#33 | Go With The Flow

I've been obsessing about my release schedule recently.

I spent six months pre-writing my blog posts, sometimes having up to a month worth of posts written and scheduled. I had a rigid schedule of releasing a new post every Thursday. I like this schedule because it is a way to give the reader something on a relaxing Friday before starting their weekend.

I always had the intention that if I missed a Thursday, that would be fine. But I knew that wasn't true. I'm the kind of person that once I miss once, the drive will fade enough that I'll lose my momentum. Next thing I know, three months go by and nothing. I need the schedule to stay motivated; any will do.

When I picked up writing again, I considered a weekly release rate was burnt-out levels of output. I thought once a month would be better. That seems very doable. If I write a single post once a month, that would be easy. Sounds good!

Then I started thinking about the yearly article count. When releasing weekly, I would have 52 posts. That's a good number. When releasing monthly, that's only 12 posts. Sometimes I can write a dozen articles in a couple of weeks, so spreading the release of those out over a full year didn't fit.

My thoughts next went to a variable schedule. Something where if I have one or two posts queued up, I post monthly. If I have three to six posts queued up, I release every other week. And then if I have over six posts queued up, I would go back to weekly. That way, if I became inspired, I could release weekly and fade to monthly over time. It sounded genius.

Or not. I was getting my headache. This internal debate is how my brain works. I started spending more thought on HOW I would release my posts than WHAT would be in them (hence me taking an entire post on this topic). I'm going to try my hardest to let the obsession go and adhere to my original schedule: release on Thursday anytime I have something written AND to not fall off the wagon again for three months if I miss a week.

Forget the schedule. Just let the thoughts flow! Sometimes you just must let it go and see where things take you.

(Written 2019.10.19)

#32 | The Loss Of Focus

In the last post, I talked about my busy period and how it related to the philosophy of Boredom. This time I wanted to talk about how it impacted my Personal Control Book.

I've talked about how I organize my PCB. The guts of the PCB are within Trello. Life Focuses, Beacons, Areas of Focuses, and Projects are all kept within the Trello boards and cards. Then for my weekly updates, I keep them on a private Confluence page.

It's all very well set up, organized, and executed; until it's not.

I can admit that for a few months, I didn't touch Trello. I neglected all of those Projects with nicely laid out tasks. As new projects came in, I didn't consult Trello to see how they fit into my Life Focuses. I stopped all activity within Trello and stopped logging in. I still kept up my weekly updates, but Trello didn't exist to me.

This lapse is okay. I didn't abandon Trello or the PCB, and I still recommend them. I'm again using them today.

Overhead explains the lapse. Any system is overhead, even useful ones. Maintaining the system is energy that seldom is spent directly on whatever project you're trying to complete. So it needs to be viewed this way.

Let's imagine that your system is your car. To keep things running smoothly, you must maintain it. It needs oil changes, tuneups, and washes. Changing your oil does not get you to your destination faster. But not giving your car a tuneup will eventually cause you to be stranded away from your destination.

But life is not perfect, and we only have so many hours in the day. When we hit our most intense time crunches, that overhead involved in maintaining the system becomes a hindrance. If you need to get to your destination in an hour and it's an hour's drive away, you don't have time to take the car in for a tuneup. The tuneup can wait.

What I did was I kept the focus on the weekly updates, only because they helped me navigate my tasks and help prevent any from falling between the cracks. I shelved the rest of the PCB until I could breathe again.

As I'm writing this, I'm in the recovery phase. I've managed to include all new projects into my Weekly Update. Only about half of those have a Trello board, but any new projects will get one. I updated the boards that already existed. I even enhanced my Weekly Update now that I got to see how it performed under high stress.

I think it's critical that even when we get buried with life and start to feel like we're losing focus, we are prepared. It might seem chaotic, but we have the system. If we properly maintain our system before hitting chaos, it'll provide its value and serve its purpose during that chaos. It might start to break down, but a sound system will hold through until the turmoil dies down, and you can start maintaining it again.

(Written 2019.10.19)

#31 | When Life Happens

Recently my life has been seeing a flurry of projects. My life has been anything but Boring. I wanted to address that in direct correlation with my Boredom is my Goal philosophy.

