There has been a lot of toiling, crying, fretting, procrastinating, self-hating, housecleaning, and staring at the wall while playing with her toes along the way, but she has finally completed the journey that has been eleven (11! – counting undergrad) years in the making. Completing it was no easy matter, with her husband up and getting deployed and all.

And therein is a story to tell. I got the notification that I’d be deployed after her first year as a graduate student – right before she started thinking about doing her Master’s thesis (in Sociology). The sadness, fear, and overwhelm of the deployment was a lot to bear, but she was talking to fellow spouses of deployed Soldiers and the sociological spark went off in her. She saw so many common themes and problems – and instead of merely “dealing” with it, she started researching what was going on.

Her question: how are the spouses of Army National Guard Soldiers coping with the stress of deployment? Answering that question became her Master’s thesis, and it was an award winning thesis, quite literally.

But there were still more questions, and she wanted to take her research further. Whereas most sociology graduate students use data from data sets that are 5 – 10 years old for their dissertation, Angela wanted to do something far more ambitious – and far more important. She wanted to see how all of the spouses of deployed (Nebraska) Army National Guard Soldiers were coping with deployment. There was no data on this – there was no precedent.

It’s hard to relay how large of a scope of a project this is – I’ll spare a lot of the details, but this is the type of project that is beyond the reach of research firms or tenured faculty. She began writing grants and coordinating with the Nebraska Military Department to get access, which itself took about 2 years to get nailed down. She received a few grants and was this close to getting a National Science Foundation grant – and by this close, I mean that it came down to a revise and resubmit that was denied by fiat of an NSF grant coordinator who wasn’t knowledgeable about the type of research Angela was doing. Getting a NSF grant is a big deal that sets up those who receive it to be a nationally renowned scholar for the rest of their career; we were disheartened by how it played out, to say the least.

Despite the NSF setback, she toiled on. She downscaled some of what she was doing to match her research budget, continued to coordinate with the Nebraska Military Department, and eventually did what she set out to do: she sent surveys to every spouse of a deployed Army National Guard Soldier in Nebraska.

The project continued to be tough. A spouse complained about privacy and access even though every step was taken to protect the respondents, and this complaint almost shut down the entire project. A few stressful weeks of negotiation ensued, adjustments were made, and it continued.

Because of some errors in the surveys and a few setbacks on getting the data coded on time, Angela didn’t start writing the results of her dissertation until around March of this year. Three and a half months later, she’s now no longer a graduate student – she’s Dr. Angela Wheeler.

A lot of your success in life is determine by who you marry. Boy, did I ever luck out. This is who we both are: we are people who take real problems of real people and try to find ways to solve those problems. It’s an honor to share this journey with her.

We’ll be celebrating as much as we can, given that I’ll be putting the Green Suit on this weekend. But if I’m quiet or smiling – you now know why.

One Ph.D. down; another to go.

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It’s amazing how some of the smallest of tasks can take on a life of their own. Of course, the truth of it is that they don’t take on a life of their own – we are the ones that give them their vitality.

It could be something as simple as paying a bill, even though we have the money to pay. Or it could be responding to an email that make take 3 minutes to do if we’d just make up our mind and do it.

I’ve spoken about these types of things before – I call them frogs based off a quote from Mark Twain:

“If you know you have to swallow a frog, swallow it first thing in the morning. If there are two frogs, swallow the big one first.”

Someone recently commented that she didn’t much care for the violent, destructive nature of the metaphor, and I can see her perspective. So let’s change it up a bit: if you know you have to catch a frog, do it first thing in the morning; if there are two frogs, catch the big one first. The reason to catch it first thing in the morning is so that you avoid increasing the dread-to-work ratio.

The Dread-To-Work Ratio, Explained

Most tasks generally require a fixed minimum amount of work – meaning that doing it later won’t make it any easier. If it was going to take five minutes at first, then odds are, it’s going to take at least five minutes whenever you do it. The “work” part of the equation stays the same.

It’s the “dread” that increases substantially with time. The longer the tasks sits there, the more you think about it, and the amount of time you’ve invested in thinking about and putting off the task somehow gets added to the psychological “size” of the task. The frog gets bigger and wartier, and the warts themselves start growing hairs and warts. It feels that way, at least.

At a certain point, the distinction between directly working on that task and indirectly working on it blurs to the point in which it doesn’t make sense to make the distinction. If you’ve spent all day (or week) avoiding and fretting about it, then you’ve spent time and energy on it that you could have spent on other things. To think about it in terms of the “soft costs” of inaction belies the point that it’s still costly, nonetheless.

A Frog A Day Keeps Your Anchors Aweigh

My prior suggestion to catch the frog first thing in the morning is not quite fine-grained enough, to be honest. Just like time, all frogs are not the same. A frog that requires a creative solution to catch needs to be chased during creative times. When a bunch of little frogs can be caught at the same time, they should be batched and caught together. But be honest with yourself about whether you’re putting off catching your frogs because you have a more effective plan or because you really don’t want to do them.

I often advise my clients to identify their frogs and catch at least one a day (if they have any – which we all do). By doing so, three inter-related things happen: 1) the dread-to-work ratio stays pretty low, 2) they get fewer and smaller frogs, and 3) they’re able to build some pretty serious momentum with their products. These results are a bit counter-intuitive, so I’ll explain what’s going on.

Since they identify the frogs early on, acknowledge them for what they are, and catch them sooner rather than later, the dread-to-work ratio stays as low as possible. Because they start thinking about the nature of their frogs, they see trends and patterns in their workflow; once they see those trends and patterns, they can start working on eliminating the parts of their lives that are generating the frogs in the first place. Lastly, because they’re releasing a lot of negative energy and doing fewer of the things they’d rather not, they can spend that time and energy on the things they actually want to do.

But I should be clear here: there will always be frogs. They may be smaller…they may come up less often…and they may be an entirely new type of frog, but they’ll pop up nonetheless. Spot ‘em, catch ‘em, and move on to the next thing – there’s no need to increase they work by dreading it so much.

What frog is staring you down right now? Is it really that big, or can you take care of it today?

If you’d like more help on catching frogs before they turn into monsters, grab the FREE updates to Productive Flourishing by RSS or by Email. Thanks for reading!

