#13 | What am I?

What am I? I feel my blog has been asking me this question since I started.

“Am I a place for the author to tell his story about making his life Boring?”

“Am I a place for the author to hash out his thoughts on a life philosophy that he thinks is worth spreading but still in its infancy?”

“Am I a place to discuss productivity hacks, which became the obvious evolution of the blog?”

“Am I an accountability partner to make sure that the author keeps pushing on his passion projects?”

“Am I just a waste of time to keep the author feeling productive and important while not providing any real value?”

“Or maybe I’m all of these things, while also being none of them?”

I feel like most of my posts was me telling my story. But then I wrote Project Organization where I detailed how I plan on tackling some of my ambitions. I enjoyed writing it; it felt like I was providing value. I’m a pretty private person and don’t like talking about my personal life. I'm so secret that when I had my youngest kid, I didn’t tell anyone at work for a good six months. I told my boss and HR so that I could get paternity leave. But my coworkers and even my direct reports thought I was just on vacation. So sharing my story is uncomfortable and as much as I know there can be value in it, I have a hard time convincing myself others will find value in it. However, figuring out and sharing a way to effectively setup Project Organization in your personal life; that’s different.

I talked to my wife last night about how I wasn’t vibing with the blog. I was thinking about how it’s not possible for me to come up with something value-adding every week. I’ve had enough thoughts to keep my posts pre-written to sustain a weekly release schedule, but I never intended to keep that frequency. So if I can only think of a value-adding item once a month or even less, that’s fine. But I have to be honest with myself. If I am jumping on the blog once a month or less, I’ll forget about it and move onto something else. I had a problem on my hands.

Tonight she pitched some ideas to me, we brainstormed a bit, and I hit a revelation. I’ve mentioned before that I’m an engineering manager in charge of four teams and almost two dozen engineers. Every year both the number of projects I manage and the total headcount has too. In my opinion, this is because I’m very skilled in creating a system. Instead of engineering software, I feel like I’ve engineered a culture and environment for my teams. I have daily and weekly checklists that I go through to keep the team’s train on the tracks. I have what I call my Team Control Book detailing full transparency on what I do so that the teams stay informed of what I’m thinking, what I’m focusing on, and what I expect of them. In this Team Control Book, I also have our core processes and even some culture items. It’s only about a half dozen documents that I tweak and trim to keep it current, relevant, and as concise as possible.

I don’t have a similar system in place for my personal life. I have various documents here and tools there, but since I don’t have a team to work with, I’ve never formalized it. Why create a Personal Control Book for me, myself, and I? That’s where I went wrong.

Since starting to think about Boredom is my Goal as a philosophy, I’ve been able to focus on my Big Rocks more easily. But not until the last post did I start to think about my projects as a system. So that’s what this blog has become.

This blog is my team. Even if no one reads it, that’s irrelevant, because the results speak for itself. So it doesn’t matter if anyone reads the blog. The only thing that matters is results in my projects.

I think I’m going to create three main purposes to this blog now. By the time this writing goes public in a few weeks, we’ll see if I follow through.

The first purpose is to tell my story. Since this makes me uncomfortable, I need to keep doing this. It’ll help me grow. I'll continue doing my regular Thursday release schedule. On this schedule, I can talk about what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, what I’m failing, and where I’m going. It’s all the “feels.”

The second purpose is to start building out my Personal Control Book. This control book will mirror the Team Control Book I have at work. It’ll be static pages on the site where I detail my processes. The Thursday release schedule can talk about how and why I came up with my Project Organization, but the static Personal Control Book page will remove all the personal details and document how it works.

The third and last purpose will be to provide accountability for myself. At work, I do a Weekly Update so that everyone on the team knows what’s what's happening on the team, in the division, and at the company. It’s become the primary way for a distributed team to keep connected to everyone else. So to mirror this, I’m going to start doing a Weekly Update post on Sunday nights to recap accomplishments during the previous week.

All the pieces are coming together. My blog’s identity is starting to come into focus.

(Written 2019.03.28)

#12 | Project Organization

Last week I talked about how I spent the weekend figuring out my next steps. I wanted to dig into that a bit more and discuss how I organize all these projects.

I’ve always been very goal oriented along with writing down the goals, outcomes, and accomplishments. Documenting everything gave the goals more weight, more meaning. It helped me stay focused and complete them.

About six months ago, my wife asked if I wanted to do Merrill Lynch’s Life Priority assessment. I felt useful, but at the same time, I thought it was a bit overwhelming. The evaluation focused on seven categories with two goals each. 14 life-goals. Damn. We then needed to prioritize them. We sorted out the first couple pretty quickly. Things broke down when we couldn’t agree on the priority order for anything past Life Goal 5.

