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Encounters: The Aviator, or what I want to be when I learn to play

(Caption: Our view of Big Sur)

I met Kareem because we needed a contract script writer--badly. Copywriting was not Kareem's only career strength, and not exactly a career passion, but the project was temporary, and he had just come from a digital agency with too much experience on his resume to get picked up immediately in a downsizing economy.

Prior to meeting Kareem I'd spoken on the phone to another writer with an agency background. She was ready and eager to jump into our project. Shortly, after being briefed about the aggressive deadlines and requirements of the client, she reconsidered and backed away, mid-script. We were supposed to shoot the following week.

In ideal circumstances, we strive for a sane approach to project management, where we plan such things as scriptwriting and shooting schedules way in advance, but being in this Webby world we're in, projects are often inked close to launch. Some people thrive in this kind of environment, some fight it and give in begrudgingly, some reject it outright. I needed to see how Kareem would react early, before hiring him.

I was brutally frank in our interview. Our "co-created" project with Brand X was exciting stuff, but it was not without client oversight and last-minute changes. I said something that I wish I hadn't,

"I need someone who's comfortable with user-generated content that's not all user-generated...I mean, it is, but with an eye toward the brand... not that they want to influence the script, of course...it must be authentic, but brand-friendly..."

I decided to look up from staring down at Kareem's extensive resume; he remained smiling and calm.

"Yes, I think I understand," he said. He told me of several on-set projects he'd done as a creative director. The personalities he'd encountered, the seemingly contradictory directives. It was clear to me that, from a production standpoint, he'd seen it all, and he understood the dichotomous nature of client work--something that often relied on a paradoxical act of creating authentic connection. He didn't bristle when I told him we were shooting next week and still needed scripts to submit for approval. And these scripts depended on the availability of his script subjects, whom had yet to be selected, let alone contacted.

"No problem," he said.

The following week, he arrived for a briefing meeting with snacks for the team. Shortly thereafter, scripts written and approved, he arrived at the set early with props that our producer had trouble procuring. Everyone who had arrived on-set had been briefed by him and was ready to go. He got along famously with the camera crew and director. Later, when the rough cuts were complete he adeptly knew where to cut and even how to retroactively make guests look more comfortable than they actually were. Client requests that may have overwhelmed another writer/producer were creatively integrated with no complaints.

After our final shoot he suggested we go grab some coffee. Already I was trying to think of how else we could work with Kareem until a more suitable position opened up for him.

It was a hot day; I sipped ice-coffee in an air-conditioned Starbucks. He asked me, "Do you fly much?"

Option 1: Work more; Option 2: Work less; Option 3 ...

Kris at The HR Capitalist caught my attention with his post, "Being a Star - Either Put In More Hours Than Others, or Start Eliminating Stuff (But Stop Whining)...." He says:

Work/life balance is a choice.  You won't be able to be your version of Bono with work/life balance as your goal.  More and more, I run into super sharp people who are amazed at the entitlement culture of talented folks who say they want to be stars, but won't put in the time to outwork others and are outraged when told that's what it takes.

If you are not inclined to put in more hours, Kris says, "you need to start eliminating things that you don't think matter, the things you can get away with not doing, not being involved with at work."

This is the choice of anyone seeking success, but notably of the entrepreneur. As my company has grown, my time management strategy as evolved--or devolved as the case may be:

• Phase 1--The first date that won't end: You have a crush on all the excitement that your business is providing for you in life and unwittingly give it all the time that it needs. Other things need to happen, like sleep, so you just add more work hours to your day and keep plugging after dinner, or after your spouse knocks off for bed. When opportunities present themselves, you drop everything.  For instance, someone you've wanted to meet with for some time wants to connect for breakfast at 7:30 a.m. the next day in New York City, and you are in San Francisco. No problem! Sure you don't feel great after taking a red-eye, but you make it there. And you've set up other back-to-back meetings to get the most out of your time. By the time you are back at the airport you realize you might not have mentioned your whereabouts to your spouse but know he'll understand. And you know that this phase can't last forever, but you must take full advantage of every opportunity now, while you have it.