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I got up late, which is always a signal that it’s going to be a rough day. My serious creative time happens from about 6:30am – 11:00, so whenever I get up at 9:30, I’m already behind the curve.

I’ve been practicing spending the first hour or so of my day in quiet reflection while I drink enough coffee to get the neurons firing and ready to go. Initially, it was hard to do because I felt like I needed to capture all of the ideas that had formed while I slept, but after a while, I started enjoying it. After letting my mind settle and deciding which idea to work on for the day, I find it easier to stay focused on that one idea rather than jump from idea to idea.

But when I get up late, that whole “I’ve got to catch up!” thing pops up, and the first thing to go is my morning reflection. So yesterday I was already off to the races.

Let’s start the timer at 9:30am.

Instead of jumping right into writing, I checked email, quite unintentionally. I was thinking about a call I needed to make today (Friday), and I think I was checking to see if I had more details in my Inbox. Little did I know that my Inbox contained a goodie that would keep me running around on the Internet for a few hours.

I emailed a friend of mine about some differences between Backpack and Basecamp, and how I prefer one over the other for different reasons, wherein I wrote that the calendar and reminders are the critical feature of Backpack that keep me using the service. And that stuck with me: I’m paying $12 a month for shared calendars and reminders!

Knowing that Google has their own free Google Calendar service, and hearing people rave about it, I decided to give it another shot. Upon checking it out, I saw that they’d finally fixed the one thing I don’t like about Backpack’s calendars – Google Calendar actually gave a graphical representation of the day. Eureka!

So I spent about 20 minutes playing around with Google Calendar to get to a position in which I felt comfortable moving on and giving it a shot. Then I remembered the iGoogle page, in which you can pull all your different Google apps into one spot. If I can get all my information in one spot for free, then I wouldn’t have to pay $12 a month to 37Signals – the cheap ass in me was stoked!

10:00

The money thing has come back up recently for me as I’m looking to trim business and personal overheads. After the insanity that was May and June, we took a look at how much money slid out the door, and it has been our intention to be more present about that, especially since the next few months will be both tight and chaotic. June 30th was also the end of the quarter, and I do a pretty thorough money review at the end of each quarter.

I started configuring my iGoogle page to include my new Google Calendar, Gmail, our investments, RSS feeds, and everything into one place. After about an hour of tinkering around with my iGoogle page, I ran into a “problem” – I use two active gmail accounts. One is more or less personal, and the other is more or less business. (Yes, I know I can send email from one Gmail account, but I don’t like the way it routes the domain.)

11:00

But before I talk about that problem, it’s interesting to see why it took me an hour to get to it. My iGoogle page contained a lot of dynamic information that kept changing. I’d get all of my blocks configured only to have some email show up in the meantime. Since the email had my attention, I’d process it. Then I noticed that my investment portfolio was wrong, so I went to fix that, which took me to another full-page screen. By the time I had that figured out, more email came in, so I processed that.

And then while looking at what I could add, I noticed that there were celebrity iGoogle pages that I could check out. Ooh, neat! I wonder what Al Gore and Seth Godin have on their page? There went another 10 or 15 minutes.

By the time I got back around to my iGoogle page, more email had come in, and I noticed that the stock market was not particularly good yesterday. Between processing email, adding modules, tinkering with the calendar, checking investments, figuring out how to get back to my iGoogle page, and fidgeting with tasks, it started to feel like an endless cycle of data management and metawork.

Back to the problem: my business email account was the email account that I wanted to remain visible, but my iGoogle page was only looking at personal information. Was there a way I could add my other Gmail account to my iGoogle page? Did I need to set all that stuff up on my other account so that I could have it all in the right place? There went another 20-25 minutes of fiddling, researching, and such. In the meantime, I was processing email from both accounts, as I was bouncing between my business and personal accounts.

11:30

I finally gave up on adding my business email account to my iGoogle page and resolved just to check that separately. I settled into it.

I went from wasting my own time to figuring out how to waste Angela’s time, too. I knew that for me to stick to a new calendar option, Angela had to, as well. So I went back to Google Calendar and tried to look at it from her perspective. I dug through all the settings to make sure it could match what we had going in Backpack. I set up my phone and did a test reminder to see how it looked. I looked at the RSS functions to see how it would show that I’ve added something. Check, check, check.

11:50

Angela walked into the office to shred some paper, and I excitedly told her about Google Calendar and showed her my iGoogle page. I showed her the ins and outs of Google Calendar in a rough 3 minute tour. “Give it a try for a week and we’ll talk about it,” she said reservedly. Because I was still in Instant! mode, I didn’t notice the tone or the look on her face.

I did some final adjustments, did some actual correspondence and worthwhile Social Media stuff, and then unplugged around 12:30 and got ready to meet one of our friends for a late-ish lunch.

While driving the motorcycle to lunch, I started thinking about the morning. What in the hell was I doing? The last time I tried to find a better solution than Backpack, I wasted several hours before deciding to stick with Backpack. And it wasn’t because of the cost of switching – it was because I really didn’t need the additional features of different calendaring solutions. They encouraged me to do more fiddling, and since getting away from segmenting time, I’ve actually become more consistently productive. You’d think I would have read what I wrote about it last time, but no…

And why did I want all of my data in the same place when I’ve learned that I’m better off segmenting my information streams? When I cut off those streams, I can focus on the task at hand, instead of shuffling between tasks, projects, and information management. It’s especially bad when the information changes dynamically, as the change is what grabs my attention, and once it’s there, it’s there. I have to actively choose to ignore the new information or process it so that I’m not actively ignoring it, but either way, there’s some cognitive load there that I could have avoided.

There is a difference between something being neat and it being valuable. Knowing what Seth Godin and Al Gore have on their page is a neat idea – but it’s not valuable. What can I do with that information? How does it help me push along the things I need to push along?

I wasted three hours coming up with solutions to problems I really didn’t have. Three hours, when I look at what my creative time is worth, converts to at least $300. Furthermore, it’s not like it was just thirty minutes – there are a lot of things I could have completed in that three hours: a pillar post; a guest post; a few sections of the thing I’m working on; a new design; one of the books I’m most of the way through; that FAQ about my coaching service that I’ve been meaning to write. Any single one of those things would have been meaningful and effective. I spent $300 to save $144 – not the most brilliant use of my resources, to be sure.