We went with the 14 goal list even though I had reservations about its effectiveness. After we defined what the 14 goals would be and prioritized the top batch, we set about knocking them off. I quickly went towards writing them down in a trackable manner. Each goal had several subtasks; most had research that was needed; some had dependencies. For example, buying our home was one of these goals. That’s not something we can walk out and do in a day. There’s a lot of prep-work, research, and organization that’s needed.

In writing this down, I tried to utilize Google’s suite of tools. In my personal life, I’m a heavy user of gMail, gDocs, and gCalendar for all things productivity related. I found out a Google account has a Tasks feature. Awesome. I could have my checklist of tasks right there whenever I was getting things done. I converted the 14 goals into a Life Goals List. Then I created a Milestones List which contained the various milestones for every goal. Then I created an Efforts List, essentially a project, which included the individual checklist for each milestone. All of these multiple lists were needed because Tasks only lets you embed a list one level deep. My system started seeming convoluted, but I just kept pushing forward hoping it would all clear itself up.

Besides the limitation on how deep lists can be embedded, Tasks also doesn’t hold enough information. When researching a project, sometimes more information is needed than just a checklist. I’ve used Trello before and think it’s a handy tool. So I busted that out. I converted each complex project in the Efforts List to a Trello Board and then created Lists and Cards in each Trello Board. The simpler projects stayed in the Tasks Efforts List.

At this point, you’re probably like WTF. Goals, Lists, Boards, Milestones, Tasks, what? Yeah. I ran like this for probably six months. Sometimes managing all of this was more complicated than actually working on a project. Plus with 14 goals, it was easy to start too many at once or feel guilty when neglecting some. I was making progress, but the overhead was impeding more than assisting.

My system had to change so last weekend I revamped everything.

Step 1, consolidate the 14 goals. The goals were more short term based. I needed long term on-the-horizon goals. Looking at the 14 goals I had, they consolidated down into three different Focuses.

• Financial Independence
• Health
• Philanthropy

Instead of trying to juggle 14 goals, managing three focuses is doable.

Next up is to consolidate tools. Using Google Tasks and Trello is just silly. Since Google Tasks isn’t feature-rich enough to satisfy what I needed, it had to go. So I created a Trello Board for each of my three Focuses. Once that was done, I merged in the 14 different goals under the appropriate Focus as a Card.

Here is an example:


Whew. Down to one tool now. I now had my Focuses organized in Trello into three Boards. Next up was defining the Projects that would push each of the Focuses forward.

Next up was to create a standardized Board for an actual Project. That was easy enough. I already had a template I had been using. Three columns: Queued, In Progress, and Completed. Then all tasks fit into one of the three columns and contain any number of checklists, notes, or attachments as needed. To create a new project, all I have to do is Copy Board.



To wrap things up, I just had to create Boards for each of my Projects and throw some color coding into it. Behold the final result.



This system lets me keep my energy on three main Focuses and helps limit the number of ongoing Projects I have. The Boards with “(1)” in them are the Focus boards which contains all the various goals and notes to help channel future energies. The colors help make it easy to see where my attention is going.

Going from an overly complicated system into a sweet and straightforward Boring organization lets me put more energy into the projects themselves instead of the overhead.

(Written 2019.02.26)

#11 | Philanthropy Revisited

Today I want to write about a previous post I did, The Trap. I originally wrote it on January 24th (posted February 28th). Today is February 25th.

A month after I wrote that post. A month ago I was feeling overwhelmed because I was trying to tackle the next phase in Minimalism, starting this Blog, and starting to figure out how to become more engaged in Philanthropy. I needed to slow down and breathe and eliminate some things. The outcome, I pre-wrote a bunch of Blog posts, so I was able to remove it from my plate for a month. I temporarily shelved Philanthropy. And then I put my entire focus on Minimalism.

By doing that, I felt refreshed and energized to tackle my main focus. It was awesome. I was able to close that out in a little over a week. I went through our hallway nook and cleared off a junk collecting desk. The desk itself went into the garage. Then I went through the living room. I emptied the bookshelf there and either got rid of the contents or moved them into our previously empty TV stand. The bookshelf replaced the hallway nook desk and filled with meaningful stuff. My bedroom and the kids' room was next. I cleared out a couple of boxes of old toys along with twice that many boxes of my old paperwork, junk, etc. Both of our closets are now half-empty. Unfortunately, our garage is packed with junk now, but once there is a shiny weekend, we’ll hold a garage sale and get rid of what we can. We'll donate or give away the rest.

Whew, I was dreading this project, but once I could focus on it, I was able to knock it out in record time. I’m sure I can trim down even more, but for now, I have an excellent minimalism foundation.

That’s one week, there are three more that passed between then and now. During that time, I read/skimmed The Singularity Is Near and read Factfulness. Two great books for feeling positive about the future again.

In addition to these books, I was also able to respond to an emotionally hard week at work while dealing with this long-running sickness. And I knocked out my taxes which I'll wrap up this week.

After a month, I feel accomplished even though I was working on my project only for a quarter of that time, which leads to this weekend.

