“Task Saturation is too much to do with not enough time, not enough tools, and not enough resources. It can be real or imagined, but in the end it can do the same thing. It can kill you. What fighter pilots know about task saturation should worry every CEO. As task saturation increases, performance decreases; as task saturation increases, executional errors increase. … The correct action to take is to acknowledge that it exists, acknowledge that it creates problems, identify the symptoms and then work to eliminate it.”
-Flawless Execution: Use the Techniques and Systems of America's Fighter Pilots to Perform at Your Peak and Win the Battles of the Business World
Too many balls in the air this morning, after cramming six depositions and a mediation into the last couple days.
Pressure builds to go back to Florida a few days early--a client is being deposed in Alabama on the 25th, and insists I show up in person. P can't leave Corning that soon, but we want to spend Memorial Day weekend on the farm. I reckon that means I'll fly down on the 24th, then fly her down to Tallahassee via Delta that Friday. But what happens the following Monday? I'm supposed to be opening the new office the next day. Her ticket therefore is probably going to be round-trip, and I'll get back to New York when I can.
Speaking of the new office, a battle royale is building over furnishings, washing away the brief bonhomie of the firm retreat.
In a business that shares overhead and distributes net revenue to the equity partners (that would be most law firms), no one wants to spend on things that don't directly benefit his or her own practice. It's just human nature. And furnishing the new office the right way is going to cost a little up-front money. I hired an interior designer, who assembled an inventory of nice-but-sort-of-expensive stuff as furnishings. The executive committee recoiled at the price tag, and one of my partners suggested instead that I go to the surplus furniture store where they sell great stuff that people removed from their rental condos during the last renovation.
Post-2009 garage sale is not the image I hoped to convey. I see trouble ahead.
Then there is the house we're looking to buy up here.
Waiting today for the nice Corning lawyer to send us a contract for review. How to finance? Do we get a loan and mortgage up here, or use some sort of VA product leveraging the farm? We could pay cash for the damn thing, but for the fact that the firm's executive committee doesn't bonus someone even when, as has happened this year, I've covered my draw for the year already.
And the landlord is looking for a commitment from us to be out of the Sinclaire House before the end of June, so he can move another family into this place. But the lawyer says the closing pipeline is backed up 2-3 months, so if we leave here and don't have the 1849 house closed Peg'll be in the Staybridge Suites. What happens to the cats in that scenario?
It all makes my head spin.
And, of course, the contractor who's fixing the condo (in theory) is now a week late in submitting a budget and schedule.
That's our corner unit there on the fourth floor. The views are awesome, certainly better now that they've replaced with sliding glass the boards that covered our blown out windows from 10.10.18 until the end of January this year.
Felix claimed he could do the job in twelve weeks, which would've been fine had we managed to engage him when we first started this conversation back in February. Now I am stuck looking for short-term lodgings in Bay County for the summer while I'm standing up the new office, and finding only options like this:
Of course, it does come with a pig cooker and old tires/planters in the front yard, which is nice.
"Try posting on Facebook," a realtor friend in PC recommended, looking for a way to find a place to lay my head over the summer. I've assiduously avoided looking at Facebook for a month or more, benefitting my mental health greatly along the way, but I guess I'll give it a try.
Sherm the airplane mechanic finally called yesterday to declare the annual inspection of the Mighty Cardinal complete after nearly three months. It's supposed to be sold on Monday, and I'm holding my breath that the closing will happen and we'll be back down to one airplane.
Meanwhile, there are those sixty or so ticking time bombs in my virtual file cabinet, with two jury trials scheduled in August and a mound of depositions and motions and trial preparation between here and there. Clients clamor for face-to-face meetings, and depositions are mostly in-person now. I am confident we'll get back into a rhythm as things lurch back to life, and with the new plane we'll eventually be able to juggle Corning, Perry, and Panama City. The last on that list, however, is going to demand an inordinate amount of time during the next few months.
Today I have seven (yes, seven) conference calls. In between I need to talk to a couple bankers about the 1849 house problem, and register with Jeppesen so all the magic stuff on our new instrument panel doesn't go blank in a couple weeks. I offered a friend an airplane ride over the weekend, but it sounds like his schedule won't allow it, and P would like to go someplace fun like Maine over the weekend. I guess we need to get those trips in while we can--vocational reality is about to rear its demanding head, and our weekends together up here grow short.
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