Relationships

I wish it were as simple as “the weather.” After 27 days in a row of rain (ok – we had sun for part of two days), the sun finally came out today. I’ve been coming up to Alaska in the summer for about 15 years. Amy grew up here and after we started going out together it seemed like a trip to her home state was in order. I grew up in Texas, so after putting up with the “if you cut Alaska in half Texas would become the third largest state” jokes, I took a trip and immediately fell in love with the place. ...

When I was at MIT, I loved the idea of office hours. I didn’t use them often, but when I did they were incredibly helpful to me. When I had focused one on one time with a professor, it took some of the intimidation out of the learning experience and gave me a tight window to be open about the ideas and concepts that I was struggling with, while not worrying about being graded on that stuff. ...

I will never be as good a writer as Amy. It’s always fun for me to read her view of a shared experience we have had. She’s got a lovely post up titled Bella Italia about our Q2 vacation to Positano and Lake Como that includes a bunch of fun pictures include breadsticks and a scorpion. If you want to live vicariously through us and get a sense of what one of the Q vacations is like, wander over to her blog and take a look.

During my morning routine (90 – 120 minutes of catching up on email, reading my “daily” folder in Firefox, reading my RSS feeds, and blogging) I came across Alex Iskold’s post Faster – Why Constant Stress is Part of Our Future. It was ironic to me that I read it shortly after posting my last blog about my Q1 vacation. Alex makes the argument that constant stress is part of our current reality and that it is accelerating. I don’t buy the argument that it is inevitable – I believe that it is a choice. And I reject it. ...

Last week, while on vacation, Fred Wilson wrote a post titled Working on Vacation . It began as follows: The title of this post sounds like an oxymoron. But it is a fact of life for me and probably many of the people who read this blog. The idea of a ‘get away from it all’ vacation is a romantic notion that I cannot seem to achieve as much as the Gotham Gal and my kids would like me to. ...

This rarely happens to me so when it does, I notice it. And – in my effort to write some of my tricks about work-life balance, I thought I’d call this one out, especially since it was totally my fault. In a board meeting last week, I had a quick reaction to something I saw and rather than say something in the moment (since my comment was off topic), I added an item to my todo list to email out a note about it. ...

One of my Work-Life Balance institutions is something Amy and I call “Life Dinner.” We have a standing dinner date on the first night of every month. Given my travel, we usually end up having this date 75% of the time; when we miss it’s my responsibility to schedule a new one shortly after the first. Life Dinner has three key parts to it. First, we have a pre-arranged, regular, repeating evening where we both can reflect on and talk about what is going on in our lives. Next, we give each other a gift. Finally, we have a fun night out and either explore a new place or enjoy one of our regular haunts. A few times a year we will share Life Dinner with another couple, although we almost always do it alone. ...

I spent the weekend in Austin with my dad who has written a nice post about his experience with me. We ate, hung out, ate some more, wandered around, saw a shitty movie, had a fantastic dinner with friends, went for a run, and enjoyed being together. We’ve been doing this for five years. My rules are simple – we go anywhere he wants and I pay for everything. This weekend with my dad is one of the work-life balance things that I do on an annual basis. I’ve got several of these that make up the rhythm of my non-work life, including the annual Feld Men’s trip, my month in Alaska during the summer with Amy, and my quarterly “total disconnect” vacations with Amy. ...

I get questions like the following on a regular basis: “I like reading your blog, and I’m amazed that you can get involved with so many things simultaneously and manage to get great results while living a balanced life. Could you talk a little about your time management techniques, and how do you prioritize your daily activities? I’m sure many readers would appreciate a post on these.” I sat down to write a long answer to this and realized that there is a whole category of self help books on this that takes up a ridiculous amount of floor space at Borders. I decided that rather than answer this in a blog post, I’d write another crappy time management book. ...

If you do a search via any of the rapidly expanding Lijit search wijits, you’ll discover that it is now recommending me as an expert on the search term “wife.” I haven’t decided which is more disconcerting – that Lijit thinks I’m an expert on “wife” (I’ll leave that up to Amy to weigh in on) or that I’m slightly ahead of someone named “bitemycookie .” (Thanks David.)