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.

Week Two: Doing the Work

There is a great military quote that comes to mind.  It goes something like this:

"No plan survives contact with the enemy."

Well, we have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.  Actually, it's not all that bad, it's just that things never go as smoothly as your pen and paper plans would make them out to be.  Despite that, I feel this first Sprint is off to a decent start, despite some bumps along the way.

Sprint One:  "Headstart"

• Sprint Length:  Two Weeks
• Sprint Highlights/Important Events:
• Great America Dance Performance
• Wife Travels to China
• Handle Insurance
• Week One:
• Home Improvement:   Yard Work, Stage Two
• Daughters - Mindfulness:  Find a Book at Reading Level
• Career Development:  Update Audible Profile
• Go Someplace New:  Coffee shop in Saratoga
• Daughters - Adventure:  Go to Library
• New Recipe:  Dahl & Rice
• Week Two:
• Home Improvement:  Kitchen Cabinets - Sort Them!
• Daughters - Mindfulness:  Backpack Management
• Career Development:  Submit 3 Audible Auditions
• Go Someplace New:  New Pub in SV
• Daughters - Adventure:  Go to Beach
• New Recipe:  Skillet Mac & Cheese (Jasper)

The great news is that Sprint planning went really, really well.  My whole family got involved, and sat around offering suggestions, helped me add tasks to our Buckets, and actually suggested new recipes they wanted me to try out.  We then retired to the hot tub to brain storm and go over what the next two weeks would look like!  

In short, it was Domestic Bliss.

I was feeling pretty good about it actually.  However, Monday ended up being a school holiday where I live (Scotts Valley is apparently sufficiently Christian that schools get Easter Monday off as well) so that threw off my career development goal for the day, as I spent more time chasing kids than I had planned for.  "No problem", I thought, "Tomorrow is their first day back after break, what could go wrong?"  This is where (thankfully), I remembered to look at my day planner, and OH SHIT!  I had to chaperon and drive for a field trip for my 5th grade daughter the next day.

First lesson learned about the differences between the Workplace Sprint and the Domestic Sprint:  Check Your Calendar!  Truth be told, in the office you would have something like Microsoft Office (AKA: Microsoft Orifice) reminding you of your meetings, and you would simply take that into account when planning your Sprints.  For whatever reason that escaped my mind when I was planning my first Domestic Sprint.  This then combined with my idea of dedicating certain days to certain tasks (I still like this idea BTW) meant that when I had a pre-planned, on the schedule already event I was required to do, it was in direct conflict with whatever Sprint tasks I had given for myself that day.  Whoops!

So, yeah, I'm going to have to slip those stories until next Sprint.  But hey, that happens in the workplace as often as it does at home, so onward.  Today, Wednesday, was my first real success.  The kids went to school.  I took a Morning walk to clear my head, get the blood flowing, reflect on my goals, and then I went home and wrote for a few hours.  I then accomplished my Sprint Task of taking my kids to the library and getting them to check out some various books for their school projects.  I also (bonus) picked up some books on Home Brewing, Vikings, and Airships.

The important thing to remember, I keep telling myself, is that Agile is an adaptive process with the ultimate goal of improving itself with each iteration.  Don't be too hard on yourself if reality doesn't exactly match up with your beautiful plan.  That is often the way the cookie crumbles.  Or the way the software develops.  Or the way the Sprint sprints.

Day 4: Epics as Buckets

Hello again,

Yeah yeah, I didn't post yesterday.  Sorry about that.  I am going to try and shoot for about three posts a week, if at all possible.  Don't want to get into the trap of posting and not doing (a common complaint of mine with avid/rabid Facebook users).  I believe last time I said I would go into more detail about my concept behind the different "Buckets" I have created for myself intellectually to organize my weekly activities.  Let's dive into them now.

Buckets:  AKA - Epics from Agile

• General Categories to Hold Tasks/Ideas
• Used to pull tasks from during your Sprint Planning
• I created a "Theme" for each day, that corresponds directly to these Buckets
• These map to Epics in Agile, but in my case I create a backlog for each Bucket individually (JIRA has a generalized backlog that holds all of the tasks, and displays what Epic they belong to as a color code)

So, what Bucket's did you choose?

Great question.  Thanks for asking virtual me.  I chose a set of five themes for each of my days.  The first half of my day is always the same.  Get up.  Get my kids up.  Wave breakfast in their general direction.  Get them to school.  Work out for half an hour.  Write/narrate for three hours til lunch.  Then in the afternoons I do my Domestic Engineering tasks.

When I was first trying to figure out how to be as effective and successful as possible at the daunting task of running a household, I felt a lot like a hungry man staring into a fridge who doesn't know the first thing about cooking.  You know there's a lot of food in there, but you are not exactly sure how it transforms from its present state - boring things in bags - to a sumptuous meal on your plate.  For me I decided I would simply break down everything I needed to do into a general set of categories that mapped to what was important to me and my family.  Are these the perfect five categories that everybody should have?  No, hell no.  But they are mine, and I need to start somewhere.  Will I possibly change them after a few months of trying to work with them?  Yes, possibly.  Why, because that's all part of being Agile.

Okay, enough talking - onto the initial Buckets I chose:

1. Home Improvement:  This is everything from fixing the leak in the faucet, to remodeling the bathroom.
2. Daughters:  Mindfulness and Development:  Teaching my lovely daughters how to manage their stuff, how to call friends and socialize, good study habits, and so on.  You know, the "parenting" part of the job.
3. Career Development:  This includes researching how to publish books, improving my narration skills, networking with other authors or voice talents, etc.
4. Go Someplace New!  The fight against stagnation.  Each week I am going to attempt to go someplace I have not been before.  Why?  Because the brain, the creative  brain needs new stimulus, or else it dies.  This is my attempt to shake it up.  Also, a good excuse to ride my motorcycle.
5. Daughters: Fun and Adventure:  Can range from going to the beach, visiting Cannery Row, dressing up in silly costumes and running through the woods, making music, playing a game together, making YouTube videos (they are trying to convince me to make a 'YouPlay' video with them) and so on.

Confused why you don't see "Laundry" or "Dishes" on the list?  The answer is simple - I should be doing those each day.  I also didn't put "get dressed" or "eat food" on the list.  Those are daily tasks that I always need to do.  I wanted my Buckets to be the things I always seemed to put off for later in my old life.  The things I always knew I should be doing, but never quite got around to.  Imagine if I actually, you know, started doing some of them?

I know.  Terrifying.

But worth it I hope.  So far so good.  In the last few days I brewed beer for the first time in years, cleaned my yard, planted seeds in the earth with my daughters, and served a few pretty good meals al fresco.  I also did some errands along the way, and it was good.

Talk soon.  And please feel free to leave as much feedback as you wish.  I really appreciate peoples thoughts, and it is good to hear from others that have gone through similar changes, and what worked and didn't work for them.

Cheers!