Today my main project was reading and notetaking from A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide), which was suggested to me by a work colleague when I expressed interest in trying for a project management position. I’ve gotten this tome from the library with the intent of reading it through and maybe completing a mock or real project using the principles. Today I read Chapters 7-9, focusing on Cost, Quality, and Human Resources. It’s dry but also fairly easy reading once you get the rhythm of it (it is written rather repetitively).
Ideas for what projects to undertake to experiment with the framework:
Rebuilding the yurt (as a rental space)
Restoring an old house (if the lady down the street ever lets us buy it)
Writing a book
Developing the Friendship Database into a salable application
Re-covering our couch (this is probably too simplistic)
Creating a new household system (meal planning for a particularly busy season or coordinating independent lawn care for the summer)
Planning a big ol’ party (we want to throw a big 5th anniversary party since we didn’t have much of a wedding)
What do you think?
Today I…
Ran 7 miles
Did an hour of job board hunting (half of this time was writing a formal cover letter for a particular position)
Read 3 chapters of PMBOK
Took myself out for lunch
Read some more Slow Productivity
Played 20 minutes of Stardew Valley
Roasted a chicken and did a load of laundry
Today I felt…
One of the ideas Cal Newport puts up in Slow Productivity several times is that people are bad at estimating the amount of time it takes to do knowledge work, and so you had best just go get ahead of it by doubling your timelines for projects and leaving at least a 25% buffer around your daily tasks.
I made the task matrix I shared yesterday mostly to keep myself on task, but I’m also documenting how long I actually work on my projects. In my work as a software developer, projects were notorious for going over schedule and expanding scope in unwieldy ways, so I am interested to perhaps attempt to make estimates on my personal projects and play with systems of documentation to see how they actually go. I haven’t made any estimates — I should try to make one just from my gut and then adjust — but I’m now I’m tracking which is a good first step.
The other question, that most people only make educated guesses at because who would be completely honest on such a survey, is how much time in a given day is it actually feasible, day after day, to spend doing knowledge work? My old supervisor went with six hours per day, after the obligatory email checking and water cooler-ing, but I would place that as overly optimistic except for the most dedicated of workers.
Yesterday I job hunted for about 30 minutes and worked on the Pen Pal Posts e-book for 3.5 hours. Today I job hunted for an hour and did my reading for 2 hours. Very notably not 6, and certainly not 8, in either case. I’m perfectly fine with that, especially in this sabbatical time. Oh, and another about 30-40 minutes per day to write this Substack post.
Tomorrow on the docket is another run, job boards, and I think I will return to the penpal e-book. I think I can finish putting all of the content into the formatted book, but I hesitate to say whether it will be “done,” because polishing can take more time than expected. If I feel done or if I start getting obsessive, I will start building out a sales page on my website for it.
Until tomorrow,
