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.

I’ve been working on chapters for Definitive Drupal 7 about project planning and managing a major project. It’s supposed to come out this fall, we hope!, and this one’s been on my plate for awhile. I’m about half-way through the “Planning a Project” chapter, and I’m noticing a theme in my writing. It’s very subtle.

It goes a little like this:‘Don’t kill yourselves off. You are no good to us dead. Make reasonable goals. Don’t do anything you don’t think you can do.’ Which is fun, because there’s also the theme of ‘Drupal can do almost anything. Be really excited about all of the stuff that it can do.’ (The hard part is figuring out where the hell that ‘almost’ lies, and your own limitations, and what else you’ve got to go learn.)

And then I scurried off to a meeting and sortof lived it. ‘Tell me stories. Oh, holy god, that is more than I can do, you do need an experienced team. Stop right there while I make a call. Ok, these people! Go!’
I had really mixed feelings about calling Uncle and we find someone else to play, because it could have been a lot of fun. But it’s all about delegation right now, finding those things where I’m doing exactly what I’m good at, other people are doing what they’re good at, and it’s sortof like Plato’s idea of Justice is coming alive in the world. (Lyza will appreciate the strange parallels. As near as I remember it, Plato’s ideal of justice was everyone doing exactly what they were meant to.)

But when ultimately, it can work out for the best and you’ve pointed folks down the right path, it’s the point where you invoke the ‘Glass of Wine’ rule and call it off for a bit.

The Glass of Wine rule is a post all its own.

As is how I’m working in Jersey Shore references into the Planning a Project chapter. We’ll see if it stays in.