HUD, part 3
(So here is part 3 of my long exegesis on [Heads-up Display], the semi-cryptic & minimalist side-project that I’ve been posting over on Dreamwidth.)
The next section is the true heavy-hitter: “debts“. Displaying my debt numbers as they slowly roll down to zero was HUD’s original raison d’etre.
I find it gauche to discuss the naked specifics of one’s finances in a public conversation, so I simply label the debts “1″ to “4″. The main thing to know about them is that they’re all going *down*. If all goes well, debt 1 (my oldest) will be payed-off by the end of the summer and debt 4 (my newest) will be blanked by year’s end. The other two amount to about 8 grand, 5 grand of which is tied-up in “debt 3″, a 15-year low interest student loan.
So why are these debts such a big deal to me? Just this: as you may recall, 4 years ago I put a five-year plan in motion. The plan was to move from Phoenix AZ to the Pacific NW, and find a town that I loved so much that I’d want to spend half-a-decade there and put down roots. A place where I could find a satisfying job or two, work hard, make friends, live on the cheap, and become debt-free & fully self-reliant by age 30. Bellingham WA turned out to be that town, and I truly do love it here more & more every year.
The rest of that plan is going great. I’ll be 29 this December, and turn 30 in December ‘11. While I’ll likely be carrying around that student loan for a few more years to come, by this time next year the amount of my budget set aside for debt payments will go from $350/mon (right now) to $30/mon next summer.
To me, that’s huge. That spells the difference between having to continue living in the same town (however nice it may be) and continue doing the same steady full-time, well-paying job or else face bankruptcy… or having the freedom to packup a backpack w/ a few essentials, lace up my hiking boots and travel anywhere in the world, for any length of time. Granted the former is okay. But the latter has been my own private dream practically since the time I was first old enough to lace my own shoes.
Those debt numbers represent, in my mind, the actual physical distance between me and one of my biggest, burliest long-term goals. It’s one of the reasons why I think posting the thing on a site called “Dreamwidth” seems doubly appropriate.
Anyway, that’s that. I’m sure you’re all sick of hearing me crow endlessly about debt-reduction. I admit I’ve gotten a bit obsessed with those four numbers. Putting them on HUD helps me push them out of my head and down onto a few clean lines of text, where they seem far less immutable and scary.
Next time, I’ll move on to the less serious stuff & talk about the next section, which is all about my hobbies. See yah then.
Fatigue & distraction
I’ll interrupt the HUD-related posts for tonight. My mind isn’t really in that place right now. Instead, let me talk shortly about the two things smashing into me tonight: distraction & fatigue.
First though, let me mention that by the end of September I’ll likely be back to a normal American 5-on-2-off work schedule. The “marathon summer” approach is a short-term fix only, something I’ve decided to do entirely for economic reasons. My sincere hope is that, work-wise, I’ll never have another summer like this again. It’s working pretty much how I planned it, but it’s not a method I particularly endorse. (Instead, I just give this advice: if you ever get into debt, work as hard as you can to pay it off fast, using whichever method works best for you.)
The main reason I can work a no-weekends schedule is because I’m pretty good at managing fatigue. “Fatigue management” is, essentially, knowing when it’s okay to let yrself slack-off. And here’s a secret, friends: The answer is usually “more than you think”.
Like right now, for instance.
I guess what I’m driving at is: I’m tired & distracted tonight and my solution for that is not “powering through it”. That may work for some people, but for me the prescription is an hour of unfocused goofing-around, then sleep. With luck, that remedy will work & I’ll be back & more lucid tomorrow.
HUD, part 2
(continuing from yesterday. This is more of my exhaustive explication of each line-item on my daily “status weblog” at [Heads-Up Display].)
The next section is what I think of as my daily “score”. On a less abstract level, these four lines let me quantify how I’m doing on four basic ongoing goals: “1) Remember to take care of myself & my daily business. 2) Keep my inbox clear. 3) Keep my finances positive. 4) Remember to water my herbs.” Since forgetfulness, communication shortcomings, budget concerns, and straight-up slackerdom are my four big weaknesses in life, these four numbers are a decent indicator of how my day is going.
The first line is “checklist items:“. This is the output of my basic daily todo-list system.
Two of the five essential items I have in my pockets at all times are a spiral-top pocket memo book and a pencil. I like spiral-tops because they’re double sided. I keep my to-do list on the top page of one side, and flip it over to scrawl random notes on the back side. Plus, they sit better in a pocket than the spiral-side kind.
Here’s a quick rundown of my checklist system. (If you’re the tl;dr type, just skip this paragraph, but I know there are other [lifehacker]-type folks out there that get switched-on by this kind of thing.) I separate tasks into only three categories. “new” items are things I just wrote down today. Every morning, I copy over all the “new” items on to a fresh page and write a number in front of it (generally 7 or 14): that’s the number of days I plan to keep the task alive. If an “old” item stays on my to-do list for days, I copy it over again and again, decrementing the number each time. When an item reaches 0, it’s “expiring”– if I don’t cross off an expiring item by the end of the day, I just erase it. (Erasing an expired task is a tough thing to do, psychologically. It generally means admitting that I dropped the ball on something. But taking that hit and getting closure is much preferable to dragging around a todo list of months-old crap. Took me a long time to learn that.)
The memo books I use have 15 lines on a page, so I try to keep the list capped at 15 items max. Yet another good reason to keep your todo list on paper instead of a PDA.
The next line is “inbox:“, followed by a number. My goal is for this number to always be zero. (see [this lecture by Merlin Mann] for a good explanation of what “Inbox Zero” is about.)
