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 Traveling to California recently for the PalmSource Developer's Conference 2004, I experienced a kind of luxury that I don't always take notice of when I am back on my home turf. I am not talking about the lovely thick Turkish Bathrobes at the Fairmont Hotel, having maid service to straighten the room each day, or the catering service. The hotel was very cushy indeed, and these services certainly contributed directly to the effect to which I am referring. No, I am talking about the luxury of having only about ten tasks ap pear on my To Do List in Life Balance.
Because I had assigned tasks to be done while I was in San Jose, the ten or so tasks left on my Life Balance list included the following. I needed to coordinate the submission of a future advertisement for another conference. I needed to attend the sessions each day. I needed to go to the lab to be sure that our Palm edition of the Life Balance software was ready for the next incarnation of Palm OS, now named Cobalt. I had several meetings with partners lined up. There was a dinner party with friends to attend. And of course packing up for the return trip. The mission for the conference was crystal clear, learn everything we needed to know about Cobalt in three days and come home. To be sure, many of the things I normally would do, were being taken care of by the rest of my great support team, or they would have to wait until I got back. Nevertheless, the hundreds of other tasks that could contribute to my list in any given day were not on my list. For the week, my list was going to be surprisingly sparse. I was two thousand miles away from my normal routine. This resulted in a liberating concentration on our coding efforts which was incredibly productive, and surprisingly pleasurable. This was not by any stretch of the imagination a vacation for us. We woke up before dawn because of the difference in time zones between the East Coast of the United States and the West Coast. We went to the conference sessions all day. We talked to friends, colleagues and business partners until our voices were raspy. We only see this great group of people in person once a year, and there was a lot to talk about. The engineering lab time began in the early evening and went until midnight. Long days which should have been exhausting instead left us energized and eager to follow through. Why is it that we still felt relatively crisp and chipper by the end of the week? Why weren't we stressed out from the information overload? What could account for the sense of comparative ease with what we we were doing? I am definitely biased on this point, but I believe that part of the reason is captured in the design of Life Balance itself. By filtering away tasks from your To Do List that are not relevent to your current situation, you unburden yourself of the task of having to remember all the tasks that you can't actually do right now. All those other tasks can buzz around your head like hungry mosquitos on a hot summer evening next to the swamp. You think, "If I were at home, I could be fixing the screen door" and "I wonder if the mail got brought in" and " I hope the dog is okay." In that very instant, you miss what David Nagel said in the keynote. Ouch! Someone get the Bactine! Never forget that the tasks that you can't do right now, are out for blood -- they will do their utmost to distract you from your mission, and in the long run they will try to distract you from your heart's desire, maybe even your destiny. Don't let them sink their teeth into you! Life Balance is designed to be Distraction Repellent! Apply it liberally to all the exposed surfaces of your To Do List. Keep in mind that when you are traveling on business, it is always more tiring to keep going back home in your imagination to try to take care of your normal routine every few minutes. And you won't earn any extra frequent flyer miles. Once you are at the conference, you have to stay at the conference. When you are fully engaged with whatever you are actually doing, when it is meaningful and motivating to you and you know it is contributing directly to your long term goals, you are better able to jump right in and relish the task at hand. And that makes it easier to accomplish whatever you are doing with more oomph! More commitment! More gusto! Of course, when you get back, you can play with the dog. |
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