stepped in as House Dad and helped take his eldest daughter to and from school and had her over at my house after school in order to allow time for him to visit his family in the hospital.  All really good things I am happy and proud to have done, but they pretty much drove a big 'ole fire truck through my carefully planned schedules and tasks.

Is it over yet?

To use a work analogy, this would be the equivalent of giving Jeff Bezos a product demo at Amazon, only to have him rub his chin and say, "That's all very nice, but I want it to be hands free, cost $20, and my grandmother needs to be able to use it without instruction.  Also, change the name and make it blue."  Then the design team and product managers all go off and try to make the product they are actually shipping seem like what was just requested, fudge some dates, and try to make the impossible happen.



In short, life happened, and I had to Sprint just to keep up.  As a result several of my tasks got pushed out of scope for the Sprint.  But it wasn't all bad.  I learned to adapt, and in some cases I split the bigger task into little baby tasks (the equivalent of maybe half a Story Point) and nibbled away at them everyday.  For example my home improvement project was to redo the inventory and organization of my kitchen cabinets.  After my fourth house and close to two decades of living with the same person, you collect an amazing detritus of stuff that lurks like a crouching demon at the back of your cupboards.  You know what I'm talking about.  That one complex juicer you bought on that health kick a decade ago with the four hundred and twenty seven different attachments that now are scattered throughout everything.  The yogurt machine with its component fifty seven little jars and nick nacks.  The collection of various single purpose kitchen tools that are amazingly handy for that one time you pull them out at Thanksgiving to actually cook something besides the four basic meals you make the rest of the year.  Yeah - that stuff.

I had naively assigned the entire task to a single day, and once I sat down (or perhaps stood up rather) to actually take on the project, I discovered it was a much larger task than I had originally scoped.  As a result I decided to split the task into multiple stories and spread it out over the Sprint.  In fact, I still have my silverware to deal with as of writing this.  For some reason we have five thousand forks and only six spoons.  Anyways, this allowed me to make some real progress without simply giving up on the task as being too big to take on.  I believe this is one of the fundamental ideals behind Agile Development, and one that is directly applicable to almost any endeavor in life that is more ambitious than simply getting up in the morning.  Actually, scratch that - getting up in the morning can be pretty dang hard at times as well!

So, Sprint "Solo Daddy" is complete.  I then called the All-Hands meeting to go over the previous Sprint and plan the next.  In the middle of the Sprint Planning meeting my youngest daughter realized she had somehow forgotten to do any homework for the entire weekend, and it was all due in the morning.  There was some wailing, some denial, some panic, and then some late night cramming.  My Sprint Planning meeting was blown away like so much detritus before the storm of a ten year olds full on five alarm fire panic.

Needless to say Sprint "Muskasprints" got off to a rocky start.  I realized on my morning walk I made the classic manager mistake.  If you are going to get team buy in for an All-Hands Meeting you get one, maybe two free passes where they will actually show up and be interested.  After that they quite rightly wonder why they have to go to all of these meetings in stead of doing their actual job.  So what do managers do?  They bribe them.  "Come to the All-Hands, we have free drinks and pizza!"  "Come to the All-Hands!  We are giving out T-Shirts this time!", and so on.  I am thinking for my next Sprint Planning meeting to do it at an ice cream shop, ice cream in hand, with a captive audience.  Hell, maybe I'll even throw in a free T-shirt as well.

So, at the end of the day all of the best careful planning can't always plan for real, actual Life.  But we Domestic Engineers soldier on none the less.  I am learning the importance of building more flex into my schedules to take this into account as a result.

"Bend like the willow, lest you break like the oak..."

On The Importance of Going Somewhere New

Greetings once more!

This post I want to focus on one of my "theme days", specifically my "Go Somewhere New" day.  This happens to be Tuesday for me, but honestly I have been trying to squeeze it in where ever I can.  I will start by asking a question to you, my readers...

When was the last time you went somewhere new?

Was it to a new restaurant?    Perhaps to a new city or country while travelling?  Perhaps the time you got lost trying to follow Google maps and drove through a charming neighborhood by accident?  Maybe you got lost and ended up in the "bad part of town"...  What do all of these things have in common?

