progress report [01/24/2007 22:43:02]
Since I just passed the five month point, I want to talk a bit about the progress toward my twelve goals, including the one about my web framework (scarlet lambda) that it seems quite a few new readers have tuned in for.
First off, I'm very proud of myself for maintaining a set of goals this long. I don't know how many times I've changed my mind or just plain forgotten about goals in the past. So sticking with this is a big improvement.
But am I really any better off than I was five months ago? Really, not all that much has changed. I've made some progress toward several goals, but I'm still stressed and overweight and often behind on email.
In early December, I realized a lot of that stress was coming from my business, and I wrote out a bunch of company goals which I eventually posted elsewhere.
It occurred to me that most of my company goals are web projects, and that the main reason I want to get my web framework out there is so that I can bring people up to speed on how I do things, and that if I made the web stuff top priority and something people wanted to learn, then I could hire help without paying for a huge learning curve.
I think I made a mistake talking about ecdysis up front though. Ecdysis, the lisp-like syntax for python, sort of represents an ideal state to work towards. It's the part that's most interesting to me, but it's also the part that doesn't exist. Perhaps that's why it's the most interesting. And while there are various things I do where I really really really wish I had a more expressive python, most of the company goals could be achieved just with the tools I already have, if I could only get those tools cleaned up and documented.
This feels a bit like a bait and switch, but I'm hardly a language designer, and it makes sense to involve a community in building something like ecdysis rather than just trying to make it up on the fly. It makes more sense to offer the foundations and get people trained and working on using and improving them, and then once I have a group of people working with me, and things are getting done for my customers, then I can start thinking about the harder, more interesting problems.
Lack of documentation is only one barrier to me delegating, though. The other is a ticket system. I have a ticket system. In fact, I have two ticket systems. And there are many free ones, but I mean I have two that I've installed and studied the code for and whatnot. But it's been very hard for me to integrate them into my workflow.
When I talk about delegating, there's two main areas: support and development. Most of the company goals are development goals, but they exist to address the recurring issues that come up in support.
I feel like I spend way too much time on support. So I'm constantly coming up with projects to reduce that time. Then I get working on the projects and support suffers and then I'm even more stressed out about support, and I come up with even more projects. I made the company list because I realized that development vs support conflict/cycle thing was really causing a lot of stress and pulling me in a lot of different directions, and I needed to manage that if I wanted to reach my personal goals.
So of course now I have two sets of goals and it's pretty clear I can't do both and still be where I want to be in August unless I delegate. The cycle continues.
The thing about the ticket systems that stop me from delegating are:
- for support, it feels like a huge step down from just managing email with pine
- for development, my real problem is breaking the tasks down, not tracking the resulting chunks. That'll be a problem eventually but it's a problem I haven't gotten to yet.
The development problem is a lot easier to manage simply because I can just do one project at a time, plan it out, and hopefully soon, have someone helping me so it moves faster.
But the support side is much harder. You can't just install a ticket system and go. For one thing, I have hundreds of customers used to just emailing me. I don't want to take that away, but I do need some way to integrate email into the ticket system. Both systems I have can read an inbox, but I don't want everything to just go into the box. I want to start with my own inbox, go through it Getting Things Done style, and then if I choose to delegate something to a support staff (and I actually do have someone working part time in this role) then I should be able to do that. But I don't just want to hand it over. I want to still be aware of what's going on and be able to follow up or intervene if need be.
So what I really want is an email client with all the benefits of pine, but can be integrated with a ticket system, which I can then open up to my support staff, and then directly to customers.
So I've arrived at the point where what I think I ought to be doing is coming up with a webmail app that shows off the technology I do have for scarlet, and can later be integrated with the roundup backend (or something like it) for the ticket system. And so for the past couple days I've been juggling my inbox and a webmail application.