The key addition for me is that “Inbox” is an umbrella concept that *includes* my Gmail inbox, but also encompasses all the other ways that people use to communicate me– voice mail, real mail, RSS feeds, Facebook, and all that. It’s the whole ball of string. I try to process (again, see above vid for what I mean by “process”) and respond to *everything* that hits my Inbox within 24 hours. Sometimes I slip. (In fact, I slip a lot.) But if you have a good mental system for processing your ‘box– and I think my system is pretty good– it’s hard to get too far lost.
If the number is higher than zero, it means I have stuff in my Inbox that I’d like to respond to, but haven’t got to yet. If *you* left me a message and my Inbox isn’t zero, then it’s likely yours is sitting right there. To quote [jessicapierce]: Please be patient, I am only a donkey.
The next line is “budget:“. I definitely don’t want to unpack my entire budget process right here either (though, yeah man, I’m proud of my budgeting method too). The main thing to know is that I consider my budget to have only three states: “green”, “black”, and “red”. I update it about once a week.
“Green” means that my savings account is going up. “Black” means that I’m on budget, but haven’t yet met my savings goal for the month. “Red” means that my savings are going down because I’ve gone over-budget. (note: “red” doesn’t mean that I’m broke, just losing money. So don’t panic. I have savings. Right now, “green” means I’m saving 15% of my income straight off the top.)
And the last one is a simple boolean. “checked herbs?“, yes or no. Because I am constantly forgetting to water the potted herbs on our back porch, and if you forget to water them on hot day they get toasted.
So that’s it for that. There’s still 6 blocks to go. I’ll keep going tomorrow.
HUD, part 1
(a continuation of yesterday’s entry. Every which way I tried to write this I soon realized it was going to get loooong. Expanding each HUD entry into a fully-formed thought will take pages and pages. Looks like I’ll be splitting this into sections too.)
So, HUD. [Heads-Up Display] is the organization method I use to keep my life moving. It’s my dashboard. I used to keep this kind of thing in a notebook or on a corkboard, but tossing it up on a blog just works better. It’s already become a productive habit.
Like a dashboard, it’s just a bunch of numbers and gauges of varying obscurity. Even if it’s obvious what an item measures, it may not be particularly obvious why I care about a particular number. I’ll try to answer that broader question as I go. Here’s an explanation of each, from top to bottom:
The first item is “Rad thing du jour“. A short answer question: What was the raddest thing you saw today? Phrase your answer in the form of a URL.
Posting this helps me think back and compartmentalize all the wonderful, fun and important things that I see on the daily, both online and off. I don’t think I’m boasting to say that I find the world we live in to be freaking amazing. We are awash in wonders every single day. “Rad” (as in “radical”) is my favorite word to describe this kind of thing.
I put this right at the top of the page, as a sort of antidote to all the boring crap beneath it.
Next, “flour milled“: This is the amount of flour that I personally produced that day. I’m the miller’s assistant at an independent, organic flour mill. Flour is my stock & trade. It’s the main way that I pay my bills & make a living. (I don’t get paid by the pound or anything; I just enjoying having the number to look back on at the end of the day.)
We sell flour in bulk (25- or 50-pound bags) and in cases of two-, five-, or eight-pound bags (a case weighs about 30 or 40 lbs). We have 13 different varieties of flour, so I sometimes use abbreviations. “UBW” is Unbleached White Flour, “WW Stone” is Stoneground Whole Wheat, “BW” is Buckwheat, etc.
For some perspective, 1 pound of flour = 1 loaf of bread. I generally mill 3000 to 5000 lbs of flour every day (Mon-Fri), enough to feed a few thousand people.
(continued tomorrow)
A weekend of words
I haven’t taken a day off in four months. For the rest of August and into September, I’ll be working 6 to 8 hours every day, Monday-Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. That’s obviously a tough schedule to keep. It requires major willpower and some personal sacrifices. What’s less obvious is A) I’m doing this intentionally, and B) it’s working out wonderfully. If you want the story of my summer in a sentence then there you go, but it’s far from the whole picture.
Every day I come home tired– typically *happy* and tired, mind you, and very rarely feeling exhausted, but when I’m tired the first thing to sail out the window is my ability or desire to type a creative sentence.
Related paragraph: I received a package(!) today from my aunt & uncle in Michigan that held a freshly-sealed jar of blackberry jam and a pocket knife, both very appreciated, especially the beautiful jam (To Jerry & Sue: Thanks!). In one part of the letter that came with it, my uncle wrote “I try to understand your Facebook and Beyond Metamora updates but I’m a bit out of touch with the lingo.” Which tells me that I should probably try to do more explicatin’.
To that end, I’ve cleared off the rest of my afternoon (ie post-gardening) schedule this weekend so that I can spend some time offloading some text, however poorly or tiredly, about the oh-by-the-way rocking good times that I’ve been enjoying this summer.
First, I should start off by doing a much-needed “Hey, WTF is this?” post about my Dreamwidth journal, [Heads-Up Display]. Other than the occasional blip on [Twitter], HUD is the only thing online that I’ve been updating regularly. Updates to that site are written in my wonky shorthand and– I cannot stress this enough– probably of limited interest to anyone other than me. But explicating HUD provides a useful window into what I’m actually up to this summer, and what I’m trying to accomplish.
After that, I’ll write a bit more about milling and gardening– ie the things I do for a living– and a bit about the hobbies I mess with in my leisure hours. Finally, I’ve got some fairly important and substantial news to share about what I plan to be doing next summer & beyond.
(*ding* part 1 done. barring calamity, look for part 2 tomorrow)
