NOTE: I got behind posting, so this isn’t a mis-print, it’s a catch up post. This is post 5 in the series so I’m finally caught up.

For five weeks my plan has been to write about Work Life IMBalance. For the better part of of this time, I’ve been preparing for travel or traveling halfway across the country (two weeks in one case, one week in the second). While the teeter-totter of Work-Life has been solidly on the Life side, I’ve had many opportunities to decide on what I’m doing. I’ve become much more aware of the decisions that I’m making on the teeter-totter. While I haven’t done as much business work as I had planned, I’m actually OK with that. I’m really OK with the fact that I have been able to help my daughter prepare for her move back to Kansas. While it’s not been “work” in the traditional sense, it’s a kind of work that I would trade for anything else.

My travel back to Kansas was somewhat delayed, so I arrived home after midnight after a full day’s worth of travel. But that didn’t alleviate the amount of work that needed to be done at home. Fortunately, I had spent a large part of the flight home making a list of the things that I needed to do. You know your lists are pretty complex when you have to create categories for your sublists.

Since my wife and I got married 28 years ago, and through all eight kids, I’ve never been gone from the household for more than five days. Even with our two trips to Junior Olympics, I was back within a week. This trip I was gone for two solid weeks. As the primary household manager, cook, laundry washer, grass mower, etc. I was worried that lots of tasks would have to be picked up by somebody else. I wasn’t worried that things wouldn’t get done, but rather how stressed everybody would be for having to assume extra responsibilities.

Dumb little things like the processing of mail came to mine. Usually I pick up the mail and distribute it to whomever it’s addressed to. This doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, but with three or more of the kids away during the school year or permanently, sometimes it’s confusing as to what mail is to be held, what needs to be forwarded, and what needs immediate attention. It’s funny that it took me almost an hour to explain the “rules of engagement with mail” to my two youngest kids (15 and 11). It seemed excessive, but with the amount of mail that arrives at our house, if we don’t process it regularly we get really, really far behind.

When I arrived home, the mail had pretty much been processed. A few things had fallen through the cracks, and a couple items had stacked up in odd places, but other than that everything was where it needed to be.

The house had run very smoothly while I was gone, and I was thankful for that. Over the next couple of days I caught up on the household financial tasks that needed to be completed. I finally resolved that I was going to move our household Quicken file off the server and onto my Mac Pro. This would allow me to enter all my financial information no matter where I was. I’ve been using Quicken Mobile for the better part of a year, and while I like that method for data entry, it’s really, really hard to use for any sort of analysis. 

I started investigating moving data from the Windows desktop/server version of Quicken to the Mac version and discovered that the data formats are not only not compatible, but the Mac version of the program is quite a bit more limited than the Windows version. I have Windows installed on my Mac, but it requires rebooting the machine to switch operating systems, so I began an investigation of Parallels Desktop for Mac.

I decided to try the two week trial, downloaded Parallels, and installed Quicken. Then I backed up all the data for Quicken and moved it to my Mac. This took a few hours, so I caught up on other data entry and mail processing while the install was completing. I also wrapped up two business projects and began the work on a new potential project.

Over the next couple of days I used the 8:00 – 5:00 time about 75% for work projects and home management and 25% preparing for my next trip to NJ and then on to Maine. Having had two weeks to practice my decision making skills, I found myself able to postpone projects and tasks much more easily. That is, rather than just deferring them to be done “sometime later”, I actually made compacts with myself that I was going to work on a specific project now and then at X:XX I would start on the task I was deferring. I used a couple of different tools to keep track of the tasks, and this worked pretty well for me. I honestly got more done in those five days home than I have in a long time.