Before this current explosion of activity, my life was getting pretty Boring. I had three ongoing projects according to my Personal Control Book, but making progress against those goals was not all-consuming. I was spending a significant amount of time every night reading graphic novels. I was staying on top of all household chores, and the house was impeccably clean and tidy. I was going to bed early every night and naturally early every morning.

It was amazing.

And then an opportunity blitz hit. I haven't touched a graphic novel in a long time, and a couple of new ones are piling up waiting for their turn to be consumed. I'm going to bed late, waking by my alarm, and sometimes slogging through my morning routine to get the day rolling. The house feels cluttered and chaotic and frequently doesn't get the much-needed attention it deserves until the weekend.

"But I thought your goal was to be Bored! Why would you take on these projects instead of saying 'NO'!"

That is a direct paraphrased quote.

It might appear that I lost my way, but I don't see it that way. Instead, I see things as life happening. Each opportunity that I said "yes" to somehow fit into my Life Focuses as defined by my PCB. They might have been all different, with different actions required, and different outcomes. But, with the help of my PCB, I could quickly evaluate each opportunity and figure out if they fit or not. If it didn't, I could reject it. And some things I did decline. If it did match my PCB, and that opportunity needed immediate action, I could accept it with confidence.

So I was prepared for the chaos. It was an organized and managed chaos.

It goes beyond that, though. Throughout the entire experience, my focus was always on figuring out how to make things Boring again. I keep my graphic novels in eyesight, teasing me to get back to them. I have held my morning alarm at the same time, to prevent myself from falling too far out of my routine. These actions, among others, have helped to make sure I defined a realistic scope for each project and pushed hard to close the project out as soon as possible. It helped motivate me to reevaluate a plan so that once immediate action was no longer needed, I could shelf it. It kept me sane, knowing that this wasn't my new norm and that every week, my goal was to close out more tasks than open new ones. I knew that as long as I kept my Boredom is my Goal philosophy close to my heart, this insanity was just temporary.

We can't control life, nor can we control what is presented to us: opportunities or otherwise. We can't control other people or the unfolding of events. We can't control time and magically create more. But we can control ourselves and how we react to the world. So when life happens, if you've mentally and philosophically prepared yourself, you can roll with it, embrace it, and thrive with it.

When life happens, go with the flow!

(Written 2019.10.19)

#30 | The Company We Keep

This topic isn't very original, but it's something that I started thinking about recently. It's essential to think about the people surrounding you.

The reason why I've started thinking about this is a trifecta of scenarios.

The first is one of the reasons why I ended up taking a 3-month hiatus from the blog. Some real estate opportunities presented themselves, and it was a chance to put some foundational components into my Financial Independence life goal. The opportunity involved engaging in a part of real estate investing I hadn't done before, so the process was very new and intensive. I can't recall how many times I was talking to someone more experienced would say: "When you did due diligence on XYZ, what did you find out?". And I would scramble to not sound like a complete newbie with a stalling response like "That's a good question, let me check with my wife to see what she's found out." Even though we were scouring the internet for advice, there was still much more to know, and we were consistently a few steps behind.

In our defense, most of our contacts knew we hadn't done a project like this before. We were typically upfront with it on the first introductions. But it was still not the most flattering place to find ourselves time and time again. Sometimes my wife or I would start to get self-conscious, but I would remind us that everyone starts at the beginning. Everyone knows that, and so it was vital for us to always present the most professional and capable versions of ourselves in these situations. Every person we talked to was a future long-term contact. I wanted them to view us as new but reliable up-comers, someone they would want to know for our potential. On the flip side, we wanted to recognize them for their experience and guidance. Within this particular investment and throughout the entire process, we wanted to surround ourselves with competent people, while proving that we were worthy of joining that network. Having that network will be invaluable for future endeavors.

The second scenario is the FI meetups I had mentioned a few posts back. At the time of writing this post, we have only gone to two of their monthly meetups, but I already feel good about the company we can keep there. Everyone is at a different stage in their FI journey. Some just heard about financial independence and are working on converting the management of their finances. Some have already retired early. And then the majority seem like they are like us, somewhere in the middle.

While going to these meetups, I've found a good portion of the conversation does not revolve around finances, investing, or anything directly related to FI. But that does not matter as I don't feel that's the purpose of the meetups. Instead, we can surround ourselves once a month with people who understand this niche mentality. They understand the financial motivation of skipping the fries and drink to save a few bucks. They appreciate finding free or cheap entertainment instead of looking for pay-to-entertain activities. Even when talking about our side hustles, they understand the motivation. I've hinted at some of my other friends about our side hustles, and I get the impression they feel we are crazy. The people at the FI meetups understand the potential in a side hustle. Those are the people I want to surround myself with, people who encourage me to achieve my highest potential instead of feeling crazy for trying to maximize my accomplishments.

And the last scenario is my Personal Control Book "coaching" (if it can be called that just yet). Essentially, helping people to perform their own PCB Setup.

Besides the motivation to continue developing this PCB concept, I'm finding a new group of people worthy of knowing. People who, although they may be at different phases, just like the FI-folks, have a desire to be more focused and productive in their lives. People who want to set goals and accomplish them. People that feel there is a lot to do in life and want to make something worthwhile. This coaching concept is very new, but it's exhilarating to start embarking on this journey. The real estate network is solely an investment group. The FI meetups involve joining an existing community. PCB coaching is a chance for me to help build a community of like-minded individuals. The honor of helping to bring together what I hope will be a fantastic group of people is very humbling.

Although I love meeting new people and I'm friends with individuals from at all different points in their lives and different cultures, ideologies, and mentalities, making sure we keep close the right company is an invaluable action.

(Written 2019.10.19)

#29 | Why 3 Life Focuses?

I wanted to talk today about why I pick three life focuses. I feel this is especially important because when I started this journey, one of my original inspirations had seven focuses.

That inspiration was a Merril Lynch life planner. My wife and I went through this life planner, and although it tries to be great, it's a bit overwhelming. It took us forever to go through all seven categories. Especially because each of the seven categories then wants you to have two goals. That means you end up with 14 life goals. To me, that's just insane. How can you apply focus when there are 14 things on your plate?

My wife and I pushed through the process and started prioritizing these 14 goals. We could only prioritize five goals before we started having arguments between what the next priorities would be. It was ridiculous. From my years of dealing with product managers trying to prioritize feature development, it's obvious anything above a certain threshold is pointless. If it's not something you can start working on immediately, it's priority will change by the time you get to it.

As a couple, if we can only work on a few priorities at once and trying to prioritize everything beyond that top group becomes pointless, why even try to prioritize everything? So the first thing I wanted to do when I was developing my Personal Control Book was to define better these life goals (called Life Focuses within the PCB) and goals (called Beacons within the PCB). During this redefining is when I determined three was the ideal number.

One might ask, why not just have one? Then you could focus entirely on something. This concentrated focus is what I feel a lot of the FIRE community does. The subreddit is bursting with people who put FI as their top and only priority and end up negatively impacting other parts of their lives. There is no life balance.

It makes sense if you think about it. If you become a workaholic, you will never see your family. You will eat unhealthy because it's convenient, and you will never make time for exercise. Eventually, your family life will fall apart, and your health will diminish. If you become an obsessed gym rat, you won't give your career the energy it needs to flourish, and again your home life will become heavily neglected. And if you spend all of your energy building relationships with your family, then unless they are part of your fitness and career, your performance at work will suffer, and you'll never take time to take care of yourself.

Three Life Focuses don't have the downside of either having a single Life Focus or seven Life Focuses. It keeps you well rounded, yet not so well rounded that you can't make progress on anything. It's in the Goldie Locks zone.

And just because some things are not part of my three Life Focuses doesn't mean I neglect them entirely. For example, if my three Life Focuses are family, career, and health. Friendships are not directly part of that trio, but healthy friendships might be necessary to health and so are indirectly included. That's why I don't have the family as part of my Life Focuses within my PCB, because to me, having a strong relationship with everyone in my family is a critical part of health. When I focus on health, typically, things related to building stronger familial relationships is top and center.

By having three Life Focuses leading to three On-The-Horizon Beacons, it lets you focus on what you feel is most critical while ensuring you still become a well-rounded individual.

(Written 2019.06.27)

#28 | Career vs Job

I frequently tell my colleagues that their career is not their job. My intended purpose of voicing this opinion is to bring focus on the bigger picture of their career instead of the smaller front-and-center "distraction" that is their job. Recently I repeated this to someone but with a tweak.