The irony about all of this is that I know better – this is some of the stuff that I help clients with. Had I taken five minutes to think about what I was doing, I would have stopped and moved on to something more valuable. The motorcycle ride gave me that serendipitous moment to reflect on the morning, and after lunch I was able to regain some perspective and do some things that really mattered. The morning was lost, but that didn’t mean that the afternoon needed to follow suit.

I’m writing this post to pull some value from my folly and share it with you. I’m sure I’m not alone in being pulled in by the shiny baubles of technology, and I hope reading my story helps give some perspective on your story. The reason this is Episode 1 is because there will be other days like this, and I’d like to share them with you when they come up, so if you see “One of Those Days” in the title, it’s a story about one of those days – I invite you to laugh and learn with me.

If you’d like to hear more stories and lessons learned from the field, get FREE updates by RSS or by Email. Thanks for reading!

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Release Notes:

• I made some minor changes to the Freelancer Workweek. It’s just a few words, but the old phrases and words bugged me a little.
• I’m still a bit stuck with the planners. They all need some TLC, but I’ve got two problems: 1) I only use them when I have to, and I’ve gotten better at not needing to structure my day, and 2) I’m still really insecure about my graphic design skills.
• I’ll probably start a newsletter, forum, or something to aggregate discussions around these planners soon, and I hope you’ll join it (if you’re interested). The basic idea is to have a place where we can talk about how you’re using the aids, what needs to be improved, and where we’d like to take them. I’m aware that there’s only a small percent of you that use and care about the planners, but I’d like to have a place to hang out and keep the discussion going about them – for what it’s worth, a lot of stuff related to productivity and creativity tends to come up, as the aids are a way of distilling theory into practice.

Before I stop yapping, I want to encourage you to make the most of your summer – remember that family, friends, and summertime laziness are part of what allows you to keep doing what you do. Don’t view them as a distraction from work, when in reality they are a part of your work.

Productivity Heatmap:

Basic idea: We are more productive at some times rather than others.
Use when: You’re trying to figure out when you’re the most productive.
For more information: How Heatmapping Your Productivity Can Make You More Productive

Download: Blank Daily Productivity Heatmap (8848)

The Productivity Planner Series:

Basic Idea: Once you know when you work best, why not plan your weeks and days around that information? Do more work in less time by leveraging your natural rhythms.
Use when: You’re planning your day or week.
For more information: Read the Productivity Planners User Guide (2103)

Downloads:
Daily Productivity Planner (July 2009) (279)
Weekly Productivity Planner (July 2009) (240)

The Productivity Jumpstarter

Basic Idea: Sometimes we’re running around being busy but aren’t really being productive. This aid helps you stop running in circles and start making meaningful progress on your goals.
Use when: You have no idea what you should be doing and are tired of running in circles.

Download:Productivity Jumpstarter (v.2) (3305)

The Blog Post Planner and Calendar

Basic Idea: Brainstorming and planning your posts ahead of time may help you have a more streamlined, consistent, and insightful blog. Your mileage may vary, but it’s worth a shot!
Use when: You want to improve your blogging posts and habits.
For more information: The Blog Post Planner and Calendar – skip down to “How to Use These Planners” if you don’t need to be sold on why to use them.

Downloads:
Blog Post Planner (July 2009) (131)
Blog Post Calendar (July 2009) (94)
Blog Post Planner-Calendar Set (July 2009) (120)

The Freelancer Workweek

Basic Idea: Some of us work better to task than to time, and we need a planner that addresses how we work rather than making us fit how we work into it. This is a great one for freelancers and entrepreneurs.
Use when: You’re tired of time-based planners and want to get clarity on what needs to be done.
For more information: The Freelancer Workweek – skip down to “How to Use This Planner” if you don’t care about the design methodology.

Download: Freelancer Workweek (Draft) – July 2009 (169)

p.s. I sincerely hope that these aids help you. If they do, please consider leaving a tip using the button below – any and all contributions are greatly appreciated. Thanks for sharing some of your value with me.

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I think I’ll always remember the look in his eyes and the tremble in his voice as he asked me that question that rainy evening. I couldn’t blame him for feeling that way – I remembered my first time commanding a convoy along a route I didn’t know. The feeling of complete overwhelm and fear that you’ll take a wrong turn and be out in the middle of nowhere, beyond the help of the better armed and armored route security forces. Getting caught in an ambush in a tractor-trailer convoy is like fighting off a bear with a toothpick.

And this was precisely the reason I had decided to come with him to “ride in the backseat” during his first convoy through the combat zone. His senior sergeants kept saying he wasn’t ready, and their hesitation was feeding his insecurities. He kept living under their shadow, and you can’t become your own leader in that situation. Leadership is all about figuring out who you are and getting people to respond to that person, not someone else you’re trying to emulate.

Maybe they were right about him not being ready, but at their pace, he would never be ready. They were burnt out and needed a break from running these convoys, and SSG Noonz was their relief.

“Maybe we could, Tom – but we’re not going to. We can’t hole up here, and there’s no guarantee that we won’t have to run the same route tomorrow. Let’s go over the route again.” Calling him by his first name softened the reply – he knew that I was right, and he was somewhat relieved that I had said it, even though none of us wanted to do it. I now know that he was relieved because he didn’t have to make the decision.

We covered the route again, did some rehearsals, and checked loads one more time. We were leaving the gate in an hour.

*****

“Hey guys, check it out. That sign points to Abu Ghraib. I wonder how far it is from here.”

We were still dealing with how we felt about Abu Ghraib. We all knew that it was a complete sham – there’s no way that those troops could have done all that without other people knowing. If their leaders didn’t know, they should all be relieved for dereliction of duty.

Sure, my troops did things I didn’t know about. But not in areas that were under my watch.

Luckily, the general fear that everyone was feeling kept the radio traffic to a minimum.

*****

“Uh…Blackshirt31 we may have a problem…we can’t find Burnett’s weapon…”

Shit, shit, shit! I grabbed the radio from SSG Noonz and started yelling “BREAK, BREAK, BREAK! STOP NOW!,” but Garner was keeping his finger on the radio, so I couldn’t get through. Damn, he talks so slow. Shut the fuck up! We have to stop!

