I spent a good bit of my spare time this week trying to get my task list life back under my control.  Needless to say, when you ignore anything like that for 3-4 months, things start to get missed.  Missed is only good when someone is shooting at you.

The first step was deciding once again what task management tool I wanted to use.  I’m  a geek, I love tools.  Bright shiny tools. I had been using Thinking Rock which I liked for its cross platform capabilities.  I was still deciding whether to make my primary workstation my Macbook, or my Thinkpad from work and Thinking Rock let me move back and forth.  The problem was I had to then keep track of updates and put them in later.  With me, not so good an idea since I tend to forget to do it until too late.

However, my beautiful wife needed the Macbook for her nursing studies.  So I went back to something I had tried and liked, but hadn’t really committed to.  Remember The Milk is not strictly a GTD tool, it is a list management tool.  But with just a little work it works just fine.  More importantly it syncs with my Blackberry Curve.  Since I installed the 4.5 OS update on my Blackberry it has been much more user friendly, and the task management interface on it is simple but gets the job done.  So now I can enter tasks right away, without losing them.  Then I go back and can manage them from RTM’s web interface, and they are automatically synced back to my Blackberry.

Now the real fun begins.  Getting my task list life organized again….

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I think the senate is unclear on the concept of why the House bailout was rejected, at least by the House Republicans and the vast majority of the American people.  It isn’t that we don’t want the problems fixed, it is that we don’t want to pay for the mistakes and greed of Congress coupled with Wall Street.

Make no mistake, we know who’s fault this is (well, at least some of us do).  And the Senate version of the bailout does not address the problem, it confirms and extends it.  The same essential bill is being offered, but with more pork.  I am disappointed in John McCain for supporting this bill.  It won’t help his election campaign, and it violates his stated principles about pork and waste.

Earmarks, pay for play, and lobbying got us into this mess, made it worse, and are not going to solve it for us.

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Downtime in that environment could cost millions (the rough planning figure I used was in the vicinity of a quarter of a million dollars an hour in lost productivity with the first 15 minutes of the outage losing between 4-24 hours of work.  Lots of money was on the line, and I had plenty of senior management at IBM regularly telling me how criticial it was.  I even got a phone call once from the VP in charge of the Server group to let me know how critical uptime was for a particular chip build.

Needless to say, in that environment it would be easy to panic.  Most times I didn’t because I had a strong team backing me.  The few times I did panic were very instructive.  Here are some of the lessons I learned:

1. Panic will not make the solution better.  It usually prevents the solution.
2. Panic will not get anything done any sooner.
3. Choices made while panicking will almost universally prove to be the wrong ones.
4. Panic immobilizes.
5. Panic equals FAIL.

Panic is what I see going on with the bailout.  We don’t know what to do, so we gotta do *something*.   And we do need to do something.  But does it need to be so panic driven?  What will change between today and tomorrow that will make such a huge difference?

Bold and decisive action does need to be taken, but it should also be deliberate action, not the panic driven need to do anything to show we are doing something.

Rudyard Kipling (under read in our politically correct society said this:

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too; . . . If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same . . . yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.

We forget this to our peril.

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Below is the text of an email I sent to my senators today.

Please vote against the bailout bill.  I have already contacted my Representatives office (Mike Conaway) and thanked him for voting against it.  I hope to be able to thank you as well on Wednesday.

The bailout has been necessitated by poor policy that was the enabled by the Community Reinvestment act and poor oversight by Congress.  The activities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the stewardship of Henry Paulson, John Snow, and their predecessors.

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