Life has almost settled. My wife has been transitioning to a new career as a lactation consultant/nurse and she just completed her 500 hours of required training. She's an RN so it was a natural transition, but still lots of work. Quite proud of her. To finish she been living at a friends closer to our old house. She's coming home today. Home to OCNJ. Can't wait.

On my end, I hired a triathlon coach for the first time. I've been racing triathlons for close to twenty years. I finished Ironman Maryland in 2015, then needed shoulder surgery and COVID so I haven't gotten back to that level of racing. I've been doing Sprints and Olympic distance races the past few years and even qualified for and raced in the USA Triathlon Olympic Championship last year, but it's time to get back to longer distances. I'm planning on racing an 70.3 event in late September and need to lose a few pounds and get back in race shape. For the uninitiated a 70.3 triathlon is a 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, and a half marathon.

With everything going on and having a great experience having a support team around the book, I thought, why not follow the same model for my training. I've created my own training plans, but that is time consuming, so having some pros to help, will be refreshing. A key aspect of pulling this off is energy management. I need to finish the book, continue being productive at work, and enjoy the beach life in OCNJ. Oh, and the best of all, my daughter is getting married in July!

On writing

Writing a book is hard. It's a major energy commitment. When I started I had no idea how I was going to pull this off. Do I have the energy to do this? Most think in terms of time. It's a major time commitment and takes a lot of time. I think in terms of energy. We have lots of time, but need to manage our energy to get everything done. I workout and train in the mornings. If I go too hard for too many days in a row, my ability to concentrate, be present, and get things done effectively - to be productive - will suffer.

As I embarked on this journey, I thought writing a book was all about putting my thoughts, and only my thoughts down on paper. That's intimidating and a huge amount of mental energy. Oh, how wrong I was. It's definitely intimidating, but writing a book is not about me. A compelling book, even one on productivity, needs to tell a story, an interesting story. I'm part of that story, but it needs an arc - the introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and a resolution.

We need to lay the groundwork, how did we get here, identify the problem, reveal the solution, and work through implementing my ideas. A major aspect of that is research. Each chapter to be interesting includes several elements - a personal story, research facts, a first person interview and even second person interviews. Including these elements in each chapter makes it interesting, compelling reading. The challenge of writing the book was not what I thought it would be. You do have to write, but it's about research and research I'm good at.

Everyone thinks of productivity and getting stuff done in terms of time management. Productivity is a huge $5 billion dollar industry. They push maximizing your time. When did this even start? Well, a long, long time ago. Think ancient Rome. Lots more on that, but more recently Frederick Taylor is consider the person to really get it started. He was hired by Bethlehem Steel in the early twentieth century to improve productivity and his efforts kicked off modern day time management, but what history has forgotten is that he was fired.

Taylor's work lead to burnout and no improvements. Quite the opposite of what he's known for. An interesting story indeed.

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