“He was getting tired…so we decided to switch out on the road…he thinks he leaned his rifle against the door…and when I got in and started checking for his weapon, I couldn’t find it.” Garner continued in that slow way that only Midwestern farmboys can.

It wasn’t that uncommon for troops to switch out drivers while driving. The procedure was simple enough: the passenger would put his foot on the accelerator and keep the wheel steady, and when the driver was ready, he’d jump out the door while hanging on the lift bar on the outside of the truck, walk around the catwalk on the back of the tractor, open the door on the other side, and jump back in. It was easy enough – but unsafe, as hell. Troops only pulled this off when they really didn’t want to stop, like when they were on a road that scared the shit out of them.

“BREAK, BREAK, BREAK. STOP THE CONVOY NOW!” Garner had finally let go of the transmit button, so I was able to get through. The lead guntruck acknowledged and started slowing down.

“Can’t we just report it and keep going?…I don’t think we’re going to find it…this happened about a couple of minutes ago.” It was clear that Garner didn’t get it.

Losing a rifle is a big deal. Whenever a weapon is lost, that information makes it up to the Secretary of Defense. It doesn’t matter why it was lost or how it was lost – it gets forwarded, and that’s somebody’s ass. You can’t just report it and drive on.

“Garner, it’s best if you just stop talking until someone asks you a question.” Sergeant Andrews, one of our most senior junior sergeants, jumped in to give the convoy commander some relief. He was always good about that.

At this point, everyone knew that I was in charge of the convoy, not SSG Noonz. This relieved almost everyone, not the least SSG Noonz. We didn’t have time for hesitation at this juncture. I started analyzing the situation.

We always ran our convoys in the wee hours of the morning, because if you’re up and messing with the roads at 2am in the morning, you’re probably up to no good. The Iraqis understood this, too, and many of them were asleep anyway; luckily, they haven’t embraced the 24-hour lifestyle that Americans have. And the last thing you wanted to do is get caught in a mid-day traffic jam with a convoy that’s spread out over a mile. Soldiers end up dead and missing that way.

But this night was particularly dark. The clouds were still heavy from the rain, so no moonlight was making it through. We were out in the middle of nowhere – no street or highway lights, no city glow – just dark trucks on dark pavement on a dark night.

Except that it wasn’t pitch black. That would have been more comforting. There had been a car following us in the distance on a parallel highway. It was far enough that we could clearly see it, meaning that it could see us, too. And it had matched our speed for the last hour. Everyone knew what that meant.

It meant that we were being paced and targeted – the car was relaying our convoy’s speed, size, and destination to someone else. Sometimes this was just because they were collecting intelligence on us, and sometimes it meant they were setting up an ambush for us. They knew where we were going and how long it would take to get there, and they also knew that security was light on this road tonight.

And now we were stopping! There’s a deep fear and dread that comes over every transporter when you start talking about stopping the convoy. We were in the fastest vehicles in the Army’s fleet – ironic that it’s a tractor-trailer – but it was still the least maneuverable. Take the average semitrailer you see on the highway and paint it green. That was, quite literally, what we were driving.

It would be bad enough if it were just one 60-foot, 20 ton vehicle. But it’s loaded with crap. These trucks can carry 34-tons of cargo on their trailers. So you’re talking about a 60-foot, 50-ton monstrosity that you’re trying to manage tactically.

Still worse is when you have 20 of these things that you’re trying to keep together. When we kept our intervals, our convoy stretched out over 2 kilometers. That’s a lot of real estate to defend, but at least if you were moving, it was hard to hit. We simply outdistanced our enemy’s weapons if they set them up.

But when you’re at a dead stop, you’re a sitting duck. If you do get your ass handed to you, you can’t really run, since it takes 10-15 minutes to get all the vehicles going again when they’re organized. In the chaos of a firefight…forget about it. You own a peace of land, and you’ve got to fight for it.

And what do you have? A bunch of truckers that, historically, were never given the priority in training and allocation to become warfighters. Up until 2004, tactical training was a low priority for transporters because, doctrinally, we weren’t supposed to be on the frontlines. But there are no frontlines anymore.

And given that this war is being fought on the cheap, there aren’t enough guntrucks to go around. We’re having to defend this convoy with two guntrucks – Humvees with a turret-mounted machine gun – and one Humvee that’s dual-hatting as a guntruck and a command/control vehicle, meaning your convoy commander has to be in the fight to control the fight. Note: you can’t control the fight and be in it at the same time, just as you can’t be in the trenches of your workflow and have some perspective on it.

The last bad thing about stopping is that the foreign national (FN) truckers that we had with us were chaotic as hell. Again, because this war was on the cheap, the only way we could get enough supplies where they needed to go was by augmenting our logistical capabilities with those of civilians. Because it costs too much to hire Westerners – you know, because it was dangerous and you had to pay accordingly – the civilian contractors hired people from the developing world. The problem was that they often had no idea what they were doing and didn’t speak English.

I’ve met few braver men than these FN truckers. They had no idea where they were going, had little to no training, and were isolated, scared, and tired. Our frustration at having to deal with them frequently boiled over to us treating them more like cattle than human beings. (There’s a lot of regret and sadness here for me and it’s sometimes hard to deal with; overall, I did a great job of humanizing our FN compatriots in my treatment of them and the way I taught my troops to treat them, but there were times in which I was viciously forceful, mean, dismissive, unsympathetic, and/or condescending when I could have been otherwise if I had maintained my composure.)

But when we stopped, there was no telling what they’d do. Some would run and jump in ditches. Others would stay in their trucks. Others would run into the surrounding fields to relieve themselves. Others would find their friends and start talking. None of this sat well for a tactical commander, because they were your responsibility, yet you couldn’t control them.

The dark. The fear of this new route that none of us had been down. The car in the distance. Being underarmed. What will our FNs do? Will we be ambushed?

It then occurred to me. Burnett wasn’t just carrying a normal M16; he was carrying a M16/M203 – a M16 with a grenade launcher attachment. Hopefully he hadn’t loaded it. There wasn’t really an option of leaving it in the first place, but now we had to find it.

