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Every Friday is Zen and Zoom picture day.
This is a waterfall (really, it is!) in a little creek near Gatlinburg, Tennessee. I stayed at Butterfly Gap Resort while I was working on a huge writing assignment a few years ago. The snow was melting and this little creek roared near my cabin.
Have you ever noticed that the few days before a vacation you can get loads of work done? And when you return from vacation you may take an entire day to complete just one task?
This phenomenon is called Parkinson’s Law. Parkinson’s Law states that work will expand to fill the amount of time allotted to it. It’s a law that project managers fight constantly when it comes to creating time estimates in their projects. For example, a project team member might know a task will probably take 25 hours to complete but the team member wants to pad the task just a little. You know the drill, people pad the time estimate in case things go wrong - the built-in extra time helps the worker. So the team member’s 25-hour activity is reported to take 40 hours. Guess what? Parkinson’s Law will ensure that the activity will magically take 40 hours to complete - because that’s how much time is available to complete the work.
Parkinson’s Law is important in the Lifelong Project too. If you give yourself more than enough time to complete an activity you’ll use all the allotted time to complete the work. The Lifelong Project is based on a one-year commitment to your goals. Not all of your goals, however, should take a year to complete. Goals that can be accomplished in a day should take a day to complete. And goals that can be accomplished in six months, well, you give yourself six months. Resist the urge to pad your goals with extra time - or you’ll risk the realization of Parkinson’s Law.
Goal setting is just the start of reaching your ambitions. You’ll need planning in order to achieve your goals. Part of planning is to plan for time management. Time is, in this project, a predetermined deadline. Within this one-year agreement with yourself you’ll need to examine each goal you’ve created and determine four things:
You really need to document your goals, the answers to these questions, and set a deadline for each goal - not just a deadline for the entire project. I’d love to hear about your projects and how you’re managing your project time.
In just a few days I’ll be in Tampa completing my fifth half-marathon. I am so looking forward to completing this race as it represents the first milestone in my ultimate fitness goal of completing the Chicago Marathon in October 2009. After last October and my wobbly finish at 2008’s Chicago Marathon I took some time away from my exercise routine. And by time away I mean I laid on the couch and watched football, drank beer, and ate nachos.
My lean and mean body ballooned with nearly 25 pounds of extra weight by Christmas. I was so disappointed and ashamed of packing that weight back on I vowed to get back to work shedding the weight, keeping a good diet, and exercising. I have and I am. It wasn’t just the extra weight that bothered me - I just feel better when I exercise. I was missing the alertness, the sound sleep, and the good feeling after a solid workout. So I’ve gotten back to work and I’m feeling pretty good. Pretty, pretty good.
I’m also looking forward to visiting Tampa next weekend as I’m giving some serious though to moving to Florida. I work from home, am writing nearly full-time, and have had a lifetime of cold, snow, and ice. The only I want to deal with at this point in my life is the ice in my frosty beverage. Do you live in Tampa? Sarasota? Thoughts about life in Florida? I’m curious what others have to say.
So think of me, if you will, next Sunday morning. I’ll be completing my welcome back to fitness run and finishing my first milestone. Cheers!
Every Friday is Zen and Zoom picture day!
This is a weird shot from the Indiana State Museum. I'm looking up at a frosted glass walkway. It's a great museum and is worth a visit if you're ever in Indianapolis.
I love reading. I consider reading part of my job as a writer. While I don’t always read topics that I write about, I think it’s good to read, expand my brain a little, and I enjoy learning new things from other writers. I’m always amazed at good fiction that links elements of a story together, writers that can create vivid characters, and exact dialogue that’s believable and heady.
One book that has had a lingering affect on my life is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I was hesitant when I first picked this book up. I’d heard so much about it, about the realness of the experience, and the honesty Robert M. Pirsig puts into the book. There were expectations surrounding the book. And then there’s that whole motorcycle business. I’ve admired motorcycles but have never ridden on one.