• Phase 2--The Trade-offs: You realize that other things--hobbies, friends, wellness--are being impacted, but hopefully now you are experiencing some growth and cannot imagine losing momentum in order to stop and smell the roses. Also, expectations have been set. Clients on the East Coast expect that you will be available during the wee hours of the morning on the West Coast; you've told them to call you if they wanted to talk--anytime; they're just taking you up on your offer. All those opportunities that you have been pushing for are now happening; and you must be there to implement them. You can't imagine having others do it during such a delicate, relationship-building phase. You plan to eventually build replicable, delegatable processes, but you must trail-blaze for how.

You try to fit it all in, but even with extended hours you can't. So you compromise on everything except your business. You skip those biannual physical exams, you whittle that full workout into a few sit-ups before bed, you spam an eGreeting card to your address book this year instead of sending individually written cards. That quality time you book nightly with your spouse or the kids is spent responding to email while sitting next to him on the couch. You don't have to meet with people in-person today, so you forgo showering and getting dressed--time is money, people! The first time you skip these things it feels bad; the second time you can justify it as something you're sacrificing "for now", the third time you've re-identified yourself: "I guess I'm just going to be 10 pounds heavier." "I've never been much of a home cook." "I'm just not a neat person." "I'm the kind of person who always has to be doing something." ...

You start to fear that your tradeoffs are becoming more and more visible. You look older. You have creaky knees and your neck hurts. You indiscriminately hand people not associated with your business, like your drycleaner, your business card. You develop this glassy look that signals to your domestic partner that you are assessing what else you need to get done today, not listening to his suggestions for what to have for dinner. You meet up with friends you haven't seen in ages, and when they ask how you are doing, you update them on your calendar and on your competition.

• Phase 3--Signs of wear and tear: You have much to show for your hard work--both good and bad. You are still pushing hard; forget about cruise-control. But you can speak confidently about the future of your business.

Through accidental situations, like delayed flights and malfunctioning electronics, you find yourself with small pockets of unscheduled time and have no idea what to do with it: Pick up a newspaper and at least familiarize yourself with the happenings in the world, pet your cat, or call people? You realize you don't know where to start and defer to doodling in your notebook. You go to the dentist and they declare you're in for a year of orthodontics due to stress-induced jaw alignment issues. You understand the urgency but just don't know how you can fit that sort of thing into your schedule at this time. Pain is also very time consuming--feeling it, preventing it, containing it. You plan another appointment in several months--hopefully enough lead time to plan around it. You later realize that you do have a conflict but you do nothing. Maybe the other party will cancel. You meet up with friends you haven't seen in ages, and when they ask how you are doing, you have nothing to say. You say, "Hanging in, and you?

People call you successful and you wonder, "How so?" Even if you are, you are so used to the act of building momentum that you don't know what success feels like. Perhaps you've overcome it and it's now trailing behind, and you just feel something dragging. You assume it's another problem to attack. You remove your anniversary dinner from your calendar and enter "figure out dragging issue" in its place.

But back to HR Capitalist's two options: Accept that you are going to have to put in the time, or start taking things off your plate. The frustration of a later-stage entrepreneur who's had a few years to cycle through both options is "what else?"

One could say Option 3 is aspire to less. Let's just say for the sake of argument that this was even possible for the entrepreneur, that we could temporarily suppress this unquenchable ambition and could actually make a logical decision to dial it back a bit. I argue that our natures would kick back in, and we would become crazy about something else.

My friend and former coach Kimberly threw something out to me that was similar to Kris's advice, but offered in a way that I could actually consider.

"I'll bet you could back off about 10 percent and no one would even notice," she said.

"But I would notice," I said.

And I thought about that. There are types of effort: level one being "9-5" effort, level two being extraordinary effort, and level three being "Why are you afraid that level two won't suffice?" effort.

I am willing to consider level 2 may be effective.

Learning to surf at work

When I was in Mexico earlier this year, I loved getting up in the morning, walking along the shore, and then body surfing the waves of the ocean--all before breakfast. H-band taught me a few tricks to riding waves that I never had an opportunity to practice in the relatively tame waters where I grew up. He could spot a wave coming from several hundred yards out.

"Here we go," he'd say, and I'd assume the position: Back toward the endless expanse of water, eyes focused on the shore, one arm out in front of me and one behind. When the wave approached, at just the right time H-band would yell, "Start swimming!" and I'd frantically freestyle-stroke like I was trying to escape a great white. About 70 percent of the time the wave would wash over me, and I'd emerge from the water with my hair in my face, disoriented. "Nope," H-band would say, "you didn't catch that one." The other 30 percent of the time I would feel this sensation of being lifted up and forward, and I would emerge yards ahead in the shallow water. That was catching a wave.