I decided to start two projects. The Trap, I know. But this time it’s intentional. One is a financial independence project which will be slow and long-running. The other project will be more time-intensive, philanthropy project.

I currently participate monthly in One on One Outreach. I just went again last night, my third time going so far. Last month after my wife and I volunteered, we started talking about starting a program ourselves. She pitched a similar concept as One on One. One on One works towards providing local lower-income families with basic household goods and foods: things like detergent, bleach, and various food staples. It’s a great cause, but we’re both more passionate about helping out kids specifically. So our idea was to start putting together school care packages for local elementary schools in lower-income neighborhoods. We were thinking of incorporating it into her business' proceeds which would give us some consistent funding to start things. After a fun brainstorming session, we filed it away as a sweet dream, but neither of us was in the position to start a new project.

Well, last night as I was driving home from this month’s event, I reevaluated where I was at in terms of projects. I had just spent the weekend cleaning up my project list and rebuilding it. I was ready to start something new. As I was going to sleep, I pulled out my laptop in bed (heh… a terrible habit I try to avoid) and looked up some info. I searched local elementary schools ranked in order from best to worst. I researched most needed supplies for elementary schools, broken down to grade level. I laid out the contribution plan for what percentages of our business’ proceeds to apply towards purchasing supplies along with how we were going to carve that percentage out of our current budget. I detailed distribution quantities and frequency. I took rough notes for everything. It’s all very rough notes right now. Over the next week, I’ll put it into a more presentable format and then pitch it to my wife. But it’s a start.

A month ago I had the same moment at night and realized that I had fallen into the Trap. This time, because I correctly managed my projects and workload, that late night burst of energy will become a foundation for my family’s Philanthropy efforts for decades to come.

(Written 2019.02.25)

#10 | I'm Bored. What Now?

Up until now, I’ve talked about being Bored in a very vague sense. “Boredom fills my life.” “I want to be “Bored.” I’ve never actually talked about what being Bored means to me. I want to discuss that now.

At one point I mentioned “staring at the wall” was my Boring task but that’s not the case. Although Boredom is my Goal, I also don’t want to waste my life away. Deciding what I did during my Bored time was critical to making this philosophy work.

The first “Boring” activity I picked up was reading, specifically reading self-improvement and other non-fiction books. Although I’ve always enjoyed being a light reader throughout my life, I’ve never been able to sustain reading over the long haul. I might get into a craze and go through a few books quickly and then not touch a book for a year. It was mostly a binge-read and then withdraw relationship. I’ve been able to change this into a more consistent reading habit by slowing everything down in my life. If I know I’m going to have an hour of free time every night, filling it with a book is quickly done.

I’ve also focused on staying away from fiction books. Although I have read a few this past year, I put these in the same distraction category as TV or social media. Albeit a much more useful distraction but a distraction nonetheless. So by sticking to self-improvement and other non-fiction books, I keep things on a more productive trajectory.

Another “Boring” activity I’ve started is reading graphic novels. I know it’s easy to argue that these are fictional books and I just said I consider them a distraction, which is true. But graphic novels are in a unique class and if done thoughtfully, fit into the system smoothly. The reason why my interest in them has sparked recently is that the storyline can progress quickly. If I pick one up for even just a few minutes, something meaningful can happen in the story. I also tend to go through them fast. So they are a short distraction; not a distraction 20 episode binge watch on Netflix where you essentially lock in half a work week worth of distraction time. The ease of picking up and ease of completing graphic novels are appealing but only half the equation.

Their cost is the other half of the equation, typically ranging between $10 to $50. This amount makes it very affordable but also limiting. I wouldn’t want to buy a new one every day or even every week. So although I might be able to read through one in a few days, I might then wait a month to buy a new one to even out the costs. I could also find some graphic novels free online or at the library and the frugal part of me screams that this is the smarter approach. But the cost is a built-in mechanism to limit how much time I’m willing to give to reading them.

The last significant “Boring” activity is essentially building a better household. Random chores like cleaning the counters, cleaning the microwave, clearing out the fridge. Possibly simple meal preparations or tidying up. Even doing the laundry and folding clothes. These are all things most people probably prefer not doing. And if given a chance I would rather binge-watch that Netflix series myself. But binge-watching Netflix in no way improves my life but having a well taken care of household improves not only my life but the lives of my family. And a major side benefit of this is that it starts to become infectious. My two younger kids LOVE “folding” clothes with me now. The 2-year-old mostly moves clothes from one pile to another. The 6-year-old has focused on running between room to put the clothes away or doing simpler tasks like matching socks. But are marginally helpful but it’s a start, and it’s a great family bonding time.

In the end, I’ve still managed to keep busy and be productive even in my Bored times. But they are all typically mentally relaxing or lightly physical or some other kind of beneficial Bored. And it’s all been working out great!

(Written 2019.01.25)