Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Loose ends and estimates
Just a bit of administration fit around family time today. I took some time off. The morning for church was a given, but I took Jo, my wife, grocery shopping instead of asking one of my sons to drive her. I made time for our semi-traditional Sunday pizza supper and I left the computer for a little TV with the family tonight.

Maybe not productive workwise, but needed. One thing I can't afford to forget is that I'm not just a worker; I'm a husband, a father and, oh yes, a human being with emotional and social needs to fill.

What work I did today focused on administration: getting my estimates together for MasterVisions to detail what loose ends I recommend tying up and what ongoing maintenance I recommend that I continue to do. And then I threw out all of the detailed MasterVisions work schedules I had drawn up for the year. That part actually felt pretty freeing.

One thing that surprised me, though. I've long felt like all the projects Mark and I had lined up for MasterVisions was unending. Yet as I went through the work plans and assessed what definite projects remained, I found that I've already cut a wide swath through the list of projects I had planned for this year. A lot of what I considered high priorities are already behind me.

There are still more that Mark may or may not decide to carry through, but significant progress has been made. It makes me feel better about cutting back on work for Mark. And Mark has seemed interested in completing a lot of the projects that remain. So who knows what I'll be doing yet.

I think more and more that the decision to rearrange our working arrangement will be good for both of us. I think we both had gotten into a rut where he was comfortable having me work almost full time for him, even though a lot of what I was doing was really too routine to be worth paying me consultants fees for. And I was comfortable with the stability of working solely for him.

Reassessing our work relationship forces us to look at everything with fresh eyes again—determine which projects are beneficial and which are we just slipping into just because every idea automatically got added to the docket.

And now I have a chance to explore the other directions that doing all my work for MasterVisions had pushed out of the way. Now if I can just avoid overbooking myself with plans for those things. I've already committed myself to three avenues that, the more I look into them, each look more like they could eat up my time full time.

But dealing with that will come tomorrow or Tuesday, depending on how much time I spend working in Mark's office tomorrow. I leave you with what I keep reminding myself: bite off the work in bite-size chunks.
Jeff