I never quite understood what made a wave surfable--they all looked pretty big to me, but H-band could tell if one would crash too soon to ride, or if it would grow. I look at what I navigate on a daily basis--namely, a business--and wonder, "How good am I at riding waves?"

No wave is the same. While there is a general direction they take, some swell disappointingly early; some bring a surprising sensation of warm or cold. Every day is fraught with some variation, even if it is moving in the same general direction of growth. Some days the meeting is cancelled--a small swell that dies too soon; or some breaking news in the blogosphere cancels out the regular business of the day--a deceptively large swell that pulls everything in the vicinity to the shore, exhausted.

The same thrill of predicting waves and riding them to my advantage compells me to get a handle on these random events that over time do not seem so random. Chaos becomes the norm, becomes cyclical, like waves. So why can't I spot them, estimate how powerful they will become, and then let them propel me forward, or wait them out while pursuing bigger, more meaningful, ones?

All I can do at the moment is wake up each day and assume the position: back to the ocean, eyes ahead, arms ready to paddle, paddle, paddle.

Encounters: People who don't live in "phases"

A very close friend insisted that I meet a woman she'd just met. She just had a feeling we'd get along. After many fits and starts--business trips, cancelled opportunites and challenges getting into the city at the same time--we finally managed to be in the same place at the same time. I'm all for serendipitous encounters, but I've made far less time for these encounters than I used to.

I recall the salad days of the Dot Com bomb, when we had plenty of time and nothing to lose from meeting people who may or may not be helpful to us. I met people on searches, some similar to my own, and could listen to them talk about their endeavors for the sake of listening. Years later, with a small business to help run, time was at a premium. I've learned a new skill lately of folding in these occasional encounters with official business meetings.

This friend of my friend's was traveling far out of her way to meet me. She'd moved to the Bay Area not long ago and had some challenges navigating suitable places to park in the city. I could have gone to her, I thought, feeling a tad guilty.

Over coffee (or an iced latte; it was a hot day) we talked about what we were up to. Clearly our mutual friend thought to put us together for a reason. I knew that my coffee date was working on her third book. I guessed that my friend hoped I would be a potential reviewer of it when it was ready, or could help her with a blog promotion strategy. As she spoke, I realized she hardly needed my help. She'd practiced medicine as an OB/Gyn for years, then decided to follow her passion for art. After creating a national following (she shows in galleries across the country), she thought to expand on her passion for writing. She is now working on her third book, which had received competing bids from multiple publishing houses. She didn't need my help with online promotion; her growing online community was thriving. She had a staff to help her maintain it. Three years ago she had  a daughter, and her husband, a Harvard MBA, had stopped working to explore his own possibilities and now spent his days at their home near the ocean.

I thought to myself, she has everything she wants. What can I possibly do for her? Perhaps, it became increasingly apparent to me, it was SHE who would help me.

What this "traditional media" expat has to say about the way the wind has blown

I am an ex-pat of traditional media. I came to my first job hoping that I would see my name in magazine bylines and book covers. Maybe I would get to share my work on TV, God willing. I left "print" by accident, not by any prescience on my part of its eventual declining significance, but more from an inability to fit in.

I'm sure if I had stuck it out a bit more and not taken a new media job five years in I might have made more of a go of it. But things discouraged me about traditional media. It had an established power structure that made it nearly impossible to get noticed. I wrote things I was proud of on the side, while editing more established writers in the waking hours and writing uninspired copy as a freelancer. But I hadn't really established a voice that was worthy of cashing in favors from editor friends of mine.

I didn't crackle with potential; I tended to get sleepy at work while copyediting and often had my edits edited. My favorite part of my job was reading magazines--a nice perk of working at a print media company--and going to parties, where a lot of people asked me for my card. Being employed by a large media company, I didn't have to go after editors looking for print work. But I had no ability to get published within my own company. When I was told I couldn't write good headlines it felt more like a sentence than a criticism. It was an indication of my inability to do well in this world. I wouldn't get to do what I really wanted--to write--because clearly it wasn't in my blood.

I read with fascination Lesley M.M. Blume's piece in Slate, "The Media's Lost Generation" about the travails of traditional media refugees who are being forced to have to re-invent themselves in mid-career. Her piece opens,

Last month, a media executive met with a headhunter to plan his next career move. With years of experience at a major media organization, the executive figured that he had some good ammo to jump to the next level, even in the current economic climate.