Let’s see. We were moving at 55-60 miles per hour. It had been three minutes or so. I knew the weapon would be pretty far back, but the part of my brain that could realize it would be at least three miles back had shut down. My immediate concern was getting the convoy stopped and in a defensible position.

The convoy had finally formed up in the best position that it could. This was a skinny two lane road bordered by sand. We couldn’t turn around, and doing so would have made mattered worse. It would’ve taken too long, even if a truck didn’t jacknife or get stuck, and what would be the point? It’s not like it would make finding this weapon any easier. We had to find the weapon quickly and get the convoy moving again.

It was clear: one of our Humvees had to go look for this weapon. I quickly decided that it couldn’t be one of our dedicated guntrucks, since they’d need to defend the convoy in case we were ambushed. Which meant that my vehicle and crew would be the ones to go searching for this weapon.

We took off, driving at a snail’s pace and scanning the road with our spotlight. An eternity passed as I thought about our lone Humvee separated from the convoy, announcing its presence in the dark desert with the spotlight. I imagined how quickly we’d be torn to pieces if that car had managed to coordinate an ambush.

We kept radio contact with the convoy and had gotten so far out that we couldn’t see them any more. They had followed my instructions and shut down every light from every device they had. If you didn’t know they were there, you would run up on them before you realized it. This was intentional: if they were going to be immobile, they’d at least have the element of tactical surprise in their favor on anybody who tried to assault in a vehicle.

After yet another eternity, we hadn’t found the weapon. We’d been driving so slowly and time was amplified so much that we had no idea how far we’d gone. We couldn’t see the convoy. The static in our chatter indicated that we were starting to get out of range of radio communication. We were alone in the darkness, doubting we’d find the weapon yet unable to turn around yet.

Finally, the driver thought he saw something. Normally, he couldn’t see shit, but apparently the adrenaline had turned him into Superman. There, on his side of the road, lay the weapon. It had to be on the side of the road, didn’t it?

A common insurgent tactic was to place bombs along the side of the road in stuff that you either wouldn’t suspect or in stuff that would draw your attention. If they did it right, you couldn’t see the detonator wire buried in the sand next to the object. When you got close enough to be in the blast range, they’d detonate the bomb, hopefully catching you in the blast.

I told the driver to stop and back up. He instinctively knew why – I wanted him to get out of the blast range of any bomb or grenade that might be there.

Where was that damn car now? When was the last time we’d seen it? Dammit!

Someone would have to get out of the Humvee – and if this were an ambush, that person would surely die first.

The Humvee stopped. Without saying a word or looking at anyone, I got out of the vehicle and started approaching the weapon. I didn’t have to tell everyone else to get ready to fight and cover me – they were already ready to fight and cover someone. What they weren’t prepared for, though, was that person to be me. I think everyone expected that one of the junior soldiers would have to do it.

I hadn’t yet told my troops that this would be the last convoy that I would go on for the rest of the tour. I had found out a few days earlier that I was being reassigned to a staff position at the battalion and I was still processing it – only a few people knew, and none of them were on this convoy. The double entendre of this being my last convoy was not lost upon me during the forever that it took me to cover 20 meters.

As I approached the weapon, some relief washed over me. There was no wire running from the weapon. I could see that the grenade tube was disengaged – there was no live round sitting in there. I wasn’t going to be blown up, at least.

I grabbed the weapon and ran like hell back to the Humvee. Everyone looked at me, relieved – and the driver managed to turn the vehicle around before I was even in it. Everyone was still quiet; we weren’t out of the woods yet.

I held the weapon and looked at it for a while. I was still furious about it all, and the adrenaline was pumping through my veins. As stupid as those two troops had been…they put as all in jeopardy and could have gotten us killed…

But everything thus far was okay. Despite my anger and fear, I resolved not to blow up and take it out on those two. They didn’t mean to, and they were tired, scared, and by now didn’t need to be lectured about the gravity of the situation.

We approached the back of the convoy and I got out. Garner looked as if he were expected to be hit, yelled at, or insulted. He flinched as I quickly handed him his weapon.

“Keep your hands on your fucking weapon.” I noticed how much my hands were trembling as I handed him his weapon, and I honestly don’t know whether it was out of fear of anger.

“Y-y-ess, s-s-s-ir.” He was still waiting for more as I quickly turned around and moved smartly to my vehicle. My anger at them quickly turned to anger at myself – I wish I hadn’t cursed at him.

Once back in the vehicle, I reached for the radio. “Mount up…let’s get the hell out of here, like, now.”

It’s hard to relay the tone of victory I heard in the voices that acknowledged the order. We were still alive and we were moving.

“SSG Noonz, you’re in charge now.” He smiled. “Yes, sir.”

I don’t remember what happened after that. I’m pretty sure it was a routine trip or else I’d have another story.

Angela has always hated this story, and, before today, she’s never really heard all of the information since I’ve never taken the time to tell it in its full context. She still can’t decide whether she wants to hit me, hug me, be mad at me, call me an idiot, be proud of me, or what, but that’s to be expected, I guess. Life is complex – why should the complexity be reduced to one emotion?

This all came up because I’ve been struggling with writing some media info for a radio show I’ve been invited to do. I’ve never written a bio for a general audience (as opposed to an academic, online, or military audience), so I’ve been struggling with what to include and what to exclude.

What I’ve been trying to do is come up with a more streamlined bio that doesn’t discuss my military background so that people can understand who I am a bit more. A lot of people I’ve met have a hard time reconciling what they see as three separate aspects of who I am – the philosopher, the entrepreneur, and the officer.

Yet stories like these illustrate how we become, or manifest, who we are. We are complex creatures with complex histories- why should the complexity be reduced when the complexity is the part we care about?

I wrote a lot more about why I decided to post this today, but this post is already long enough as it is. Perhaps I’ll post the rest later if it continues to harass me. I hope you enjoyed the story and that it stands okay on its own – I don’t normally post stories without their being some point or moral to them, so this is new for me.

If this post turned a light on, maybe these will, too:

1. History, Luck, and Intention Our lives
2. Check out my interview on lost chances, feminism, and ethical dillemmas Kelly from

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More than ever, there’s a clear relationship between how new something is and how much it costs to discover that news.

