The Time Paradox

As of yesterday, I am officially receiving a salary again. I've been working for three weeks at my new job and it's nice to know I'm getting paid for that effort. It's also nice to have some established responsibilities again. The life of the househusband certainly has its perks, but it also reinforced something I've long suspected about myself: I don't do very well as my own boss. I have tons of great ideas, but I need external pressure to focus on them. Or a time crunch. The other lesson, or perhaps an extension of the same lesson: I'll take as much time to complete a project as I'm offered. If someone else sets a deadline, well, the project gets done by that deadline. On the other hand, when, as say an unemployed househusband, I find myself with theoretically infinite time, I allow myself to use all of it. You probably get the point, but I'm still going to use my dictatorial power as sole author of this blog to force a few examples on you:

Here is a list of the "projects" I've set for myself during my long hiatus from a salaried job:

• Write another book
• Revise and submit the book I did finish (while working my first full-time job, I should add)
• Build my brother's birthday present from 2008
• Create a new webpage for the B&B party
• Keep a blog (you already know how well that one turned out)
• Learn Visual Basic

The list goes on. Most of those items have been on that list since before I left my LAST job in 2006. The school year didn't help much with timing (the occasional "40 hour day" creates the opposite problem I described above), but it did offer several summers of part-time work when I couldn't say I was busy. And ALL of those items have been on the list since I left school in 2009.

So, with that in mind, here is a list of my "accomplishments" since graduation:

• Watched 2 seasons of Dexter, 4 seasons of Bones, as many episodes of CSI, NCIS, Psych, NCIS:LA, and Leverage as I could find available on-demand or on Netflix "Watch Instantly" at any given time.
• Earned roughly 7000 gamer points for achievements on my Xbox 360 (for reference: Bruce, Pennock, and Lockard are the only people on my friends list who have 7000 points at all, let alone within a 15-month period)
• Read something like a million books (including lots of WWII histories -an interest kindled after watching the full set of Band of Brothers)

Notice there's not a whole lot of overlap between the two lists. (I don't really want to think about the time-investment that second list represents). Oh, and I helped plan a wedding in there, so that counts for something, but otherwise not the set of accomplishments for which I hoped to use my downtime.

I am learning though. The solution to my "infinite time" dilemma is two-fold:
(1) Create a time shortage
Perfect example, I started a new job three weeks ago and suddenly you're getting your first blog entry in six months (and that one barely counts). Even an artificial shortage helps. Restricting my time on a personal project to specific hours forced me to actually do the work during those hours rather than telling myself I'd have time later and that, in the meantime, it was fine to seek out another secret achievement on my Batman game.
(2) Create external pressure
Part of the reason I returned to the blog instead of retiring it (as I'd been contemplating) is that my Dad asked about it which, for those of you who remember when these columns existed in email form way-back-when, is precisely why I started sharing these thoughts with others to begin with. A more successful example is The League of Extraordinary Writers. I recently assembled a few writer/critic friends into a writer's group where, among other things, we serve as motivation for each other to actually sit down and write something. I respond well to homework, and by gathering others who would expect me to contribute something on a regular basis I've made more progress on my book this summer than in the past three years combined (which is especially sad given how little progress that is BUT, thanks to the group, it IS accelerating and I'm really excited about that).

Do I have my project completion issues completely resolved now? Probably not, but I am at least working on most of these actions again. I've already begun to tackle that project list again and, at the very least, the list of "accomplishments" above certainly contains several noteworthy opportunities for review-style blog entries. Maybe I'll actually get around to writing some of them now that I don't have the time.

Better Than Smoke Signals

It's time to talk about Google. I have become something of a fanboy in recent years and today I feel like sharing. I use a lot of their other products: Gmail, Blogger (obviously), Reader, Calendar, Tasks, and Documents, to name a few. The fact that they're all synchronized is a big deal to me, the systems engineer. Google doesn't provide the only such system, but theirs is a good one, especially if you're already using Gmail.

I have also recently added two new Google products to my toolbox: Google Voice and Google Wave.

Google Voice is a phone forwarding system that gives me significant control over my phone lines, voicemail, and text messages. I've had it for a few months now and I love it. It would be even more useful if I had multiple phones, but for now I just use the voicemail capabilities. I can filter calls, put up specific messages for specific callers, save voicemails to my computer (I really wish I had this capability when my dad left the Goose V-formation joke on my voicemail), and receive transcripts of each phone message as an email or a text on my phone. It's quick and easy to check (and while the transcript program isn't perfect, it's good enough for me to use to interpret the urgency and topic of the message). It's still in beta and requires an invite to get in, but those are relatively easy to come by. I've used up my invites already, so I can't get you in myself, but I know a few people who might. And I got in by requesting an invite directly from Google. Check it out if either of the following apply to you:

• You have multiple phones and want to manage when calls go to which lines. Especially useful for those of you who have poor cell reception in your house, or who can't or don't want to get cell phone calls at work.
• You like to keep old messages, but hate trying to navigate the list structure of traditional voicemail to find them again.

Others are doing similar things with voicemail. For example, Verizon now offers Visual Voicemail on their smartphones and I'm sure other companies do as well. I suspect all voicemail is going to head this direction soon.


Google Wave is billed as what email would look like if it was invented today. It's a communications/collaboration platform that acts as a sort of combination of Gmail, Google Docs, Wiki, and Instant Messaging (if none of those words mean anything to you, than you probably don't need Wave either). It's great for collaboration. Sarah and I have been doing a fair amount of our wedding planning with it. The trouble is that it's the kind of thing that is only really useful at scale. Right now it's kind of empty, although every time I sign on, I see more of my design friends have joined it (especially those still in school). This one is also still in early beta, so it has issues. They're getting better, and the promise is there, but it still needs some polish. I do have plenty of invitations available for this. If you're interested, let me know.

I realize I'm not selling it very well, but it is an excellent tool. If more of my friends were on it, I'd use it to organize our Xbox Live nights and coordinate groomsmen activities. This would have been the perfect place to organize the weekly Dinner & Game nights we used to have in DC. And, of course, I can imagine some pretty entertaining B&B conversations on here :)

Time to be me again

I have been free from classes for some time now. I turned in my last assignment more than a week ago and got my grades a few days later. Year two is done. One more year to go. Now it is summer break, and it truly is break time for me. I have no summer job as yet, but expect to soon. For now, I have nothing in particular to do. It's awesome. Or it was. Sometime yesterday I hit the "I'm bored now" stage. I realized I haven't actually seen anyone besides the Pennocks or my girlfriend in about a week. Just me and my apartment.

And my Xbox 360. Sarah is awesome and took it upon herself to organize several of my friends to get me one for my birthday. This helps explain the lack of blog posts. I beat Halo 3 on Heroic and picked up a number of achievements there. I've been working through Bioshock (creepy, but fascinating) more recently. I am deeply enjoying this thing. My days have been a combination of video games, reading, and to-do-lists. Finally I'm getting to a lot of things that were pushed aside by the school work. I have reached the point though where my time is starting to feel a little empty.

I recognize this feeling and I know what it means. It means two things: I need to create something and I need to talk to someone. I have at least learned about myself that I need a job, or a schedule, that lets me interact with a variety of people on a regular basis. I also need to be creating whether it be writing, designing, or simply building. I have a habit of letting myself just coast (books and video games are good for that) when I don't have anything specific to accomplish. The empty feeling that follows suggests I need to be more diligent about those things I keep saying I should do (or wish I'd done). When school was on, I always had tasks to accomplish. It represents, however, the opposite extreme, all tasks all the time and no chance to pause unless I made it myself (with all the additional guilt and stress that implies).

