DaddyCub's Adventures

Sometimes he's a little to harsh even for me, but this cartoon today hit the nail on the head. It doesn't hurt that Rene Magritte is one of my favorite surrealisists, either.

OK, so it's Edmonds, not Seattle, but same difference. We moved in a month ago, and life has been a whirlwind ever since. Any free time goes to unpacking (or catching up on 24 and Lost), and not to spending time in front of the computer. That said, our move up here is proving to be pretty much everything we had hoped (and then some). We love where we live--it's amazing to turn out of the driveway and see mountains whichever way we look practically (the Olympics to the west and the Cascades to the north and east). We're also finding the area to be much more kid-friendly than Oakland was.

On the GTD front, I've made a complete transition to using MindManager as my tool (and away from the Outlook add-in). I was heading in that direction anyway, but then saw a post at Genuine Curiousity (thanks Dwayne!) that gave me the impetus I needed to take the next steps.

I keep a master list of projects, and for each one I list the desired outcome, next action(s), anything I'm waiting for, tasks on deck, needed research, completed tasks, and calls to make. I can then filter by any of those categories so that I can print up just a list of next actions, calls, waiting for, etc. What I especially like about this is that each of those lists shows the project for each task. One of the aspects of GTD that I have trouble with is the disconnect between projects and next actions on the next action list itself. This remedies that problem, at the expense of not having the contexts that are used in GTD. I never found the contexts that useful (except for "calls"), so it's no loss as far as I'm concerned.

Okay, so when I blogged about this a couple weeks ago, I only thought that moving day was getting close. We're now at 8 days, 12 hours until the big van comes to take us away. I've got to say, that this move has been a true test of my abilities to implement Getting Things Done in a home setting as opposed to work. We're balancing all of the following tasks/subtasks:

• Packing and moving (contracting with movers, having boxes, deciding on insurance, changing addresses, etc., not to mention actually packing the damn things)
• Setting up life in WA (preschool for the girls, getting my home office ready up there, getting DirecTV and our DVR installed [this is key]), and so on
• Getting ready to list our house here (meeting with our realtor, fixing up some problems, which includes a total tear down and rebuild of our shower, contracting with stagers and painters, and on and on and on)
• Saying goodbye to dear friends

And of course, our regular life still goes on. We have to feed the kids, wash clothes, pay bills, work, etc.

My main management tool for this endeavor has been a giant Mind Map that I put together on MindManager. I actually did it as a lark, since I installed MindManager just as the move was kicking off, but it turned out to be the best thing I ever did. I'm convinced that Mind Maps are the best format for my to-do lists. I don't think that it will work as a "Next Action" list (using the GTD term), but I've already started using it to keep a weekly priority list that culls the most important tasks for the week.

My next endeavor with Mind Manager will be to see if it feels liek a workable way to keep project plans for all of my active projects. (This was based on a recent post at Matt's Idea Blog.) I've already been using it on an ad hoc basis for some projects, so I guess it's workable, but it feels daunting to create a Mind Map for all of my 40+ active projects. Amond my concerns are ensuring that I don't start using the Mind Maps as my overall Next Action holders, which would definitely be my temptation. I think I'll start this experiment, though, and see how it goes.

After the move, that is...

. . . has become the scourge of my email existence. I really *really* wish that people would think before they reply to everyone. Over the last two days, I've had to delete no less than 20 emails as two people went back and forth over who got what source code file via attachment, upload to ftp, whether the ftp site was accessible outside of our corporate firewall, etc. Every labored step of the transaction was broadcast to five other people, none of whom cared remotely about the source code or how to get it.

I'm usually not a big fan of standard prompts ("Are you sure you want to delete this file?" "Yes, of course I'm sure"), but I wonder whether some kind of prompt before sending a reply all ("Are you sure that everyone you're sending this to cares?") might not be a bad thing.

Blogging (and working) from Phoenix tonight and tomorrow.

Onto today's business travel annoyance. It's a small thing, but why can't Chevrolet standardize where they put the trunk release button inside the car??? In the last 6 weeks, I've had a Cobalt, an Impala, and a Cobalt again. The first Cobalt had the trunk popper inside the change cabinet (took me three days to find). The Impala had it on the driver's door, embedded in the handle. I found that one accidentally, as I was looking for the lock (!). The current Cobalt? Search me--I haven't found it yet. Anyone else had this problem?

Signing off now.

The big news in our life is that we're packing up the truck (OK, the Subaru Forester) and moving to Beverly, Hills that is (OK, Edmonds, Washington). Why? Well, for starters, we're raising two kids with no family around and T. has a sister who lives up in those parts, on Whidbey Island. They have kids close to our kids' ages, so the cousins will know each other (hopefully not as well as the cousins on the late, great Arrested Development). Plus, we'll get some free babysitting, so it's hard to argue with that.

Second, we're just fed up with housing prices (and the general cost of living) here in the over-valued Bay Area. For what we're paying both for the home and in taxes, we ought to be sending our kids to some gold-plated public schools. Instead, we could barely send them to elementary school here, and middle and high schools are out of the question. It'll be nice to be living somewhere where $500K can buy more than a starter home.

Third (and maybe most importantly), we love it up there. We're both midwestern refugees (Chicago area for me, Detroit area for her), and we're going to like being someplace green, someplace with seasons.

So anyway, we got a line on a house recently, and Terri went up with our little one (Isabel) yesterday to check it out. I stayed here with Alissa, which is probably worthy of another entry--that's the first time I've had either of the kids by myself for that long (and everything went just fine). Everything looks A-OK with the house (except for the fact that I'm buying a house without seeing it!!!), and we're under contract now. We should be closing in mid-April, listing our house here around the same time, and heading north.

The best part of the deal is that I get to keep my job. I work out of my home for a consultant based in Florida. As long as I have a broadband connection, a cell phone, and some way to get to the airport, they don't care where I live. Imagine that--a traditional engineering company (no, I'm not an engineer, but I play one on TV) that is progressive enough to let its peeps work where they want to. I can't complain.

Enough rambling already. I was hoping to say something sardonic, or at least witty, about moving, but I'll have to save that for another day.

Even though (or maybe because) they are so subjective, I love lists of 100 best movies, top books, etc. I just saw a reference to List of Bests on Lifehacker and checked it out. Very cool! It lets you create your own lists as well, so I added one for all the books that my once-thriving but now defunct Book Group read over the years.