Regardless of my trepidation surrounding the book I picked it up in Borders, read a few pages, and was hooked. The fact that I knew little about motorcycles made no difference - it’s a great, great read. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a story about a father and son who trek across America on a motorcycle. Through recollections you learn about the father’s past psychological problems and his fear for son’s mental health. You learn about how the narrator moved beyond the problems, accepted his past, and accepted his current id, mental health, and outlook on life.
Pirsig delivers a whopper of a dissertation on quality and what quality is right in the middle of the book. This exploration of quality was distracting from the story, at first, but then as I read more I was interested and read the section several times. As a writer about project management I write on the topic of quality often and was able to link his views on quality to my experiences and disappointments with quality.
In the Lifelong Project I write about values, what’s important, and the beliefs I have about life, living, and relationships. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance covers all these topics and more. The cross-country trek stirs my longing to travel America, visit with strangers, and see things in this country you can’t see at 75 miles per hour. I have a wish, not really a requirement in my current project, but a desire to travel across America on the back roads and feed my wanderlust. It’s books like this one, and Blue Highways, and A Walk in the Woods that will do for now.
I’ve become a fan of Twitter. Twitter is a simple website where you share what you’re doing right now in 140 characters or less. It’s deceptively simple as you can share web links, news, and announcements with your “followers.” You follow people that you find interesting and people that find you interesting will follow you too.
And then there are tricks like direct messages, re-tweets (where you republish someone else’s post to your crowd of followers), and you can even add your Twitter status to your website, blog, and Facebook. And there's so much more it can do. It’s a great way to quickly and precisely communicate.
The thing I like the most about Twitter, however, is the idea that what you’re doing right now is what’s important. Think about that: what are you doing right now? The questions is not what have you done over the past few days or what are you going to do, but what are you doing right now? The importance of doing is a key theme in the Lifelong Project - and you can only do anything right now. You may have goals that you’re going to lose weight, get your finances in order, and write a new book. But to make these goals a reality you need to do things right now. Certainly there are goals that have a deadline, such as my upcoming Tampa Gasparilla Half-Marathon, but while the race is a few weeks away the preparation for the race is now. What I do now affects what I will do then.
The future then is the future now.
A goal of losing weight is dependent on each moment in the now. Financial success is the culmination of decisions and choices made here in the now. Any goal you create should be decomposed into smaller, work packages, and then each package linked to an activity or set of activities. Each activity is completed step-by-step, moment-by-moment here, now.
So I’ll ask you in the realm of Twitter, in the context of the Lifelong Project, what are you doing right now?
Every Friday is Zen and Zoom picture day. Enjoy!
Guess where these steps are! A small pond in the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. I spent an afternoon wandering around in this park - absolutely lovely!
Sometimes projects go according to plan. And sometimes they don’t.
Sometimes risks come into fruition. Activities get delayed. Decisions are avoided. Resources are spread thin among the organization and what looks good on paper just doesn’t work in execution. There are times when unknown unknowns, external factors, poor communication, politics, and more attack the project.
It’s the same thing in the Lifelong Project. Sometimes things just suck. People don’t keep their promises. You don’t get paid on time - or at all. Bills pile up. The phone doesn’t ring with good news. Your emails go unanswered. The mailman brings nothing but more bills. Proposals drift into the ether with no hint of action. And the sun doesn’t shine on this side of the clouds for days. Add to that pile of misery more tumbling stocks, more war, more crime, and more foreclosures and it’s easy to get discouraged.
Lately it seems like I can’t catch a break and it’s just one damned thing after another.
In the Lifelong Project, and in project management, things don’t always go as planned. Risk and issues can seep into the project and flood the work with doubts, fear, and lamentations. Leadership is needed to keep things moving along. And that’s right where I find myself today. Yep, sometimes things just suck, don’t go according to plan, and I’m tempted to shuck it all and work at Starbucks. Assuming they’re hiring.
But I won’t do that - not yet.
Project management is about getting things done and I’ve plenty to do. I have a long list of writing projects to complete, some training gigs coming up in the next couple of months, and a couple of new books I’m writing proposals for. There’s plenty of work to be done and I really don’t have time to start feeling sorry for Joe (ahem, that’s me). I’m pressing on, learning from past mistakes, and reminding myself that this is temporary.
