My dad loves to talk about his adolescence and young adulthood. He’s got great stories of all of his early jobs, most notably working at his grandmother’s vacation cabins and shop, the Kittery-York Drive-In, and Mount Snow ski resort. But he decided to be proactive and enlist in the Air Force in 1966.

As much as my dad loves hard work, he did not love being in the service, although he made the best of it and has a lot of stories about that, too. His favorite one is to share his early mindset about joining the military. “I just kept thinking about 1970, when I’d be out. It felt so far away.” And then the punchline: “And now 1970 is fifty years ago!”

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A friend is in quarantine for COVID-19.

Her husband tested positive, so her family has to be isolated not only from the world, but also from her husband.

The circumstances are difficult. She’s not sure how she’s going to make it to the end. But if she keeps moving through her days, hour by hour, she will eventually come out the other side.

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My most useless time of day is thirty minutes before a meeting.

Even if I set an alert on my phone, I have trouble focusing. I keep looking at the clock, shifting from window to window on my browser, and feeling restless.

I am telling myself a story about how thirty (and now twenty, and now ten) minutes isn’t enough time to get anything done. But the problem isn’t time at all. It’s focus.

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These days, I’m learning how to manage projects.

This is not a well-developed skill for me. I’m good at managing a process — something repeatable that can be refined over time — and I’ve had a lot of experience dealing well with novel situations and improvising on the fly. My weakness is one-time, short-term endeavors with a beginning, middle, and end. Projects. Yeah, those.

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Whenever I’ve struggled to create something — a song, a piece of writing, a meal — the difficulty is not usually a lack of ideas.

Rather, it is found in the resistance to the ideas I already have. Each one is considered and rejected. I’m dismissing possibilities instead of developing them, and nothing is getting done.

The solution I’ve come to rely on: I just choose one of these ideas, no matter how ugly or ungainly, and move forward with it.

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