The meeting did not go well.

"The headhunter essentially told me not to even bother trying," says the executive. "He told me, ‘The old media model is broken.' The message was that there really isn't a next step to take."

I read articles about the challenges of print and television all the time, but this one really resonated with me, perhaps, because I'm relieved that through no particular flash of insight other than just a feeling to go where I can make a difference, I veered to where the action is. A direction now deemed "correct" in the world. I recall my decison to leave New York to take a new media job, ten years ago, and asking a trusted mentor whether it made sense for me to leave and relinquish my somewhat low, but higher than rock-bottom, place on the media ladder.

"You'll be back in six months. Don't lose any numbers," he said. My decision to go was one of the first logically inexplicable ones I'd made. It came from the gut and a voice that said, "Do it anyway."

I share this because I am not taking a self-righteous stance on the new relevance of new media, or social media. I make a living from it, I believe my company rides along the edge of best practices everyday, but I can't say that I knew this would happen; I'd only hoped I would be able to pursue this growing interest in a model counter intuitive to the people I used to work for. A model that democratized media, to a large extent, and made possible a notion terrifying to most people like me who hinged their self-worth on "making it" in traditional media: that there's a whole helluva lot of talent out there and it ain't all on the Hearst, Conde Nast, or Time Warner payrolls. Traditional media just took in whom they could fit, who matched the pedigree, or who had an uncle who could introduce you to the editor, or who had this random bit of luck and was seen for what she could produce, and sometimes bonafide talent. But so may others could not even make it to the filter, let alone make a living at it.

Back in my print days, there was something so alluring about being one of a few selected, whose name would be committed to print. And there's a whole community of folks, I'm sure, who still hold print sacred. I'm one of them, even as someone whose name has only made it via her work in new media. I fretted so long about being a part of it that even while it's suffering I promise to someday return -- if it will have me. Many bloggers who are doing just fine building platforms online still look at the book deal as the summit of success. I'll know I'm fully evolved when I couldn't care less about hardcover, softcover, or any cover.

Blume writes of executives who have dedicated their careers to traditional media and who now have no idea what's next. I recall from back in my editing days that the most likely way to "move up" in traditional media was to jump to a new company. I had friends whose resumes made me dizzy--they moved, often laterally, to a company, then another, sometimes even back to their original company. Anything to extricate them from a previously untenable working situation (untenable, meaning with blocked or unclear paths to promotion). Often their situation wasn't any better when they moved, but even the possibility of shaking lose a few additional thousand per year, or removing the word "associate" from their title was worth it. Movement in itself meant relevance.

But now, after swinging from tall building to tall building like Spiderman, these execs are finding themselves in freefall: The buildings have crashed down.

It's been difficult to share my thoughts on the overarching change that's going on, because it would be so easy to accuse me of advocating for the side on which my bread is buttered. But could any of us really read Blume's piece and think that we've ended up on the "right" or "wrong" side? I read it, felt lucky for a second, and then realized, no matter which side we're on, we can't stop moving. We must simply learn to love the freefall, even when at times someone throws us a net.

What I'm grateful for is not having ended up where I am, but for the voice that had told me, when I thought I should stay in the realm of the known, "Do it anyway."

The Accidental Entrepreneur

I never planned on being an entrepreneur. Independent contractor, yes. Freelancer? Uh huh. But an entrepreneur? I never thought I had it in me.

I don't consider myself a risk taker so much as a demander of work I feel passionate about. I'm ambitious, but you don't have to be a risk-taker to be ambitious. You can get all A's in school, graduate from college early with honors, get a graduate degree and thereby hedge your bets that you will be "successful" in the more superficial sense of the word--money and job opportunities. I've always been a hard worker, but that, too, doesn't mean risk-taker. Just why, then, am I an entrepreneur?

It was an accident. I found myself in a situation where the mission, the people, and the timing were right. We didn't think that the market was ripe for us, we just wanted to do what we did. We didn't think about positioning ourselves at that time. We just created what we thought was missing. We had the time and the energy. Considering all of these factors that just fell into place I'm amazed that I became an entrepreneur. The opportunities where pure passion meet a market where it can be leveraged is SO rare.

I'm reading a book, the Entrepreneurial Imperative. I've just started, so no major takes on it yet. But I am struck by the author's premise, which is we will only help ourselves through entrepreneurism. It's the only way, not only in business but in philosophy. We must be willing to take our futures into our own hands.