But what I began to think about is not the High Cost of Now, but instead the High Cost of Information. They’re very similar, but the salient feature of the problem that he was looking at was the time-sensitivity of information, whereas the problem I’m looking at is the general tendency for us to jump headlong into collecting and categorizing information without thinking about why we’re doing it.

I’ll explain by an example: There’s a turtle in a pond somewhere in Southeast Asia.

I could spend a lot of time giving details on the turtle, where it’s located, why it’s in the pond, and so on, and if you’re wondering about all those details, your eye is on the wrong ball.

The turtle, or anything about the content of that statement, really isn’t the important bit. It’s just a piece of information that I’ve added to all of the other bits of information you’re lugging around. That piece of information is worthless on its own; information without a context carries no value whatsoever. The only reason that statement becomes valuable is if it changes your behavior or decisions somehow. Adding more details to that statement doesn’t necessarily make it more valuable, either.

Obviously, the real point isn’t about that statement or turtles. It’s about the amount of time we invest in gathering information that’s not worth the cost we spend gathering it. A few actual examples:

• I’ve heard people complain about the fact that iTunes only allows you to rate songs in whole star increments. What if a song is three and a half stars rather than either three or four? What if it’s between three and a half and four?
• There’s a convention in many planner designs (including my own) in which the smallest increment of time that they’ll give room for is 15 minutes. This frustrates some people, and I’ve been asked on multiple occasions “What if I only spend 5 minutes on a task and want to track that?”
• One of the many reasons people use digital task/time management systems is that it allows them to see what they did six months ago fairly easily, whereas paper systems would require you to look in an archived notebook to do the same task. That’s just inefficient.
• People like the idea of applications/programs that show them where they’re spending their time. But this information rarely makes people change their behaviors to become more effective. Despite the fact that it’s not making an effective difference, people continue to track their time well after the placebo period.

I wrote this post Friday and let it percolate because it wasn’t ready yet. In the meantime, I stumbled across this post on SvN, and it illustrates what I’m talking about rather clearly:

In our review yesterday we discovered that [we] were tracking everything in detail, but not really learning anything. Why? We were tracking for the sake of tracking, not tracking for the sake of learning. We weren’t really sure why we were tracking what we were — but we kept on doing it because, well, momentum is a powerful force. It became an exercise in seeing how organized we could get in spite of what we actually needed.

Our extensive use of categories and tags and custom fields and pulldowns could give us a whole lot of report-friendly information, but it didn’t give us any useful information. Information without insight is junk. That’s what we had. Plenty of it.

Here we have the nice, prolific folks at 37Signals who fell into the Research Trap that catches many of us: collecting information for the sake of information instead of thinking about what we’ll do with the information we’re collecting. What’s not being accounted for is the amount of time, energy, and resources invested into making sure that we have precise, retrievable information. Precision and archival come at a cost – and this is where Seth’s question can be raised all over again: are the benefits of precision and archival worth their costs?

Adding tags and metadata, then sorting, categorizing, and layering those tags and metadata, is another clear example of this tendency at play. What’s great about tags is that they allow us to categorize our information in an ad hoc way, but that ad hoc-ness sometimes comes at a high cost when we recognize that we’ve been labeling the same types of information in different ways. And there we are, trying to remember what tags we used and dealing with the cognitive dissonance of information that’s sorted differently. Instead of thinking about what relevance the turtle in the pond has for us, we’re thinking about what kind of turtle it is.

In an earlier post, I wrote about why GTD contexts are not worth the time for me. Instead of helping me structure my workflow, I found that context served to be an additional piece of information for me to manage, and managing that information wasn’t value-added. So, rather than continuing to monkey with the system, I dropped them for a more lean framework. [This framework is discussed in the product I'm working on.] But here again, we see the High Cost of Information cloaked within a rationalization about what an efficient system looks like. I’m not saying that contexts are not worth the time for everybody, but really look at what you’re getting out of them.

The last trend I’ll discuss is our tendency to over-research information when we should instead be creating from and/or understanding the information we already have. As I mentioned a while ago, this tendency to research is often a prop we put in the way of doing the creative stuff we need to be doing. But the basic rationalization for this tendency is the idea that more information is better than less information.

And that idea is wrong. More information is not inherently better. More information will not necessarily help you make decisions or understand things any better than less information. Moreover, more information can create more work for either no gain or substantially diminished returns.

The truth is that there will always be more information to gather, and the only time you’ll have a complete informational picture is when it’s too late. Yet we still spend a lot of our time collecting, organizing, archiving, and rereading information that won’t actually change our behavior or help make decisions.

How does knowing you spent seven minutes on a task from 10:00 to 10:07 change your behavior or help make decisions better than knowing that you did two specific tasks between 10:00 and 10:15?

Is it really worth taking the time to rate a song in half star increments when the cost of storing music data is cheaper than the soft costs of you spending the time to rate and sort songs by halves?

Is it really worth the amount of fiddling that digital task/time management systems tend to foster just so you can know what you did six months ago – especially when most of the time, we care about this only when dealing with others, in which case, the information is probably in your sent email archive anyway?

I’m not saying that there aren’t times and places when more information is really valuable, and I’m also not saying that you should just keep winging it through ignorance. Far from it.

But here’s the bottom line: if you can’t ask yourself the basic questions that you’re hoping the information will answer, you probably shouldn’t be collecting information – you should be asking yourself what questions you need answered. If those questions are worth the high cost of information, then you’re golden; otherwise, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

Leave the turtle sitting in the pond in Southeast Asia – you’ve got more worthwhile things to be thinking about and doing.

Tired of the wheel-spinning and busyness and ready to get down to meaningful action? Subscibe (IT’S FREE!) by RSS or by Email to get more tips, thoughts, and strategies to help you get your creative groove on. Thanks for reading!

If this post turned a light on, maybe these will, too:

1. Is It Worth Doing? Think abou
2. Create, Connect, and Consume It’
3. When A Cobbler Wears His Shoes… Last week

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Which of the pictures below is mine?

If you picked the last one,  you are correct; what gave it away? Although, with the size of my melon, I wouldn’t be surprised if the picture of Mr. Potato Head threw you off.

