How your business/life/whatever shouldn't feel. But it's still an awesome wipeout photo.

Tris probably feels the same way, although he said a lot more in “Writer’s Frustration: Taking a Weekend Off”.

That feeling like you just can’t take a weekend off, or you’ll be so behind in either cashflow or workflow that you might as well turn turtle. Or you’ll end up like this guy, and instead of riding the waves, the waves are riding you.

No good!

Yeah, sometimes, you really do just need to go water the plants and do some gardening and try to stretch out your wrists so that you don’t end up with worse carpal tunnel than you already have. (Insert stretch break here.)  Take today, Saturday, July 10th. I worked this morning and got so much farther on some of the things that I never get time to do when I’m on a ‘manager’s schedule’. (See also: Paul Graham’s excellent article on manager vs maker schedules.) And then I got a call from a friend who was moving from one quadrant of town to another and I lifted boxes around for about 3 hours and he’s now totally moved. (Right? No more of that, right?) It’s now the end of the ‘workday’, and I’m back for another few hours of systems-tuning, catching up with email, news and just stuff before I’ll head out again. This is pretty typical.

I rarely take ‘days off’. I break things up into 3 to 4 hour chunks, just long enough to keep all of the gardens weeded, watered and tended to. Maybe I should stop with this title of ‘project manager’ and replace it with ‘chief gardener’.
Back to the weeding.

So these are some of my guidelines or stories or things I do to keep that sense of humor.

Ask yourself one question:
As the owner of a startup, my job is to be the calmest person in the room.  I have to work on this.  Ask yourself the question of ‘What can I do to remain the calmest person in the room?’ And then do it. Even if it’s going to be beer-o-clock for the whole meeting.

Think about your environment:
One thing that seriously helped me keep my sense of humor about the ups and downs of business is getting an office cat. (I also gave up a separate office, have a home office, and work with clients on-site.) He’s about the friendliest cat ever, and whenever I start to lose my sense of humor, I get up and do something with him. It’s about 10 times better than getting up, taking a walk, because sometimes, you have to make a quick decision, and you can’t go wander around the block. (I’m also not allergic to cats, so there you are then.)

Balance calls and emails.
Calls are where you talk about what you’re doing, what you did, and what you want to do. It’s thinking time. It’s communicating time. But give yourself 10 minutes after the calls to be able to write down your promises, and even more importantly, other people’s promises. Email it. Let yourself be on top of it.

Make Rules for yourself:
I have a lot of rules. I can break them when I want to, which makes them more like guidelines than rules. But my rules are: Don’t answer any business call afters: 7pm. Don’t start before 8am local time. (As I’m on the West Coast, this is sometimes more challenging than not. A 9:30am call for them is a 6:30am call for me, which is less ideal.)

Speaking Engagement Rules (Or one massage per talk):
Every time I have a speaking engagement somewhere, I make sure that I book a massage either in the city that I’ve travelled to or when I get back. It reminds me that my shoulders do not have to be so tight, that I can get a chance to think somewhere offline, and that I get out in the real world more than just being there for the conference. I really try to schedule an extra day after the conference just for that kind of time. It’s time to sleep, time to remind myself that I’m not always on deck, that I am dispensible from my own business, and that I am the better for it.

Keep Eating:
You can work as much as you want, sleep as little as you can, party as much as you want, workout as much as you have time for, but if you stop eating, the train ends. I’ve fallen in love with these Oskri bars, they’re just coconut and rice syrup, they fit in a purse, and they get me out of the 2pm ‘I am really unreasonable’ feeling if I don’t have breakfast.  So remember to eat. You want to keep your sense of humor and not lash out.

Something really big. Something possibly life changing. Or at least blog changing.

I’ve decided that this freelancing thing is silly. That there are bigger fish to catch, higher mountains, the works.

What’s not silly is starting a company. Which I did. It’s called Function.

Function is the company that works with open source development shops to make their project management better, to help train their project managers, support them in their growth cycles, and generally keep the wheels on. I don’t know where the road leads from here, but it seems to have Function written all over it.

From this point forward (and from a few weeks ago), msamye.com is now my personal blog about, oh, magical robot ponies and kitties and riding bikes and world travel and whatever else normal people put on their blogs.

Short version: msamye.com = silliness and other good stuff. createfunction.com = equal parts substance and style.

Come along for the ride.

I’ll go over all of the tools that I live and die by, because it’s the question I get asked most often.

What tool is going to be my magical robot pony and fix all of my project management woes?

I’m sorry, but I’m going to level with you here: There is no ‘project management tool to rule them all’. It’s going to be the one that has enough of the features you really need (and this list is different for everyone!): time-tracking, ticket creating, milestone making, invoicing, version-control connecting, report making, whiz-bang graphical burndown charts, etc… But it also has few enough features that you don’t get distracted by what else the tool could do for you.