I’ll be honest. As a business owner the past year has been incredibly scary, frustrating, and it's been one of the worst years in gross incomes since I started working in corporate education in 1993.
My core business is teaching. I swoop into organizations and deliver project management seminars, goal setting seminars, and coaching sessions. Guess what companies have sliced out of their budgets over the past year? Well, guess what companies have cut in addition to jobs, coffee, bonuses, marketing, travel, and paperclips. If you guessed education you’re correct. If you guessed Joe you’re correct too.
In project management, milestones are events that represent significant accomplishments in the project. You can usually find milestones at the end of a phase, such as the completion of creating the foundation in construction or the successful testing in software development. Milestones are also associated with “go/no-go decisions.” These are also known as kill-points as they offer the organization a chance to kill the project without sinking more funds into a losing battle.
I am at a milestone. I’m examining how my business is performing, the effort and costs to keep on marketing, keep on selling, and to keep on watching my client base evaporate. I cannot do this forever and I need to make a decision. I need to decide if I can tough this “recession” out in the training arena, do other activities in the interim, or make the no-go decision. It’s heart-breaking, really. I really love to teach, to share what I know with others, and to help people advance their careers. It’s an amazing feeling to deliver a kick-ass class, get rave reviews, and occasionally hear from participants how their career is moving along since the class. I like to think I’ve a gift to teach and it’s killing me to think that I won’t be teaching corporate education much longer.
I’ve taught classes coast-to-coast here in the US. I’ve taught in oil refineries, in penthouse conference rooms, in trailers, in hotels, in gymnasiums, and even outdoors. I’ve taught in university classrooms, in museums, in factories, and twice in a mechanics’ garage. I’ve taught in hotel rooms where I slept across the hall from where I was to teach the next morning. I’ve taught for banks, pharmaceutical companies, phone companies, hospitals, the US military, and more. It was a thrill to teach throughout Europe. It was a challenge to deliver a keynote presentation in near darkness when a hotel’s power failed, or when I taught through a lingering flu bug, or to arrive in New York after an all-night delay with moments to spare before class started. But I did what was required, just like so many of you do too.
When I speak I give one hundred percent and can feel the reciprocal energy an audience offers. It has been an amazing career to see so many industries, meet so many different people, and to gaze across a crowded room with people ready to hear what I had to say.
On the other hand, it is killing me to think that I’d hang onto something that people aren’t buying or can’t afford. Training has always been a competitive business and maybe it’s just become so saturated that I can longer compete. Sure, I can compete on quality, on credentials, and on experience - but I keep losing on price. Some of my competition is charging a third of what I’m charging. I don’t know how they’re paying the bills. Maybe half a loaf is better than nothing at all - or in their case, a third of a loaf.
I am thankful for the handful of clients that have kept me on as their project management training provider. I am thankful that I can write and having plenty of writing projects to tide me over. But frankly, writing doesn’t pay like training does. Writing projects take much longer to complete than training projects. Writing is damned hard work - anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
In my Lifelong Project I’m shifting from monitoring and controlling back into planning. Monitoring and controlling is a set of processes that happen in parallel to project execution. Project execution is completing the work that was identified in project planning. When things don’t go according to plan monitoring and controlling process catch the problem and send the project back to planning. You can check out the flow of the project management lifecycle in this figure below.
Planning is the process of determining decisions and choices. Choices are things you want to do while decisions are things you must do. Over the next two weeks I’ll be making some decisions. I’ll keep you posted.
In three weeks, that’s March 1, I’ll be in Tampa on my first run since the Chicago Marathon last October. I’m not sure how it happened but after finishing Chicago I eased off my running and exercise, eased off my diet, and eased back into fifteen extra pounds in just two months. Yikes! It’s amazing to me how easily it all goes back on and how slowly it comes off. Gaining weight, in my opinion, is not in proportion to losing weight.
It wasn’t just the weight gain that bothered me. I felt grumpy, felt lethargic, and felt lazy, sad, and worn down. Around Christmastime I knew what the problem was - I was eating (and drinking beer) like I was still in college. My metabolism, however, was telling me those days are long gone. So I put down the fork, tied on my running shoes, and got back to work. Back to the gym, back doing crunches, and back to the miles. It feels so good to finish a long run, have energy, and to work towards a goal. I've dropped ten of those 15 pounds and feel great.