Marissa is not alone in that I remind her of someone else – in fact, this happens to me all the time. Depending on the time of year, how long my hair is, and whether or not I’ve been working out, people have commented about how I remind them of someone else. Normally I remind them of one of the celebrities pictured above, but that’s not always the case. I think it has to do a lot with my ambiguous facial features and the particular shade of brown that I am.

In case you’re wondering but don’t want to ask (another common pattern), I am, indeed, multiracial. My father is African American with a strong splash of Native American, and my mother is Irish American with a strong splash of Native American. I say “strong splash” because specifying heredity by fractions is a mistaken view of genealogy. I’ve been called worse than a mongrel. :p

Have a great weekend!

In order of appearance (left to right):

1. Cory Bell from 3rd Watch – Photo Credit
2. Tiger Woods – Photo Credit
3. Dwayne Johnson (aka “The Rock”) – Photo Credit
4. Shemar Moore from Criminal Minds – Photo Credit
5. Mr. Potato Head – Photo Credit
6. Michael Yo – Photo Credit
7. Charlie Gilkey

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I’ve been wanting to do one of these for a long time, but they’ve never been good enough. The lighting was wrong. The sound was bad. I said “Um” too much or wouldn’t look at the camera.

Today, I’m just doing it and putting it out there. I have to start somewhere.

The video is just shy of 10 minutes and safe for work. If you’d like to see more of these, please let me know.

If this post turned a light on, maybe these will, too:

1. Why Are You Trying to Save Time? A lot of p
2. A Weekend Unplugged When was t

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After I wrote Multithreading and The Complexity of Modern Experience a few weeks ago, I started thinking about the different sources of experiential input in my life and how those inputs chopped up my time in weird ways. It was also about this time that I was getting frustrated with myself for not knowing what to do with my time, so both thoughts converged onto one single thread: it was time for me to unplug for a weekend.

Shortly after this thread dawned on me, I found myself in my office when I had started out going towards my bedroom – few things make you more aware of your habits than recognizing you did something counter to what you were thinking without being aware that you were doing it.

I immediately started the process of unplugging when I woke up from my distracted stupor in my office. It went about like this:

1. Is there anything on my calendar that requires my attention this weekend?

Nope. Just about like every other weekend.

2. Are there any messages in my Inbox that require my attention this weekend?

This one was more difficult, as I had stuff sitting there that needed action, but on second analysis, it could wait. Responding to those messages at 4:30pm on Friday only encourages other people to be checking email on the weekend, anyway; they can wait, too.

3. Do any of my projects require work this weekend?

This was the hardest for me to get real about. Almost everything I do is on my computer. What if I got creative while I was unplugged?

Excuses. If I felt like writing, I could write longhand, so I found my notebook and got it staged. If a design hit me, I could draft it in my design pad, so I got that staged. What if I wanted to record something? Seriously, when was the last time I recorded a video, podcast, or son? I could make do without it.

I had a technique for capturing any way I might want to express myself – I just had to use them. I didn’t need technology to be creative, and many of my preceding explorations had shown me just how much technology got in the way of my creativity.

After running through that list, writing a few things down, and really making it clear to myself that I’d be okay, I shut down everything. I turned my phone off. My iMac and MacBook were both shutdown, and I hid the MacBook in the closet in the office. My unplugged weekend started then and there!

Or so I thought. It took about two or three hours for me to detox. It’s not like I was twitching or anything, but I was getting my mind wrapped around what the weekend would look like. And this time, I wasn’t running away from my home to unplug. Going camping is easy, since you don’t have the option to use your stuff. But what about when you’re sitting at home? That’s where the battle would be fought this weekend.

Friday night went pretty quickly since I was tired anyway.

And then Saturday came…

I woke up still with the intention to have an unplugged weekend. The morning’s dawn revealed exactly what that meant.

Our clocks were electric. Our lights were electric. My coffee pot was electric. Fans, air conditioners, and basically our entire modern lives are built upon being plugged in in one way or the other.

Clearly, I had to make some compromises here. Lights and appliances were okay. Everything else was out.

What bothered me the most, honestly, were the clocks. As I figured out what I was going to do, I would frequently look at the clock on the DVR since it was right in my line of sight. 7:30. 7:36. 7:44. 7:52. 8:00. Every six to eight minutes, I noticed what time it was. Annoying!

After a couple hours of sitting in a somewhat meditative/reflective state, I determined that the damn clock had to go. I put masking tape over the time so I couldn’t see it. Whether it was the tape or just me adjusting to things, the annoyance with being aware of time stopped.

In those hours, I had also managed to wear myself out mentally. Without having a way to focus my thoughts – I’d resolved to not “work” – all my mental energy went inward. I wasn’t going to make the day at the rate I was burning.

So I started reading. Half a book later, it was lunch time.

Now, Seriously, What Am I Going to Do For the Rest of The Day?

One of the habits I’ve been wanting to change is my reliance on video games as a way to spend my time when I’m not working. Let me express this more clearly: video games became a way for me to stop working, otherwise I’d continue to try to do stuff when I had a little energy, even though I clearly knew I needed to stop. Also for context: I watch maybe an hour or so of TV a week.

Last week, I wrote about time ownership, but why it was so important was because I had vast stretches of the day to claim. As I’ve said repeatedly, time is not the limiting factor on what you can do – creative energy is. That said, it’s a lot easier increase the amount of unallocated time you have available, but very, very difficult to increase the amount of creative energy (or creative time) you have available. For what it’s worth, most research points to 6-8 hours as the maximum amount of time per day that people can remain in creative peaks before mental fatigue sets in.

I sleep six or so hours a day, on average. That leaves eighteen hours unallocated. At most, eight hours of the day is spent doing creative stuff. Four hours or so are for chores and maintenance. That leaves me six hours of “leisure” time.

In the past, I didn’t have that time since it was spent in the overhead of maintaining three different careers. I’ve been trying to own that time effectively and to get out of that weird, non-productive middle ground between work and play. I hate that middle ground.

Video games allowed me to claim that time, since they were fun (enough) and engaging (enough) that I wouldn’t slide back into the middle ground. At the same time, that wasn’t the way I wanted to spend my time, so I found myself frustrated that all my efforts to reclaim my time amounted to me needing to distract myself in order to avoid the middle ground.