Resist the urge to go all in and find the tool that does absolutely everything. My biggest line for a tool is: Am I decently happy when I’m using it? This is very nebulous, but I want something that doesn’t frustrate me. It doesn’t have to think as fast as I do, but it shouldn’t get in the way of getting my work done.  Thus far, only Klok and I have stayed friends. And Klok’s just a beautiful time tracker.

A year ago, we had people interested in project management, but not a whole lot of people actually doing it in Drupal. This morning, we had the Project Manager Birds of a Feather session in a room that ended up being standing room only. Sure, there were a few laptop dwellers (and sometimes I’m one of them), but with roughly 40-50 people there, it’s the biggest PM BoF I’ve seen in the year and some change of getting really involved in Drupal community. So thanks.

We also had a panel today on The Care and Feeding of Project Managers, which was a lot of fun. The hour went by fast, with conversations about backgrounds, where we come from, but how we’re all sortof on the same page about how we build our processes.

The four of us (myself moderating, Wendy Iguchi, Chris Strahl, Crystal Williams, on the panel realized that project managers in Drupal haven’t really committed much back to the project itself. Just because there isn’t really a space for that in drupal.org is, realistically, no excuse, and I’ll be the first to say that I haven’t done a good job of putting my own work anywhere useful to folks. To paraphrase Dries, ‘Talk is silver, documentation is gold’.

I’m not sure where things will go from here, because the firehose of crazy projects + conferences + life is totally here, but I’ll be spending some time in the coming months on giving back.

Hope to see some of you in the Managing Expectations talk tomorrow morning, too early!

1) Write on your badge. If you’re doing new cool things, put it on there! If you’re hiring, and I think a few people might be, put that on there too.
2) Perform the Ceremonial DeBadging as you’re leaving the venue. While it’s funny to be branded with this weird blue alien that stares at people, don’t let that out in public.
3) Look at the schedule, see what you want to go to.. and then spend the rest of the time in the Hallway track. That’s where you’ll learn the most, from meeting with people.
4) See if you can’t brush up on actual names instead of drupal.org usernames. I haven’t seen the badge designs yet, but usually, first names are on top and are most visible. (Crell is actually Larry, etc.)
5) Go with the flow. Drupal’s moving and changing, and this is one of the points in the year where we get to talk about where we’re going, where we’ve been, and what cool things we want to see happen.

If you’re on Twitter, think about how many people you’re following, how many people follow you. That’s an easy place to start connecting the networks. The hard part is having a memory that remembers who’s interested in what, who was looking for what, and being able to recall that as someone tells you a story.

Same with LinkedIn. The visual way to see who you went to school with, worked with, or currently work with is another way to jog your memory, and helps keep it current. Who changes jobs, who’s looking, who’s in a particular place.. All of this is useful information about your personal community. The groups on LinkedIn can sometimes be a distraction, but if you’re looking to change careers, pay attention.

I don’t use Facebook, but that’s Another Story. It’s a personal preference.

I’m going to level with you: This is what Social Media really is. Clean off that icky-gross feeling about the word ‘networking’ and stop imagining a roomful of suits drinking martinis and thinking only about where their next sale is coming from, and ‘working the room’ as fast as possible.
Imagine instead that there is going to be a fascinating conversation in that room, and you just have to start asking people about something that interests them. Imagine that your new best friend could be out there, but you’ll never know until you start asking around. Get over that feeling of gross and get out there.
Favorite book for Networking advice: Never Eat Alone.You’re going to have to be in the right frame of mind to read it, but at least flip through it.

A SMART goal is: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timed. List each of the nebulous things you want to do. Use deadlines that are already fixed. For example: end of the year, before the next class starts.

Specific: I want to have more people in this class that I am giving.

Measurable: I want at least 5% more people here for the whole class, not just the first session.

Attainable: 5% is a reasonable goal. 500% for a first goal would be unadvisable.

Revelent: Yeah, I struggle with this too. Is this really important to what I’m doing?

Timed: Deadlines, they’re useful. They’ll get you to action. Let’s say that the class starts in a month.

Now you know what you want?

Here’s how I get there:

I use Remember The Milk for my own projects, things that I want to get done. I have about 10 different ‘buckets’, which are targeted lists, so that I don’t end up getting distracted from one list to another. Getting more people into a class that I’m giving would fall under my ‘Worktime’ lists. So, start at the end: ‘Class Starts May 1st’. Now work backwards: Who’s your ideal candidate? How many people do you need to tell about it? Those are two different steps. The ideal candidate profile is something I should start working on right away, so I’ll have that due at the end of today, April 1st. It doesn’t have to be long, but I should know who I’m looking for. How many people do I have to ask is harder, but not impossible, break it down into: 30 people, 60 people, 90 people. Despite the fact that it’s Thursday and the end of the week, I want to put out a mass mailing for the first 30 people that I need to talk to by next Tuesday morning, April 6. (Timing email newsletters and useful correspondence is another post.)