This can be interpreted in many ways: we can become entrepreneurial by bringing our passions to the workplace, or creating our own workplace if we can't bring them to our current ones. We must allow intrapreneurism (Nina Simosko writes an interesting piece about the origins and true meaning of this word) in our companies.
 
Applying this imperative to the current world situation, we need to allow each other to think our way out of what isn't working. Waiting for cycles of change isn't effective. What will happen if we all take our career lives into our own hands? Make our jobs. Think of our best way to serve.

Perhaps, then, being entrepreneurial would not seem so risky.

Fear

I live in a teensy weensy house. H-band says I exaggerate its teensy-weesiness. Our friends say it's really cozy. I like how, when the sun begins to set, it lights the living room in burnt yellow.

We moved in over Memorial Day weekend in 2004. It seemed like a nice "in-between" place for us, a place where we could test our growing relationship, when H-band was B-friend, and midway into a grad school program. I was working in the city and picked up the bus every day just a few yards from our front door. It was one of the best commutes I'd ever had.

The house had a very affordable rent, almost too affordable. We later learned that the owner was trying to sell the place and kept the rent low to keep people there. For me, that meant saving almost $1,000 a month, compared to what I was paying in the city. That $1,000 became more meaningful when I quit my job to freelance and explore the blogging world. I didn't have gigs lined up, just a book proposal and a desire to learn what was next without knowing what it would look like. The house gave me the luxury of living in uncertainty.

When I quit my other work to make BlogHer a full-time business, our little, rented house made an irregular paycheck possible. We were able to take risks because we weren't tied down to a mortgage. We had a scare when the landlord sold the house, but the new owners let us stay without raising our rent. I was relieved and annoyed at the same time. In my mind I'd set a two-year clock and thought we'd move out when then-B-friend had finished grad school. He was now starting a job, and I was now working from home. The house seemed to be getting smaller.

I noticed things. The unrenovated kitchen didn't have enough counterspace. B-friend and I had to make room by placing a cutting board across the sink. There was no dishwasher, which made for some arguments over opposed philosophies on how long dirty dishes should sit. In the colder months, ants invaded. Some of the braver ones would run across my computer screen or up my pants leg, making me smack myself continually, paranoid that more were close. In the long summer, mosquitoes somehow made it past the cracks between the adjustable screens and the uneven window frames and tortured us in the middle of the night. By the time I came to and heard the buzzing in my ear, our visitors usually had feasted two or three times. Despite the summer heat I'd mummify myself in sheets to prevent more bites and wake up wet with sweat.

"I can't keep doing this," I said, every summer.

"Don't worry, Babe." B-friend said. "We won't be here much longer."

To stay sane I'd walk one block to the local main street on hot summer nights and get ice cream or gelato.

"You won't be so close when we move up into the hills," B-friend said to me, looking eastward, where we took most of our walks, both because the hills provided some challenge and because our thoughts of the future gravitated upward, where the real estate became grander, and more elusive.

Our dining room was too small for our scratched, second-hand dining set to be placed in the middle of it. We'd pushed the table against the wall and set only two chairs at one of the corners. That was all the space B-friend and I needed. That was all the space B-friend needed to propose.

After we married, we fantasized about moving out, getting more closet space, and real furniture to dignify the plates and flatware we'd received by the boxful. We didn't feel right about unpacking it all, thinking that it was just a matter of months before we'd have to pack it all back in again. Every week we looked at patterns, browsed Pottery Barn catalogues for dining sets, found things for "the house," not the one we were currently living in.

We'd heard the economy may become unstable, so we kept our plan, but stopped looking at houses--it was just too painful to look inside a home and not be able to make an offer. We looked only enough to know where we'd look, when the time was right. We figured it would just be another few months.

My company received a round of funding, and we hired staff and moved into an office space on the Peninsula. Though I had been "unofficially" making the drive to Redwood City a few times a week, having official headquarters there now made our home's location problematic.

"If we don't buy right away," I said to H-band, "We'll need to figure something out. Get a place in the city, maybe." H-band placated me as much as he could.

"What's the point of renting a place in the city when we will buy a place soon enough?"