We remember them.  They stand out in the fog of our memory as singular events.  They shake up the old, the routine, the expected.  They agitate the the brain in the same way exercise and hard work agitates the body, causing it to grow and expand in order to meet the new challenges presented to it.  I firmly believe that people that continue to expose themselves to new ideas, new places, new people continue to live and to grow.  Once we stop doing those things, we become fossilized, our brains, bodies, minds and souls atrophying from lack of stimulus.

For me it is also something to look forward to.  After living in Scotts Valley for close to two years, and working here for over fifteen, I now know many of its secret hiking trails, it's hidden neighborhoods, and its seemingly endless lots full of RVs.  As I am getting into brewing, I went to Discretion Brewing the other day to write some more of my book.  While there I struck up a conversation with the extremely helpful and friendly staff, mentioned I was getting into home brew and was impressed with their setup, so they offered to give me a tour of the place.  I got to check out their entire operation, chat with their assistant brewer, and left feeling stoked for having done so.

I also totally understand and value the importance of s schedule.  People have to go to work.  We have to pick up our kids, run the errands, and take care of whatever other responsibilities we may have acquired during our time on this planet.  Such as grooming winged monkeys - they are very particular about their plumage it turns out.  All of that is fine, but where ever possible, see if you can sneak some new into your life.  Maybe it will be something small, like taking a new route home from work or school.  Maybe it will be huge, like deciding to travel to a new country on a lark.  Who knows.

My challenge to you is this - try going someplace new in the next.  Then tell me what you thought of it.  Challenge me back.  Let's live a little.  Lets live a lot.

My Other New Job

Hello all,

Some fun random updates since my last post for your amusement and consideration.  In my effort to save money and be able to actually afford being a stay-at-home-dad-turned author, we have done the sensible thing and let go of our gardener, housekeeper, small army of winged flying monkeys, and so forth.  Thus I now find myself gardening, cleaning the house and fighting off tinmen and lions.  All of which is part of the package deal alongside the staples of cooking the food, carting the kids to and from their activities and school, and working on my abs (trophy husbands need good abs, right?).  Besides the abs, I'm doing pretty well.

However alongside all of this 'Domestic Engineering' (my New Job), I am also trying to get my creative pursuits off the ground.  In this capacity, I am writing my first book, a fast paced sci-fi adventure filled with action and adventure.  This is my Other New Job.  According to The Plan, I write from roughly nine to noon everyday.  Sometimes this happens, sometimes responsibilities from my primary job (reference kid carting, parenting, winged monkey grooming) interrupts.  Overall though, I am making some good progress, and have hit a good cadence where I write at least five days a week.

The struggle I have found is to be good about keeping to a schedule.  As long as have my butt physically in a chair, in front of a computer, I find it easy to write.  But it is amazing the things our brain will invent to keep us from doing that.  There are always some more dishes to do, some schedule to optimize, a blog post to write (at least its writing), and don't even get me started on the distractions offered by social media.  There exists a fantastic book given to me by one of the smartest engineers I ever had the pleasure to work with in my professional career, Gabe Beddingfield.  The book is called The War of Art, and is a thin little thing that reads like a manifesto for getting your creative butt in gear.  I normally don't go for the 'motivational self-help book' type of thing, but this guy totally worked for me.  I highly recommend it for anyone who has always had some creative outlet that in their heart of hearts they know to be their life's passion, but that they have never quite gotten around to doing for some reason.  For me, at least, this book was the answer.  Well, this book, and going to the remotest part of Death Valley, soaking myself in hot water, and coming to the truth of my life.  What was that truth?

I wanted to write.  I want to write.  I will write.

So, when my wife and I sat down to figure out which one of us should quit our job to tend the home fires, I volunteered.  It was the leap from everything I knew to go pursue the goals I kept telling myself I would do someday.  The Other New Job.

So, what's this book I am writing you ask?  (Okay, so maybe I am asking for you, but work with me here people)  It's a sci-fi novel that follows a group of mercenaries looking for that one last score so they can settle down and find a place of their own.  It's got action, mecha suits, jet bikes, betrayal and a dash of romance.  Is it the best book ever written?  You decide.  Is it done yet?  Almost.  What's it called?  The working title is "Pariah Legion: Spyder's Tale".