Fortunately, I've learned these things about myself and have a better idea about how to motivate myself. The trick is to avoid the coasting AND the exhaustion. If I had a laptop, I'd take myself away from my apartment with all its video games and books, and go find someplace to write. As it is, I set aside time earlier in the semester where I turned off my phone and my internet (I had to literally unplug the modem) and just wrote. It worked. I have most of a new story written. I'd have all of it done, but homework sort of took over my life at the end of the semester. Not entirely unexpected. Well there's no homework now. I've got time and that empty feeling that tells me I have taken the "unwinding" period a little too far. So it's time to reestablish the writing period. Let's see if I can do it every day. I think I can.

Getting to the Point

My default writing style is pretty much the complete opposite of that recommended for research papers or other professional and academic communication. My style is, for one thing, a lot less likely to stay on track. I like qualifiers and modifiers. I like a certain goofiness. I like tangents. I like parenthetical asides. I really like parenthetical asides. You can see only a hint of it by reading my previous blog entries but you still have no idea just how many I remove in the process of editing what goes up here. Also, I'm having a very hard time not adding one now.

This particular style works fine for, say, a blog where the essential purpose (whatever else we may claim) is to show off. It's not very useful in a term paper or thesis. I can adapt, however. I don't really have any trouble writing in the style required for such papers. I just don't do it here. Nor, and this is where I'm headed with this entry, do I use a particularly concise style in emails.

I became aware some years ago that my email style was not entirely compatible with the email-reading habits of some of my friends. Only recently, however, have I come to recognize just how prevalent this discord is and, perhaps more importantly, how much it obscures my real message for people with little time.

The first indication came through an off-hand comment from a friend about five years ago. She told me, "Oh I don't usually read your whole email." This was pretty painful for me to hear, although she had no idea. I think from her perspective it was equivalent of telling me "I never quite got around to reading that article you recommended," in other words no big deal. From my end, though, it sounded more like, "I know you've been talking earnestly for the last ten minutes, but I wasn't really listening." It hurt (and clearly still bothers me, to a certain extent) but I understood it wasn't meant to be insulting. It was a fundamental difference in the way the two of us saw email.

I don't just write emails, I craft them. I like writing. If you get an email of a significant length from me (and admittedly my threshold for "significant" is probably higher than most), odds are good that I spent too much time drafting, editing, and tweaking it to get that perfect "casually witty" look (It's sort of like the idea of "artfully mussed hair"). As I pointed out above, however, I have more recently begun to realize that all that "craft" can obscure my original purpose.

In the past few years, more of my friends have made similar comments to the one I mentioned above. It took me a little while, but I finally started to generalize the concept and to realize that, as much fun as I find long emails, my readers don't always feel the same way.

Recently I have also begun following a blog called "43 Folders" which offers advice on being more productive and working more efficiently. It has an Apple focus, so I skip large parts of it, but the general non-Apple stuff is pretty useful. It's helping with my studies already. A large section of this blog is directed at email processing and also at email writing. Seeing the other point of view described there, that of the person who has to comb through all the "casual witty" to get to the actual information in the email, helped me realize just why some people are not inclined to read my whole email.

I have begun now to be more careful of my emailing efforts. If I'm writing an email with a purpose I'm dropping the clever subject in favor of the informative subject. I'm replacing the cryptic-yet-enticing first line with a sentence detailing exactly why I'm sending the email. I'm also discarding all (well almost all) of the irrelevant comments and asides I usually stick in the main body and then I'm signing off with a specific declaration of what I'm asking of them. Recipients should find it easier to figure out why I sent the email, whether they need to read it, and what I expect in return if they do. Hopefully it will make things easier for all involved (maybe now people will actually send RSVPs to my invitations, but efficiency may not actually be the real problem there).

I should point out that this new approach only goes for purposeful emails. I have no intentions of reducing my rambling if I'm just saying hi (I'm not going to let efficiency suck ALL the fun out of my life). Also, almost all B&B emails are exempt (October 27th, mark your calendars). For those we've always had the summary at the end anyway, so people can just deal.

For the rest, though, I'm cleaning up my act.