Jay McGavren's Journal

Wish I’d seen this quote a long time ago:

There is always more to do than there is time to do it, especially in an environment of so much possibility. We all want to be acknowledged; we all want our work to be meaningful. And in an attempt to achieve that goal, we all keep letting stuff enter our lives.

The problem, of course, is that we also want to finish what we start. Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they’ve started.</i>

Here’s the interview it’s from.

I need to figure out a top priority project, drop everything else, and just freaking do it. I think I’ll be a much happier person once I do.

Getting Things Done...

Thanks to furl.net’s popular links, I’m finding a great many people talking about David Allen’s Getting Things Done. It’s basically a set of principles for keeping your life organized, and though a lot of it is stuff I discovered on my own, it really fills in the blanks. I’m probably going to grab this book and see how much of it I can (readily) implement.

Four different developers are taking my translator model from an old project of mine and adapting it to a new hotel brand. They’re whipping through the code in no time.

I’ve always worked solo, so I was never sure how my code would hold up when someone else was maintaining/extending it. It’s a huge relief to see that others can actually grok it.

A conference call I was on this morning between like 25 people in Scottsdale, Dallas, and the U.K. was taken completely offline when one of the participants (we still don’t know who) put the conference call on hold. The muzak was so loud that no one could hear anyone else, so everyone had to scramble to switch to another conference bridge. :)

Small world...

Wow - one of our VPs who I knew pretty well from Omaha just left our company, and I thought I’d never hear from him again. I just now got a call from him, though, and it turns out he’s at one of our business partners. He was looking to sell new services back to my company. :)

He’s hardly the first - virtually everyone who left Omaha after the layoffs wound up at business partners or competitors, doing work virtually identical to their previous jobs.

I guess your job never changes, only who writes your paycheck.