My friend Venkat Malladi turned me on to a cool new way to publish through a website/company called Inkshares.com.  They basically took the Kickstarter crowd funding approach and applied it to book publishing.  You the author try to work up interest (that means backers) in your book, and if you hit the target number, your book gets published.  If not, all of the backers get their money back, and that's that.  Their bar for publishing is pretty high (750 copies for an ebook, 1000 for print) which I honestly find somewhat intimidating, but luck would have it they are currently running a cool contest called their "Swords and Lasers" collection.  The top five books in that contest get published, which has become my new goal in life, outside of raising beautiful children and fighting off giant mutant cockroaches.

So, how can you help?  Swing by the site for Pariah Legion: Spyder's Tale and pre-order a book or three.  Tell your friends.  Tell your friend's friends.  Have them tell the BBC while fighting off giant mutant mecha girls from Zanzibar.  It will be fun!  I promise.

If you have made it this far, you are already my hero.  Thank you.  What does this have to do with Domestic Engineering?  Nothing.... or possibly everything.  When I left my job, I left to take care of my family, but I also left to write.  I left so I would have as few excuses as possible left to stand in the way of achieving The Work I have been telling myself all of my life I wanted to do.

Talk soon.  Must go herd girls, read bedtime stories, brush (and floss!) teeth and so forth.  Just remember...

"Help struggle a starving artists..."

End of the First Sprint: How Did It Go?

Well, looks like we survived our first Sprint mostly intact.  The question is, how did it go?  Let's take a look at how successful or unsuccessful things turned out in the first true Sprint.

My lovely wife is in China as of yesterday, so for my Sprint Retrospective our management team was a little thing (AKA, just me).  However I still roped in the kids, er, rest of the team and we sat down and went over what worked and what didn't.  Surprisingly, they both attended the mandatory meeting with only the minimal amounts of grousing and complaints.  The first things I had us do was go over the things that went well, and the things that didn't go so well.  These I called our Wins and Not So Wins.

The good news is, we had much more to add to the Wins column than the Not So Wins Column, including some of the Daughter Development tasks I wasn't so sure they were going to enjoy (such as learning not to simply drop their bags in the hallway every time they get home).  The Daughter Adventure days were also a big hit, having gone to the Library and to the beach respectively.  We also whipped or yard into shape, planted a garden, and completed my youngest daughter's huge dance event at Great America!

Under the Not So Wins heading, we had a couple of tasks that simply never got done.  I had originally planned a pair of career development tasks based around working on my ACK profile for doing voice work for Audible.  I never came near starting those tasks.  It should also be mentioned that my new recipe of dahl and Rice did not quite come together.  Apparently lentils want to be a LOT more boiled than I allowed for.  And last but not least, my eldest daughter is still unsure as to whether or not she really likes having a Dad at home to make her do chores and homework before laying in bed and surfing the internet.  Even though this was put in the Not So Wins column, as a parent I am pretty certain it equals Winning.  ;)

We then sat down and planned the next Sprint, which we called "Solo Daddy" as I will be the only parent on deck for the majority of the Sprint with Cricket in China.  Even though the eldest daughter wanted to bail, I got both kids to sit down with me long enough to plan the next two weeks worth of activities, pulling tasks from each of our buckets for each week.  Each daughter also picked a new recipe for me to try out from the amazing America's Test Kitchen cook book, which should be fun for everyone - assuming they turn out okay.

So, in summary, I think it went pretty well.  Some things I thought I would do transformed into other tasks which I accomplished instead, but all of the major goals were accomplished on target and on time.  Kids are overall happy, wife hasn't sent me back to work yet, and the eldest is complaining about me making her "do stuff".  So far so good!

I also got my kids to help give me my favorite old school death rocker haircut today, which was fun!   My favorite haircuts throughout my life have never come from salons, but were usually done in someones bathroom with a pair of clippers and young people, so I figured why not go back to my roots!  Anyways, it helps save money, which is useful for me these days, since I am officially detached from the Corporate Teet.

Thanks for reading!

The Value of Schedules & Routines

I remember as a kid when I had infinite free time during the summer.  I also remember getting infinitely nothing done during that same summer, and many other summers just like it.  While this was fun (I did get a lot of reading and game playing in after all), it didn't exactly speak to accomplishing any larger goals in life.  I have come to believe that for most human beings, outside of those mythical "always motivated, always happy" Unicorn people, the following is true:

"Given infinite free unstructured time, one will infinitely accomplish nothing."

