?? Days: Timeframes

If this is Tuesday, it must be ...

Actually, I'm not sure what day today is. I got back from Michigan last night, where I helped move my father-in-law into his new home, an Alzheimer's care facility. It was hard and difficult (and exhausting). Sad to say, a lot of people who move their loved ones into facilities like this do little more than move them there. We did the opposite, moving his own furniture, his own art, his own books, his own bedspread. The "apartment," as we call it, looks like a miniature version of his house. The number of things that had to happen to pull this off in the short timeframe available was daunting and it absolutely had to be on time. It took all of my project management skills, not to mention design and box hauling skills, to pull it off, and we did. I completed my last trip to the facility to finish things up two hours before we took him there.

Now that I'm back, I don't know if I can pull off shipping Groupthink on time. I knew I'd be busy on the trip, but I thought that I would get maybe five hours a day to work. The reality was that I got about five hours during the entire trip, entirely on Sunday and Monday. And that's quite a step down from the typical ten to twelve hours a day I've been working. So, on my list of tasks for today is to evaluate whether I can stick with my original schedule of launching on November 3rd or if I have to push it back a bit. And do I need to cut anything else? One complication is that I am heading out to the Hackers Conference on November 7th, so I don't have a lot of flexibility in slipping my date.

You might ask, why say something now? Why not just wait until I know for sure? Well, first of all, I believe in transparency. Through the transparency, I hope to be able to help others doing similar things, and I also receive advice from people. If I limit my disclosure, both are significantly less useful.