I realized the concept was more profound and pointed out how some people risk their careers for the sake of their job, while others risk their job for the sake of their careers. As soon as I said that phrase, I wanted to delve deeper into that meaning. It felt like a light went off. So here we are.

This talking point stemmed from discussing how drawn out it was to get anything done in our environment. The politics, bureaucracy, stay-in-your-lane mentality, and non-productive anti-pattern roadblocks cause every task to take substantially longer than it should. Minute-long tasks could take days. Day-long tasks could take a month. Every step required making requests from other people, then you wait. You finally really receive a response, but find out your request was wrong. So you must make a new one, and then you wait. You finally receive approval to proceed, but you are required to talk to someone else to execute the task. So you create a new request, but that request is low on their priority list, and then you wait.

This cycle goes on, and then suddenly, you're 20 years into your career but feel like you only have a few years of experience. No matter how much you try to make that wait time more productive, you really can't. If you follow the rules, you're gated waiting. The sad part is, you might not even realize that two decades into your career has only produced two years of real experience because all of your peers have done the same thing. It feels normal. The reality is that everyone's years of experience has been watered down to be almost meaningless.

This situation is where I feel people risk their careers for the sake of their job. They played it safe. They followed the rules. They didn't step on any toes, crossed all their "t"s, and dotted all of their "i"s. They asked before acting and never did anything which would get them, their team, or their project in trouble. They never failed, but they also never really succeeded. Their job stayed happy, but their career stalled.

And then one day their company gets tired of them. That's a given in today's corporate landscape. What happens then? Panic is what happens. Because even though they might have two decades of being a warm body in a field, when they interview at another job, their experience level seems junior in comparison to what it should be. It's hard to find another job who will see value in them at the same level as their old job.

I saw this frequently happen at my first job out of college. It terrified me and even depressed me watching that happen to some of my more "experienced" peers. I see it happening to some of my coworkers now, and I fear for them. Their careers are at risk because they put their job first.

I try to do the opposite and put my career first. Straight out of college, I would freelance and do side projects even though most day jobs discourage extracurricular activities. Even within my day job, I'm respectful of job roles and responsibilities, but I center my focus around getting the project done regardless of whose lane I have to enter. One of my mottos is to let someone do their job first, but if they don't do it, then don't be afraid to step on their toes and get it done.

I've spent a lot of time risking my job to make sure my career was good. And that has given me confidence.

If I ever push boundaries too far, what's the worst that would happen? I would get fired. I've been in the field for a decade and a half, but between my mentality, my constant pushing, and my side projects, I have the equivalent of several decades worth of experience. I'm not worried about finding a replacement job.

But would my job fire me? It's possible; I might eventually cross a line. Sometimes I push too hard, and the anxiety hits me. But I have confidence that line is farther away than I'm willing to go. Plus, I provide value to my company. If I can get a "30-day" task done in a few days, that's invaluable. And Because I promote an influential positive culture among my peers and employees, and because I'm very respectful and compliment those around me that are skilled, I've built a social buffer. My teammates speak well of me. My managers praise me. And my (competent) colleagues support me. There is always a line, and there is still an ending, but I've built the proper offenses and defenses to help ensure that I'm secure.

By putting my career first at the risk of jeopardizing my job, I've created a win/win/win/win situation. My company wins by receiving more value; My coworkers win by having a champion to promote a competitive but collaborative culture. My job wins by creating a list of accomplishments and building a social buffer; My career wins in case my job ever gets tired of me, and I need to scramble to replace it.

It's not enough to say that your career is not your job. It is also essential to understand that those individuals who risk their careers to secure their jobs end up at a disadvantage in the long run, while those who risk their jobs to secure their careers tend to benefit all parties involved in the long term.

(Written 2019.10.05)

#27 | The Perks Of Having Kids

I hit my blog's half-birthday and lost steam. A lot of opportunities popped into my life, taking all of my time. Mix that with being dominated by writer's block. I haven't posted in three months, and I've been debating the future of the site.

Then my wife and I went to a Financial Independence (FI) Meetup, and the other attendees inspired me to continue. As they put it, I had already put six months into exploring this concept, creating content, and developing the site. But what sparked me was a question that someone asked me.

