Both of my sons licensed this year
As a friend put it so succinctly, I’m getting old…
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It’s so peaceful in the country
TJ (owner of my client Jamersan) has let me use an RV that’s out on his property in Lee County, and I’ve been here a few days doing some work for him and also attending parts of the Auburn Knights Reunion.
I’ve never been much for camping, but that’s okay – staying in an RV that’s permanently connected to electricity and water doesn’t really feel like camping. Except the part about utter and complete quiet.
I do not sleep well in motel rooms. Someone is always banging doors, and there is the 2 a.m. wakey-wakey when the drunks come back from the bars, and then there is the 5:30 a.m. moment when (assuming you don’t have to get up by then anyway), these same people have to go to their road construction job. If Alabama let the bars stay open longer, I don’t think the motel industry would make it.
But back to the RV – I suggested it was utter and complete quiet, but that’s not exactly right. There are humming and buzzing insects, chirping birds, and the occasional train that I seem to have learned to filter out if I’m asleep. But what there isn’t:
- people yelling down hallways, not in anger but because they just need to talk to someone who’s 50 feet away
- traffic noise
- someone else’s music being played, and not at a reasonable volume either
When I was playing more with the Montgomery Symphony – Maestro Tom Hinds would talk about how loud the modern world is compared to the pre-industrialized one. I’m not sure cities have ever been that quiet, but I can appreciate how people who lived on farms did enjoy more moments of actual quiet.
Read MoreWhy be Social?
Yesterday I talked about getting over some negative feelings about posting. But that doesn’t supply a “why” answer to maintaining a personal website.
I’ve been inconsistent about writing, but I’ve written more than ever in the past few years because of Facebook, which allows you to feel like you’re posting to a smaller group of people who actually know you.
Read MoreBlogging and Shoemaker’s Shoes Syndrome
Spent a few minutes just now beginning to renovate the personal blog again. I work around WP and Magento developers all day, and yet I haven’t been keeping up. I have begun to realize that I spend far too much time organizing and not enough time doing.
Read MoreLies, Big Lies, and Time Management Lies
Another game of putting things aside
As if we’ll come back to them some time
A brace of hope a pride of innocence
And you would say something has gone wrong
– Something’s Always Wrong – Toad the Wet Sprocket
Note – I started writing this post in April and had to leave it and come back to it. That’s both a meta-commentary and a sign of how painful this topic is to me.
I went through a bit of organizational hell a month or so several months ago a year-and-a-half-ago- I converted my Time Management system from its previous mish-mash of Outlook, Google to-do lists, email in-box etc. to a new mish-mash organized by Evernote and inspired by this article from Lifehacker about how to use it with David Allen’s Getting Things Done system.
And it’s sorta working. It’s a big improvement, I think. Outlook’s task list is terrible, Google’s is worse, and I’d been using them to enforce this bifurcation in my work life and personal/side-business life that was tying me in knots.
Read MoreMy Best Mistake: Taking Someone’s Word on Taking a Job
In the spirit of this series on LinkedIn, I offer you a tale of a five month hiatus from the family business I worked in when I was younger.
For years, a marketing professor who had acted as sort of a mentor to me when I was in school had been encouraging me to apply at a business in the telecom industry where he’d done some consulting work. He told me:
- the owner had a very hands-on management style (that certainly proved to be true).
- they valued individuality.
- they were looking for people who could produce long-term results.
The job was to work on the telephone and e-mail about three weeks per month, and travel all over the country at least one week – increasing volume at existing customers and prospecting for new ones. After an extensive series of interviews, including one with the owner himself, I was hired. The rigorousness of the hiring process, along with the persona recommendation of a friend, made me feel that the job would definitely be a good fit.
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