As a family, we had committed to participating in the Salty Dog sprint triathlon (400m swim, 10 mile bike, 5km run) on Saturday, so we headed to bed early on Friday night so that we would be out the door at 5:30am on Saturday. We competed in the triathlon, and everyone did well. Despite my lack of training for this year’s event, I was just two minutes slower than the prior year. I honestly felt pretty good about my performance. After the race, the majority of the family took naps, but I had some work to do before our departure the next morning. I got a ton of mail processing done, and even wrote a project proposal for a long-shot business opportunity. By 4:00pm I was pretty proud of myself. I made the decision to watch Divergent with my youngest daughter, and then we finished my packing for the trip. Then my daughter who will be a junior in college and I set about packing her car. It was actually pretty fast work, and we were done early enough that I didn’t feel totally stressed.

The next morning we set out an hour later than we had hoped, but about when we expected. We drove from Kansas to the Indiana-Ohio border that night, arriving much later than planned due to construction and icky weather along the way. Nevertheless, we weren’t as exhausted as we feared. We’d done this drive once before, and it’s 11 long hours of driving even in good weather. Add in construction and weather and it makes for a long day.

The following day we took off exactly on time and managed the 10 hour drive to NJ, meeting my oldest daughter as she arrived home after work. We were pretty proud of ourselves for our perfect timing!

The past week was spent working on preparing my oldest daughter’s apartment to be packed, sightseeing in NYC with my other daughter, and generally just hanging out. Being back in NYC I felt much more comfortable with public transportation, only managed to take the wrong subway once (we had to backtrack because we took an “E” train instead of a “C” train and couldn’t get to the American Museum of Natural History from where we ended up), and generally felt fairly comfortable in the city.

On Friday we had lunch with my oldest daughter after packing the car and then left for Maine. Unfortunately, NJ/NYC/Connecticut traffic really bit us, and it took over three hours to go the first 23 miles. This was not only irritating, but it also burned a lot of expensive gas. For the next seven hours we swapped drivers every two hours, and with each stint in the passenger seat I got some work done, mostly on my phone or iPad. When we finally arrived in Castine, ME at close to 1:00am, I was pretty pleased with all I’d accomplished for the day.

Honestly, the week was a good week, with a fairly decent balance of 33% work to 66% life, but almost half the “life” stuff was related to prepping the apartment for the move. I’m not exactly sure how to count that time, quite honestly.

The last two days have been spent alternating between moving my daughter into her dorm room for the upcoming school year at Maine Maritime Academy and wandering about the town of Castine, ME.

If you read my Happy Anniversary Hectic-Dad post, you’ll know know why I was sitting on the porch of the Castine Inn, 1,570 miles from Hutchinson, KS. Tomorrow I’ll spend the entire day traveling from Castine back home. First by car to Bangor, then through Detroit, Atlanta, and finally Wichita by plane. My plan is to get some reading done on the planes coupled with some additional blog posts. I’m also working on the editorial calendar for a couple of the other Hectic ecoSystem websites. Finally I have some strategy documents to finalize for the Hectic ecoSystem as a whole. Since somebody else will be doing the driving and flying, I should have plenty of time to get the work done…assuming I have the energy.

All in all, this pair of trips to NJ have been very successful. I’ve had amazing opportunities to do sightseeing and make memories with three of my daughters. They are opportunities that will only present themselves once, so I made the very conscious decisions to take advantage of each and every opportunity.

Over the next two weeks I have quite a bit more travel planned, including a 12-hour roundtrip drive to Ft. Leonard Wood to see an Army Basic Training graduation, a cross-country flight back to New Jersey, and finally a drive back from NJ to Kansas. Some of the travel will lend itself to office work and some won’t. I’m sure I’ll have lots of opportunities to decide on which path to take, and I’m now pretty confident that I will make much better decisions that I would have made five weeks ago. More importantly, I’ve trained myself to record those tasks that I’m deferring into a system that allows me to pick the tasks up at the appropriate time.

If I’ve done nothing else over the past five weeks, the memories and new-found “personal strategic management” of my time and tasks have been worth all the time and effort.

Make it a great day!