To keep me engaged he indulged me in cleaning out the storage room under the house and the garage--things you do to prepare for moving. We bought travel guides to South America and planned a trip for sometime later in the year, to get away. I ended up squelching the plans when a number of business trips to Europe made planning another trip at that time seem frivolous, and when, driving from a cousin's wedding a few weeks ago, we'd heard some news that made all this speculation about the economy feel a bit realer.

A few people were laid off at H-band's company, and then a few more. This raised some hackles, as I--a dot-com refugee--remember how that started, with just a few, then a few more. H-band began to watch more shows on CNN and MSNBC.

"They don't talk about the same things anymore," H-band said. "They talk about changing the way we live."

"We've been saving," I said.

"We could save more."

Finishing up dinner with friends last night, one of them said, "Well that's my night out for the week." It occurred to me that, some time ago, I stopped counting my nights out for dinner. While I couldn't buy a house, I had become quite accustomed of buying anything else I needed, when I needed it.

Driving home from dinner, H-band said, "We need to think of ways to cut back, before we have to."

"But we have been cutting back. For years we've been cutting back." Or more accurately, not running up credit.

"But all those people who haven't now will, and that's going to make it tough for everybody."

I thought of my few consumer obsessions--wine, spa treatments, travel, and clothes.

"I never noticed that TJ Maxx," I said as we passed it on I-80 through the City. "Is that one new?"

This morning I went to yoga class--the first time in three years. I felt stiff and tight, despite being one of the youngest people in the room. The past few years my body has contracted, possibly from being hunched over computers, or crammed in Economy Plus. I got home and expected H-band to be ready to leave on one of his Epic bike rides. The house smelled of fresh toast and fruit. He was still in his pajamas, watching political shows.

"Aren't you taking off soon?" I asked him.

"I just wanted to relax a bit more," he said. "I like relaxing here."

We watched together. More of the speeches we've seen over the past month.

"No one says it's going to get better soon," he said. I had heard much of the same. He stretched out on our massive two-year old couch. We bought it when we got married, anticipating a much bigger space for it shortly. It was so big we had to move the coffee table out of the way to accommodate the long ottoman it came with. The room seemed to be more a receptacle for furniture than our living space.

"I gotta say, Babe. Despite all the planning, all the looking, I'm happy here."

I had one foot out of the house, and now I've put that foot back in. 

Thanks Wayne!: My interview on Blog Talk Radio

Wayne, you ask really good questions. As for me, two words: Chatty Cathy. To listen to our hour-long chat about the challenges of soloing. Check out Wayne Hurlbert's radio program on Blog Talk Radio. We talk about Living without a Net, Entrepreneurial Sins, and BlogHer. It was a pleasure!

The Small Business Owner's Guide to Life: Rule #1--Stop Trying to Land Mr. Hard-to-Get

I used to read Inc. Magazine purely for hypothetical value, in case I ever needed to know how to run a business. I never planned to start my own company; I was interested in the psychology of a small business owner, knowing that I would someday take the leap again and become an independent contractor, not--I repeat--a small business owner. I figured that mundanities like payroll or P&Ls would keep me from my real work, that of creating. I skipped the stories about legal issues, accounting, and project management software for the virtual enterprise and focused on the lifestyle stories--the profiles of people who lived in incertainty and infinite possibility.

Now I'm wishing I'd paid more attention to the other stuff.

Living Without a Net: An Odyssey into Self-Employment: "Good" Procrastination

I was turned on to this essay by Paul Graham on Procrastination and had to mention it on the blog. So many aspects of it remind me of issues in my own work life.

For the record: I do not consider myself a procrastinator--more a reformed procrastinator. Back when I procrastinated, my house was never so clean than when I was on deadlines. If I struggled with a sentence I'd go wash a dish, or dust a corner of the room I'd noticed hadn't been wiped down in ages.

There are some things I know about procrastinators from the many articles I've read on working styles. Procrastinators are perfectionists in disguise. If they can't do something perfectly they don't do it, period, or they do something else. They often sabotage their efforts by looking for easier things to fix.

I think of yesterday, as I was fleshing out a concept and just got first sight in my mind of just how complicated it was, and how difficult--but possible-it would be to convey this complexity in writing. I got up for something to drink and sat back down, wondering, "Where was I?" But, remembering I was a REFORMED procrastinator and got back on track.

Still, my work style isn't perfect. Some to-do's get delayed, some plans get cancelled. And yet I feel like I am on-purpose. Back when I was a confirmed procrastinator that wasn't always the case. I felt like I worked all the time, but never got anything done.