Thus far, we’ve got two tasks:

• ‘Ideal Candidate Profile’, end of day.
• 30 people mailing, Tuesday, April 6th.

You can’t do the mailing until you know who you’re looking for, and there’s a hidden task in there after you’re done with the candidate profile. Your to-do list in the 5 days between has: Go through the mental rolodex and identify who needs to be in that 30 person first target area.

Haul out your calendar, because dates in calendar are much closer than they appear. You’ll want to followup with those 30 people to see who’s really interested, if you got your ideal candidate right, and if you need to adjust that. Take a subset of 6 from those 30, and make sure that you get to that by Thursday, April 9th. You’ve got the 60 people to pester on April 13th, so broadening the net at little wider, and the 90 people to ask by April 20th, so continue to add the ‘sifting through the mental rolodex’ tasks, and creating that correspondence.

• ‘Ideal Candidate Profile’, end of day.
• Mental Rolodex Sifting for the 30 most suited people
• 30 people mailing, Tuesday, April 6th.
• Follow up with 6 of those candidates that you think would be the most intestested, re-evaluate profile, Thursday, April 9
• Re-sort through the network for 60 people, possibly not as suited
• 60 people Mailing, Tuesday, April 13
• Follow up with 15 people from that list, Friday, April 16th

Now shake the bushes and attempt to get 90 people who might be vaguely interested.
*

90 People Mailing, Tuesday, April 20th.

By this point, everyone and their mother should be aware that you’re giving the class. You’ll probably assume that you’ll get questions, or you’ll want to be able to provide more information on your own website, without really spamming everyone.

• Page on Website describing Class, Pricing, Location, Duration, everything anyone might reasonably want to know, Up by Sunday, April 4th.

You’ll want to link to that in all of your direct marketing emails. Think about what other trade groups might be interested in coming and learning as well, but add those people to your 30-60-90 groups. Everyone’s going to be hearing from you, but if you’re going to meet your goals, push yourself on this one.

—-

We’ve gotten to two weeks before the class. You’ve paid attention to your reminders, and you’ve gone and shaken the bushes. Hopefully, your hard work is paying off and people are signing up in droves. However, you’ve also given yourself a good cushion to be able to evaluate what’s working, what’s not working, and where you can improve. Now’s the time where you’re setting a plan in place for the class to succeed, because you know you’re going to have enough people in the door.

Can you use other systems? Of course. The most important part is: Once you’ve set yourself deadlines, let something else hold you accountable to them. Writing them down is not enough, have something else nag you about them, because it’s too easy to put them in a text file and never look at it again. BaseCamp, OpenAtrium, Google Calendar + Tasks, or any number of systems will fit this bill for you. But the short answer on the Best Task System Ever is: anything that you like to use and will be able to meaningfully remind you.

As no one knew what it was, folks immediately set up a collaborative google map, with periodic screenshots to track the spread of information.

We had some issues getting everyone to add information to the map, because sometimes there would be an edit button, and sometimes there wouldn’t be, and then folks would click around wildly into the description box, add their description of the boom and blissfully clicked save. This caused the description and color mapping to disappear regularly. (Google Maps Collaboration needs improvement on the user interface.)

Audrey and Reid had thoughtfully provided a color-code for placemarkers: Green if you didn’t hear it; blue if the description said ‘heard it’, but no other descriptions; yellow if there was noise and shaking; red if it was really loud. It sortof worked as an easy visual map to triangulate.

The bit.ly link got pushed out over twitter, and not a whole lot of information happened through twitter, other than getting more folks to come add information to the map. We eventually got visual reports of white light and a plume of smoke around the waterfront area of SE, which we’re guessing is around Ross Island, but tough to say.

This was sort like a test of the emergency broadcast system, now with more crowdsourcing. It worked. It was a central repository of information that was timely and easy to access. It kept people engaged through online media with things happening in the actual community, through tools that were readily available. What happens in an actual emergency? We’re getting better at figuring out what flexible surveying needs to be in place, as well as what data we need in an actual emergency.

Also? The ratio of conspiracy theorists to normal people was around 20%, which was awesome. It turned out to be a pipe bomb, but it’s really more about the process than the outcome. This time.

Current favorites:

• Kelly Wearstler, Modern Glamour: The Art of Unexpected Style
• Amy Butler, Midwest Modern

I like Modern Glamour because it meticulously goes through her processes for creating something, and yes, it’s frilly. Midwest Modern is more about the spaces that she creates in, with a glimpse of process behind it. It’s just about cross-disciplinary rigor. And they’re great coffeetable books, if all else fails.