Panic and Fear! Panic and Fear!

Okay, maybe that headline isn't completely accurate.  In fact my wife Margaret and I got most of our panicking out of the way when we discussed doing this over the past few weeks.  On top of that we have this uncanny knack of never losing it on the same day, so one of us is usually there to talk the other one down off the ledge. -And to do the morning routine and get the kids off to school when the other had a restless night.


But as excited as I am, I did get the feeling last night as I left work for the last time that I just walked off a cliff and have just 14 weeks before I hit the ground, so I better keep my wits, and my purple crayon, and come up thinking fast.  -And organize my time and tasks linearly, which as my friends know, may require Ritalin.


So for me, the first step is figuring out a work-from-home routine that works because,  as anyone with kids can tell you, you barely get enough uninterrupted thought to complete a relatively straightforward task like making a cup of coffee, so attempting to do a deep dive on say, Head First iPhone Development without sequestering yourself just isn't going to happen.  (As I am writing this, I've had to ask my son to stop singing a made up a song about his Lego Star Wars AT-AT no less than four times.)


So, after experimenting with various ideas to defrag my day as much as possible, the routine that seems to work is to get up at 5am and sneak down to my desk in the basement. That gives me 3 quiet hours or so before taking the kids to school, then another 4 1/2 before our daughter gets home from preschool, runs downstairs and turns on her Smoosh CD and plays next to my desk, which is the mental equivalent of a buffer-overflow attack. When that happens I call one of three audibles: (a) Hang here and switch to manual half-brain tasks like configuring PCs and web servers, integrating all the crap I just hauled home from my work office, etc. (B) Head up to my wife's office and squat there while she runs interference for me, or (C) Head to a coffee shop.  I also try to batch any meetings and calls for the afternoon as well.


So far so good.


-Chris