From this experience I learned a lesson: when you finish a goal, achieve an objective, or accomplish all the things on your to-do list it’s time start anew. For me, it was so easy to feel like I’ve arrived. The Chicago Marathon was one of my final goals for 2008 and with nothing in queue to tackle it was easy to, well, take it easy. The time to set new goals is at the end of a current goal.
Which brings me to Tampa. In December I decided that I needed a series of milestones to keep me moving toward my ultimate goal of finishing the Chicago Marathon next October. So I scheduled my first half marathon, the Tampa Gasparilla Classic for March 1. This will be a fun weekend visiting some Tampa friends, scouting the area, and completing one of my first 2009 goals.
Then on April 11 I’m running the Illinois Half Marathon in Champaign-Urbana. I’m looking forward to this run as some of my friends are going to run the race too and my son will be working at water station. We're planning on staying the weekend there and just visiting, being outdoors, and welcoming spring. That will be a fun weekend!
The April 11 race is just two weeks before my next challenge: Nashville’s Country Music Half Marathon on April 25. I’ve been wanting to do this race since I heard about it as I’ve family in Tennessee, love Nashville, and will take a little break visiting friends and family in the South. Tennessee is such an interesting state that it’ll be a thrill to run through Nashville, drop down to Chattanooga for a few days, and then a quick tour through the Smokies, Knoxville, and then home.
My next scheduled run is a bit closer to home: The Geist Half Marathon. I ran this race last year and it was fun, but hillier than I imagined (when I drive around I sure didn't notice all these hills!). The course winds all the way around Geist Reservoir and ends at the marina. It was fun to run this course with my friend Don and to see other friends and neighbors along the course. This race is on May 16.
On June 6 I’ll be living a lifelong dream: running onto the field at Notre Dame Stadium. It’ll be just like Rudy. Well, maybe not just like Rudy. I am talking about the South Bend Hall of Fame to Notre Dame. This half-marathon starts at the College Football Hame of Fame, zips around South Bend, through the University of Notre Dame, and you end at the fifty-yard line of the Fighting Irish. How cool is that? I’m a bit of a Notre Dame nut so when I found out about this one I was sold in a heartbeat.
I’m looking for a few races to complete in June and July but I have some travel plans that are still forming. Most likely I’ll be in Florida much of the summer (perfect weather for running long distances, right?) though I am making a trek in August. On August 2 I’ll be completing the Rock-N-Roll Chicago Half Marathon. I’m looking forward to this race as it’s just a couple months before the Chicago Full-Marathon. My son will be on summer vacation still so we’ll end our summer festivities around the Windy City before he heads back to school. Poor, little feller. We’ll probably squeeze in a Cubs game and a visit to the Art Institute is mandatory.
In September I’m graduating to full-marathons: I’ll be running the Lewis and Clark Marathon on September 13 in Saint Louis. This course winds through Saint Louis and into the shadows of the Saint Louis Arch. I’ve only completed one marathon so this one will be a bit of a primer for Chicago a month later.
Which brings me to October. On Sunday, October 11, 2009 I’ll return to Chicago to complete the Chicago Marathon. This is a bit of a vengeance for me. I wasn’t thrilled with my wimpy time at last year’s completion and I’m taking “strides” to be better prepared for this year’s race. A marathon was the hardest thing I’ve ever completed so that’s why I’m doing it again. Only better.
I’m looking for a few more runs to complete after Chicago so I won’t make the same mistake twice. There’s a great chance I’ll be living in Tampa by next September so I’m researching some winter runs in the Sunshine State. I’ll keep you posted… but for now I’ve a ten-mile training run waiting on me. Miles to go before I sleep.
Every Friday is Zen and Zoom picture day. Enjoy!
This is a street view in Antwerp, Belgium. At the end of this street is Our Lady Cathedral of Antwerp. You can browse through a huge collection of Peter Paul Rubens paintings here.
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