How to Hold an Awesome Meeting

My project meetings are awesome.

This is because I personally don’t like meetings that waste my time, and I really don’t like being bored, so I do my best to make sure those things don’t happen to other people at my meetings.

The keys to having awesome meetings are actually pretty simple: (1) keep it small; (2) listen and ask questions; and (3) don’t end without next steps.

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Alone in the Woods

I am alone. In the woods.

Not at the moment you’re reading this of course; in the intervening time I typed it all into my computer. But as I’m writing this, it’s 5:30 p.m. on a Saturday night and I’m writing longhand in a notebook, a near-illegible mix of Palmer cursive and printing. It’s hard to write when you’re crouched over your notebook so it doesn’t get too wet in the rain.

This is my first time backcountry camping. That essentially just means that I’m in the middle of the woods. I’m not camping next to my car, and I’m also not camping next to other people. There aren’t bathrooms or picnic tables or wifi. Just me and the trees.

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Books, Books, Everywhere

My house is full of boxes. And piles of various things. I can’t move without tripping over something.

I would say I’m not usually this disorganized, but that would be a lie. However, the boxes are new.

I’m getting ready to sell my house, and my realtor has strongly admonished me that I have too much stuff, so I need to clear a bunch of it out so my house can be nicely staged while I spend a few months pretending I don’t actually live in it.

Meanwhile, the boxes and the piles of stuff: some things are going to storage for a few months, and other things are going to Goodwill.

I started with books, because I thought they would be easy. Their rectangular shape makes them fit into boxes well, and they require no additional padding. Should be a breeze, right?

Until I started packing, and counting, and how in the world did I accumulate more than a thousand books?

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Snakes Don’t Scare Me… But a Freeway Might

I went hiking yesterday, which I do for exercise, even though I don’t always like it very much.

When you’re going on a long hike by yourself, sometimes your mind gets a little bored, and you forget to watch where you’re going, and you almost step on a snake. Anyway, that seems to happen to me a lot.

This time, it was a type of snake that I didn’t recognize (as in, it wasn’t similar to the snakes I’ve previously almost stepped on). I stopped to get a good look at it so I could check my snake field guide when I got home.

Then I remembered that you’re not supposed to stand in a snake’s striking range.

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Choosing When to Feel Emotion

Watching Joshua Bell play the violin makes me forget to breathe.

Yes, I know that sounds like such a cliche, but in my case it was literally true. As I watched Bell play the violin at the Strathmore Friday night, several times I realized I was holding my breath through a phrase of music, and sometimes through more than one phrase, which left me a little lightheaded.

And I don’t even really like classical music. But I really wanted to like Joshua Bell.

So the unexpected visceral reaction made me wonder: how much of the emotion we feel when listening to music is a matter of us wanting to feel a particular emotion, rather than being truly inspired by the music itself?

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