Now, a webmail app isn't on my goals list. One personal goal says get scarlet out there, and two company goals are a ticket system and a knowledge base. And if I work backwards from all three, they converge on a small webmail app that I can both use myself, integrate with a database, and use as an example to popularize scarlet (not to mention cornerhost!) So even though once again I'm doing something new and random, I have to keep reminding myself I'm not just forward chaining down some tangent, but actually on the path to my goals. So expect to see a webmail app you can try out for yourself soon.
That leaves one major issue. Goal number two on my list should have been goal number one. It's my top priority: getting in shape. But in five months, my weight has bounced up and down between 280 and 290. I'm currently at 285. For perspective, I weighted 180 pounds in college, was down to about 220 as recently as march 2004 (when I had a personal trainer) and my goal is 200.
I know more about diet and exercise than anyone I know. Figuring out what to do isn't an issue. The problem is I get so stressed out about things that I make those things top priority until something else falls apart. So health is my top priority in theory, but in practice I'll neglect it while I work on something else. Managing my support box is the second highest priority, and the same thing happens.
Every once in a while, I get all stressed out and tell myself: stop. Just focus on health, email, and then once that's taken care of, work on one project at a time. But that only lasts until I get stressed out about something in my inbox and launch a new project, or I get caught up in some hot new idea and again, launch a new project (forward chaining - e.g., ecdysis... And again, his is why I keep checking myself on the webmail app).
Even though those moments of clarity tend to be short lived, the general strategy does work. Health first, keep my inbox clear, then work on projects. I just haven't promoted that philosophy to a master, driving principle in my life.
And in fact, the principle needs to be generalized a bit, or I'm going to have to buy new clothes. What I mean is, health and email are just instances of a larger class of problems you could call maintenance. I need to add laundry to the list. I've got two huge piles. And going through mail and receipts - my desk is once again covered in paper.
It's sort of like what David Allen (the Getting things Done guy) says. You have to clear the decks of the small stuff before you can work on the big stuff. He talks about projects, and in the past I've tried to run my projects based on his ideas, and failed misterably. But I can see using GTD just for organizing my basic household stuff. I already found a great tool for that: a freeware program called thinking rock.
So that gives me four sets of tools that I'm using right now:
- spreadsheet and calorie counter for health
- pine and various other tools for company maintenance
- thinking rock for home/life stuff
- outliners and diagrams for planning current project
Those four levels represent a hierarchy of values. Or you could say expanding circles of influence if you're a Stephen Covey fan. I've come to believe that if I stick to taking care of things in that order on a daily basis, then I'm going to go a whole lot faster. I don't have to worry about a conflict between maintaining my stuff and building new stuff, which is great because that struggle is a major source of stress in my life.
Levels 5, 6, and up would be about other people. That could mean delegating, or dating, or hanging out with friends, or even just managing comments on this blog. I get a ton of spam, and I've been working on a comment manager. But even if I have a decent comment manager, I don't have time to moderate. (So, sadly, I've turned off comments completely for now.)
My Mom called me twice yesterday, first just to chat, and later because she finally sold a couple baked potato bags off her site. I'm always happy to hear from her, but it kind of stressed me out, because sometimes hearing from anyone can stress me out. In fact, a friend called when I sat down to start this post, and I just let it go to voice mail because I didn't feel like I had time to deal with it.
I push people away because I feel like I need to be working, even if I'm not accomplishing much. There's so much I ought to be doing that I just don't want to deal with people. Especially women. In fact, if I ask myself what positive thing getting fat has done for me, being unattractive to women comes to mind as the main benefit. Meaning subconsciously, it's a way of pushing them away. Which is insane. But if I want my brain to stop thinking that way, I've got to clear up the thing that's making me push people away, and that's this conflict between staying on top of things and developing my projects.
I guess I figure the way to do that is work inside out. Start with health, then the health of my business, then basic life stuff, then goals, and then other people. That could be as simple as taking a week to get caught up on everything, and then just maintaining that while I work on my goals and make time for other people.
Anyway, that's enough of that. :)