Day: September 13, 2006

Three weeks after the last time I wrote about it, it was time for the track again yesterday morning. The welcome news? Shorter distance, since my companion is starting his taper for an October marathon, so aiming for faster/shorter reps. We did 6 x 800m, with the intention of dropping 2 seconds each rep. Not so consistent, but we did get faster, and I let it go for the last one.

In order…
3:07
3:04
2:59
2:58
2:58
2:43

That last one was close to what I could put in for 8 reps the summer before junior year of high school, training for cross-country season. I have rarely kept a good training journal, but I did that summer, and I still have it (somewhere…box in the garage?). I ran that workout in the summer heat of Billings, Montana with a good friend and his father. I still think of that workout as one of the harder ones I ever did, so finding a bit of speed several (ahem) years later feels good.

The problem is, as I discussed yesterday with a college friend, the comparative scale. When I compare my fitness to where I was five years ago, I’m happy. When I compare it to my fitness in the late high school through just after college years, it’s not such an even match…and it never will be. I’m (slowly) coming to terms with that reality. The aches and pains help reinforce the message.

I’m about ten days away from my one triathlon for the year. It will be harder to wake up early thereafter, so I’ll have to find the next race.

I pre-ordered Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence from Amazon. After reading two of his earlier books (I own Visual Display), I was looking forward to his first in years. Bottom line… the book is beautifully made, and two chapters shine, but this tome feels more like a collection of uneven essays than the tour-de-force of his earlier volumes.

The chapters I enjoyed?

The one on sparklines, which wasn’t a new concept for me, given the lengthy web discussion of same, but since I haven’t read that entire forum, the edited version was most welcome.

The evisceration of PowerPoint was a guilty pleasure. I’ve long felt frustrated by the format, and this was simply backing for my previously held biases (1, 2). Two full pages are simply a paper version of Peter Norvig’s brilliant Gettysburg address. Note: Anil Dash has often written interesting material about business software

I haven’t created a “deck” since joining OpenDNS. I’m pleased with that fact.

The irony isn’t lost on me here. David Allen’s Getting Things Done (paperback) has been on my “to blog” list for several weeks. Finishing the book took several months, too, because I didn’t want to race through it, and I didn’t want to pretend to absorb it, or why read it? I’ve hardly studied it, but I have read the entire book, and even tried to put a few methods into place to change the way I organize my “to do” items. The Internet is full of resources and tools for applying GTD techniques, and I’ve chased after a few.

I will say that I like the simplicity of the framework, and I’ve become more and more a keeper of lists, because I cherish the idea of avoiding “open loops,” where the mind cycles over something again and again because you don’t write it down and give yourself a break about where it really fits. Urgent? Important? Do you have all the prerequisites handled? For simply sanity, those reminders are welcome, and (literally) a load off my mind.

The “next action” bit, though, doesn’t advance my work tremendously. I can spend a lot of time planning instead of doing. No matter how much I believe in the value of thinking before acting, sometimes acting helps your thinking. I have a piece of paper somewhere with a favorite quote of my friend Courtney, and it’s a reminder that when you come to a crossroads, you must keep moving. It’s more eloquent in its original formulation, but it boils down to the more popular “When you see a fork in the road, take it.” The discipline of “next action” imagines that you really can scout ahead and consider all avenues. It probably helps to do what planning you can, even knowing you’ll be surprised and change course, but it’s hard to do something like this halfway.

If you feel like you’re in a rut, GTD does give you some ideas and a sense of tangible accomplishments, however small — and that’s not bad. I am keeping my inboxes cleaner, and several to do lists, some of which are life lists. Writing it down somewhere does help, even if it’s acknowledging the unlikelihood of the effort.

At least this post is one more thing to cross off the list. 😉