 This is not to say I hate free time - quite the opposite is true in fact.  I love and adore my free time!  But I have found I need to add structure to my life so that I know when I am taking my free time, it is because I have accomplished all of the other things I have set out to do.  This way I can enjoy my free time with a clean conscious, knowing that there isn't a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, neglected kids, an unwritten chapter (or blog post!), or a pile of bills lurking behind me, shaking their head in bitter disappointment while I goof off.

So, what to do?  The answer is easy, you get yourself a schedule.  And in that schedule, you make sure to build in some free time.  You organize your time.  There have been a ton of different approaches to this subject, some quite popular, but for me I have found that simple is often better.  I don't want to get bogged down reading a book, then initiating a twenty-one step program just to remind myself to write in the morning, and pick the girls up on time.  There was a time I was trying out the various Weekly Planners, of which there were some small cults built around in the late 90s (ala Franklin-Covey and others).  I found that I would be great for a week, then after two or three it would lay untouched in the bottom of my bag.  The problem I found with those systems is that they required too much upkeep.  Everyday you had too refer to the planner, check your 12 Habits for Effective People List, drink the Cool-Aid, and do your Pilates.

My approach is a little different, and a lot simpler.  I thought long and hard about what are the things I needed to actually keep on my radar and track, and how I should be organizing my time.  I realized that almost everything fell neatly into two large categories.

1. Weekly Routines:  The stuff that happens every week, whether you want it to or not.  Dropping the kids off at school, Game Night, Dance Practice, and so on.
2. Calendar Events:  Non-periodic events that are important to the whole family.  Spouse trips, friends visiting from out of town, special events, deadlines for large projects.

Once I realized this, it got a lot easier to figure out how to best manage my time.  I went with what I am calling the Standard Template Time Schedule (STTS), which is basically a weekly schedule for me to deviate from when needed.  Version one, carefully crafted from artisan colored pencils, looks like this:

As you can see, I have blocked out large sections of time for the routine activities I have committed to doing in my life.  I wanted to paint the canvas of my time with a broad brush at first, and then refine later.  The Post-It notes are for the pick up times for my daughters, as my eldest has a pretty wacky schedule that changes from semester to semester.  I purposefully left the weekends blank, as this is often when we go on trips, have events, or simply have free time.  

Is this schedule perfect?  Is this organizational approach revolutionary?  Most likely no on both counts, but I can tell you that it is simple enough to work, and easy to modify and improve.  Those to qualities give me confidence that by version four or five, we will be ready to ship this to customers.  ;)

Next post I will talk about how I incorporate STTS with my Sprint Buckets.  Its all very technical, I can assure you.

The Two Mile Walk

And now for a slight detour.  Or is it?  I want to talk about motivation, and our ability as humans to fully engage our minds and bodies in what we do.  How often have you gone to work, done your thing, and remembered almost none of it afterwards?  This is going through life on auto-pilot, and I think a lot of it has to do with not using our bodies.  At least in the tech industry this seems to be a real problem.  ;)

One of the things I have tried to institute for myself is a nice long walk in the morning.  Right after I drop my kids off at school, I find someplace new to go, and I start walking.  Now, it doesn't hurt that I live in a beautiful place, but I think just about any environment could work.  I put on my headphones, order my thoughts, and start moving.  I think about what I am going to write for that day, what Sprint task is due, when I need to get my girls later on.  Sometimes I don't think about anything besides satisfying my curiosity about the world around me.

And I use my body.  It has been far too long since I have hiked two miles before nine in the morning.  Now I can say I have done it most every day this week.  And you know what, every single day I wanted to crawl back into bed and sleep some more.  No joke.  But I knew if I did I would be cheating myself out of accomplishing the very things I set out to do for that day.  So, instead of going back home and crawling under those deliciously sweet covers, I went on a hike.

IT WAS AWESOME!

I haven't felt this good in years.  When I got home, I found myself ready to take on the challenges of the day, and energized.  Strangely more energized than if I had spent that same amount of time sleeping.  Everyone likes to say how our minds and body are interconnected, but it seems to me that very few people actually act on that knowledge.  Please, for yourself, DO.  The energy you bring back to your work, your projects, your life is astounding.  I am kicking myself for never having made the time to do this when I was working.  I am certain I would have been a more effective employee had I stopped to walk a half an hour in the morning before diving headlong into the insanity that is our modern fast paced software development process in Silicon Valley.

And I got to see cows.  And flowers.  Don't believe me.  Here, let me prove it:

So, in short, do yourself a favor.  Go on a walk.  You won't regret it.