Looking ahead: Week 26, 2008

Coming up in the 26th week of 2008 -- 6 portfolios: 2 voluntary (AAS, ISR Staff); 4 personal (Language, Writing, Training, Archiving)

Last week, I learned that there is a practical limit to the number of disparate tasks that can -- or should -- be undertaken in a short time period, i.e., one week. The problem was twofold: (1) it takes extra time to switch gears; (2) many tasks had an amount of overhead time that was not considered when allocating time, so, for example, a task that takes only 1 hour itself might really be 3 hours when the time for setup is included. When I wanted to starting writing Train Cancellation Party again, I first had to recover the files from my previous computer and shift them to my new Mac, which was no small task since the damned old thing doesn't work so well anymore.

Also, much, much more time was invested into maintaining astronautical.org than I intended, due to getting a bit of useful critical feedback that deserved attention. It was a benign equivalent of putting out a fire. It was unmanaged time that got away from me.

Instead of seeing how broad of a portfolio I can maintain concurrently, this week I would rather decrease the number of concurrent threads, running more things in series than in parallel. That was the whole point of considering my day-to-day activities in terms of portfolios: to consider what could be done practically on a daily or weekly basis. It is not practical to finish 12 hours of voluntary or personal work in a given day. If only that barrier stopped me from trying.

Doing less is difficult. Sure it will be more rewarding -- see Seth Godin's "Do Less" pamphlet on changethis.com -- because the few tasks will be done better than the many tasks. If I think quality is more important than quantity, then it's advice that needs to be heeded. But, first, the instantly gratifying low value bits have to be identified and ignored, else they seep back into the day's work.

Goals

On each weekday, no more than four hours of portfolio work -- i.e., in the six voluntary/personal categories -- is allowed. On the weekend, the limit will rise to six. Next week I hope to cut down the weekday hours to three and weekend to five; simplify, simplify. If only Megha was still here and I would cut out even more, but that's a different matter...

Language. Continue the continuous walk of learning 10 vocabulary words every day: 40/20/10 Hindi/Punjabi/Spanish (1 hour per day)

Writing. Keep it simple. Writing in the journal every day is a given ("0" hours per day). M-F: 15-minute "Zinsser sessions" -- from the idea in On Writing Well by William Zinsser that you need only invest 15 minutes per day to be successful (or something of the sort). [Edit, 24 June: I think this '15 minutes' comment comes from On Writing by Stephen King, but I can't find my copy to verify....) Weekend: 1 hour on one day.

Training. My knee feels good now, and I have my badge for the Gilruth Center weight room. M/W/F: weight training (1 hour per day). Tu/Th/Sa/Su: running (1 hour per day).

Archiving. Accelerate the pace of moving posts -- so I can do something else -- from Beauty of Lies to here. 94 posts remain, and some of those are junk, so the real number is more like 80. Move 4 posts per day (1 hour per day). Map photos from Houston-Amarillo-GMNP trip on weekend (1 hour).

The remainder is allocated to my voluntary portfolio: 0.75 hour per day during the week, 4 hours total on the weekend.

American Astronautical Society. M: Contact partners for National Conference reception; request photos from CanSat students (0.75 hour). Tu: Install CrowdSat baseline (0.75 hour). W: National Conference telecon (1 hour); CanSat press release (0.75 hour). Th/F: astronautical.org work (0.75 hour per day). Weekend: astronautical.org work (1.5 hours); Organize Education Committee (1 hour).

ISR Staff. Weekend: Upload photos to gallery (1 hour); organize one roster on wiki (0.5 hour).

OK, we'll see. At the least, this is my first experiment with looking carefully at the week ahead, and then planning. Now: a little less conversation, a little more action.