(In case you’re curious, I’m prone to stay up and exhaust myself if I read at night. No, it doesn’t matter if it’s fiction or non-fiction.)

I still haven’t quite got this “problem” figured out, but I needed to show this to put a context to the situation I was running into on my unplugged weekend. I had about ten hours left to the day, and my main time filler was part of the stuff that I had resolved to avoid. I had worn myself out mentally, so reading was out for me, too. Angela was busy with her dissertation, so I couldn’t socialize with her. Phones were out, so I couldn’t call family and friends.

I played my guitar for a few hours, but then I was seriously out of creative energy. Rather than face the stress of sitting there in the living room with the taped-over clock, I buckled. It was time for some Rock Band.

Rock Band is one of the better electronic activities I can do. You may laugh, but the drum tour actually helps me improve my rhythm and feel for timing, so it helps me musically. It helps me exercise and drink water, too – for some reason, I go through about 32oz of water per hour. Lastly, I’ve had my fair share of epiphanies whilst drumming, so that counts for something.

Luckily, after a couple hours of drumming, Angela had completed all the work she was going to be able to do. We caught up, made dinner together, talked some more, and watched a movie. Just because I decided I was going to use my time unplugged didn’t mean that she was, so the movie was one of those connective activities, and to be honest, it was nice just to sit with her. That’s always the bright spot of my day.

Sunday: The Day of Rest

Angela took the day off Sunday, more because she had worn herself out the six days prior and couldn’t do any work anyway than because she wanted to. Luckily, she had also crossed a milestone and her work was out for review, so there wasn’t much she could do on that account, either.

We went out to our favorite place for brunch, napped, hung out with each other, slid in a few family calls (I buckled on the phone, but it was more important to talk to family), went for a longish walk, ate leftovers, and went to bed somewhat early.

Sunday went a lot better because I had my main squeeze to spend time with and didn’t really need to fill space like I did on Saturday. Therein lies some insight: it’s much easier when you’re not trying to figure out what you’re going to do. Part of the reason I wore myself out Saturday was because I was trying so hard NOT to do certain activities, and I didn’t really have the headspace to just sit on the couch and nap. Or to spend many flow hours connecting with Angela. It was just me and the taped-over clock, having it out.

What’s The Point of This Post?

Jonathan Mead has been busting my chops lately with his whole “stop adding to the noise” thing. (Sidebar: Congrats for being able to quit your job, Jonathan!) Granted, he hasn’t been saying it directly to me, but it still stands. There’s this little Jonathan-faced dude on my shoulder saying “Charlie, why are you telling people about your struggle to unplug and have some peace?”

Because I don’t want you to fall into the same hole I did.

As I’ve continued to figure out how to use more and more of the time I’ve freed up, the thing I’ve noticed most is how often I bump up against the limits of modern life, especially with regards to communicative technologies. The very tools that have enabled our freedom in some areas are the very tools that enslave us in others.

And I should be clear here, too: a lot of my insecurity about being able to unplug springs from the fact that I’m afraid I’m turning into a hollow person that can’t sit with himself. This isn’t some misplaced desire for authenticity, either; it’s just that I understand how easy it is for counter-to-self habits to form when you’re busy looking at other things.

That said, I think it’s an experience that a lot of us need to go through just to see how much of our lives, habits, and orientation to the world is governed by technology. The hardest thing to articulate is how the experience of time changes.

I would normally write a post like this on Friday, since there’s a bit to think about, but the reality is, if you wanted to give it a shot this weekend, you’ll probably need the day to prepare for it.

Here are some tips for making your weekend more sane than mine:

1. Before you decide to do this, think of a few unplugged activities that you’d like to do before hand so that you’re not being harassed by clocks.
2. Do a Weekly Review, a brain dump, or whatever you do that lets you see that there are no fires you absolutely have to put out for the weekend. Make sure you cover as many bases as possible or your mind will wander.
3. Have a backup plan for how to capture your ideas and creativity. Chances are that once your mind is freed from the technological chains that bind it, your creativity will skyrocket.
4. If you live with people, talk to them about this decision and see if they’d like to do it with you. It’s a lot more fulfilling (and easier, to boot) to spend the time with the people you’ve been missing already.
5. Pay attention to yourself and your experiences. Notice how you drift towards your computer and have to intentionally change directions. Notice how quiet and still your house is. Notice how you mark time without clocks. Notice that you see the spots on the carpet you didn’t see before, or how the sunlight makes a cool shape on the wall.
6. Be gentle with yourself. The point of this is not to beat yourself up about, but to make conscious choices about how you use your time. If you decide you actually want to watch TV, watch some TV. But just notice how and why you come to that decision.

And before you write off the experience as either unnecessary or easy to do, try it. I’ll bet you’ll learn enough about yourself to make some positive changes in your daily habits.

Jack Johnson’s “Inaudible Melodies” stuck out to me on this post. Let’s end on a video again, shall we? Yes, we shall.

If this post turned a light on, maybe these will, too:

1. Turn The Instant Off My first v
2. One of Those Days (Episode 1) I had one
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Both videos asked what all the information meant. Here are some stabs at what this means for us:

1. Creating information will approach zero profitability; creating understanding and meaning will pay exponential rewards.
2. Intelligence is not enough.
3. We care more about work than about our families. We are what we repeatedly do, after all.
4. Technical abilities will be outsourced; the ability to work well with people won’t (because it can’t).
5. If you have an average commute, you are 7.5 hours behind those who work from home.
6. Deal with the stress of continual adaptation or the stress of continual insecurity.
7. We can only live on borrowed resources for so long before it comes crashing down, as individuals and as a nation.
8. If you’re reacting to the way things are today, you’ll never catch up to the way things will be tomorrow.
9. If you are employed by a corporation or large institution now, your days are numbered.
10. Start working towards being a creative entrepreneur now before you don’t have an option to do so.
11. Do the thing that only you can do.
12. You must think globally, as we are in a global economy.
13. Our education system is not preparing students for the realities they will face. Skill-based education will always lag behind process-based learning.
14. Economic reality is matching spiritual reality: it’s all about people.

(videos discovered via Gerardo Ritchey)

If this post turned a light on, maybe these will, too:

1. The High Cost of Information Seth wrote
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