In this particular FI group, having kids is rare. So someone asked my wife and me: "What are the perks of having three kids?"

It's a great question, and my wife answered it well. However, we discussed it more on the way home and realized there were so many more layers to explore. So I decided to revive the blog and address this question.

The answer is multi-faceted, but I can summarize it with one word: mindfulness.

To begin explaining, we will address the aspect of time. When you have kids, especially three kids, every free minute of your life will be sucked up. To be able to get anything done, you have to learn to be very efficient and effective with your time. My wife and I are both ambitious, so we have become calculating where our time goes. When the kids are off at school, we have to maximize our time to work on our day jobs. We're human and still have idle times, but we don't have the freedom to dawdle around frequently.

This time is bookended by dropping the kids off in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon. There are exactly 8 hours between those two bookends. That means we need to pack a full 8 hours of work, including lunch, errands, or other distractions, into precisely 8 hours. This statement might sound obvious, but you would be surprised how many of your peers do 8 hours of work during their 8-hour workday. Although our day jobs frequently bleed into our evenings, we strive to keep it contained within those two bookends.

Then the evenings come. We have about three to four hours of family time. We feel family dinner is important, so most nights, we put a focus on a home-cooked meal and eating together as a family. We tag-team to get this done, but also get all dishes and household cleanup done. Let's not forget about the kids' homework. And then the real joys of just spending some quality relax time with the kids. Almost every night, there is a struggle to push past fatigue from a long day. But because we feel it's essential to have healthy meals and spend time together as a family, we make it happen.

And finally, the kids go to bed, and we get our final chunk of time. We have about two hours before we go to bed. Some nights we put our feet up and watch a show. Most nights, we look at our side projects, investments, or interests and push on those. These two hours are our only "us" time, so we have no choice to use this time as effectively as possible, even if that activity is to cuddle up and watch something together.

Our weekends are only a slight variation of our weekdays. Some weekends we relax and are idle all weekend. But those are very rare. We have to go to the grocery store to feed five, along with doing laundry for five. We want to do activities so that the kids can have an eventful weekend. But we also have things like Meetups, date nights, and other social events. And don't forget about the side projects. The weekend is the perfect time to knock out a chunk of tasks for those.

Especially with the theme of this blog, we want to maximize our time by minimizing our wasteful activities. Looking over our days, pretty much 24/7/365, we are mindful of our time and how we use it.

We can now get to the second layer of the answer. Having kids forces us to live in the NOW. Several of the leading FI voices who have reached early retirement have talked about the downside of obsessing over their FI number. They say they wished they enjoyed life more during the wealth-building years. Hoped that they had taken better of their health or cared a little less about every single dollar saved. But with kids, we don't feel we have that option.

As hypothetical kid-free adults, maybe we would be comfortable with making a decision where we give up five or ten years of life experiences so that we could retire early and have 50+ years of early retirement. But that's not fair to our kids. Those five to ten years might be an instrumental part of their childhoods. When each kid is only at home for approximately 20 years, even though that feels like an incredibly long time, it passes in a heartbeat. What's 50+ years of retirement worth if you lose half of your kids' childhood to FI obsession.

Although we have an FI-mindset combined with our ambitious personalities, we won't sacrifice our kids' childhood or their early life experiences. It can be exhausting, but our kids give us the energy and motivation to do exactly that.

And finally, the last layer. Motivation. After the birth of every kid, my productivity and drive in my career shot up. Once the chaos of having a newborn dies down, the thoughts of providing for the kids and ensuring they have excellent future opportunities shoots up. Not only do I want to be able to provide for them, but I also want to be a good role model for them. So I strive to achieve a career they could be proud of and possibly be influenced into also working hard and reaching their dreams when they get older. But life is much more about career. So we push hard towards living a healthy lifestyle for them to mirror. We push harder in experiencing life so that they can see what's possible. It's hard to be complacent in life when you want to provide the best life for your kids.

In the end, having kids increases the stress, chaos, and sheer amount of overhead in your life. But, besides the obvious of being a bundle of joy and happiness, the mindfulness they give you in just about everything in life is a fantastic perk to having any amount of kids, especially three. You don't have the luxury of letting life pass you by.

(Written 2019.10.05)