Working

I'll admit, my work is a little odd.  I have been here for nearly 3 years and I still have a hard time getting used to the ebb and flow of the business.  Some days I could spend all day writing, others I am up to my eyeballs in work.  I'm getting better at going with the flow.

Two incredible professional things have happened to me this year.  First, I have been asked to give a keynote speech on the future of Healthcare BI in Groningen, Netherlands in January.  If you're interested you can look it up here www.allaboutdata.umcg.nl
Of course the second is my book, which still feels rather amorphous to me.  I write a lot as part of my job, but those are 2-4 page articles, this is a book with over 250 pages!  So this week I sat down and started pulling everything together that I already had.  I got this...my first draft

I still have a long way to go, but there were more pages here than I thought.  It feels a little bit more real now that this pile of papers are collated under chapters.

Progress?

Like most things in life, progress is relative.  We have spent the last two weekends packing.  Each week we are able to pack up more stuff.  Thankfully this weekend was a long one, but we also had the complication of having the house look decent for a rental showing on Tuesday.  Somehow we managed to pull off both.  The townhouse shined like a new penny.  I should have taken pictures since she doesn't dress up that much anymore :).  We are having a garage sale this weekend (9/10), and yes I am a glutton.  I have no idea what I was thinking other than my blind ambition to de-clutter and purge.

I did the math (that should surprise no one) and I have to write about 1 1/3 pages each work day between now and February to meet the deadline.  The first day after that I wrote over 4 pages, then haven't done any  :(  I have done some editing work, word choice, tone, etc. but no addition of actual content.  Believe it or not, Don Draper from Mad Men said it best "Think about it deeply. Then forget it."  It seems as if most of my writing happens after this exact process.

A picture for your enjoyment: