Project Management

So. How do we get all this done?

There’s a poignancy about it sometimes, this obsessive focus on a mad dream whilst all around me, life continues. Friends age. Babies get old enough to talk, then drive. I wear titanium-framed polycarbonate progressive bifocals; my beard is streaked with gray; I watch employed friends retire on the coattails of the stock options that have kept them chained to their desks for a decade or more. And jeez, it’s the 21st Century already... we’ve passed the checkpoint of every half-assed article about the future I’ve ever read. “By the year 2000, we’ll all be flying personal helicopters, using videophones, and living in mile-high buildings made of miracle plastics...”

I was just reading a piece I wrote over a decade ago, early in the throes of the 3.5-year BEHEMOTH project. Same crazy feeling... “standing in the window with a sore heart, watching the road go on without me.” Fresh from 16,000 miles of delicious adventure on the Winnebiko, I had flung myself into the dream of BEHEMOTH... the ultimate expression of technomadic geek bliss. I fondled the Ampro 286 processor board and state-of-the-art 40 Meg hard drive with something akin to awe, and having a 68000-based Macintosh Portable to repackage was on a par with conspicuous consumption, such a luxury was so much power and sophistication in such a small package. But I was almost suffocated by endless details before at last hitting the road again, and by then my fantasies had already leapfrogged my reality: I yearned to move the whole adventure to water.

<creak> So here we are... what is it, 2 years since leaving Silicon Valley, 7 years into the Microship project, 17 since I first pedaled out of Ohio? After all this time, all these labs, all these nautical substrates, and all this work, it’s just now beginning to feel real... albeit still vaporous, hypnagogic. I dare not fantasize overmuch about rollicking downriver, and I feel a bit furtive when I sneak the chartbook into the bathroom like a glossy skin magazine to gaze longingly at the pages, one at a time, my mind flowing over seductive benthic topography while I imagine probing estuarine crevasses heavy with the funk of low tide.

It’s really all about how we use our time, isn’t it? Aging is such a gentle wake-up call that you can sleep right through it, watch The Simpsons, have another beer, idly dream of projects, graffitize a passing thought onto the TO-DO list, and call that progress. The back’s a little too sore, the shop’s a little too cold; what the hell, it’ll keep, wouldn’t have gotten much done tonight anyway. But then you see an old friend who looks really old, and realize with a sudden shock that it’s happening to you as well. Damn. How did that happen?

Have you ever calculated how much time you spend watching TV (to pick an easy and obvious example)? A conservative estimate of 1.5 hours per night, year round, amounts over thirteen 40-hour work weeks per year! That’s more than one business quarter, or $25,000 of typical Silicon Valley high-tech employee overhead if you prefer to think in Human Resources terms. Add to that the relaxation time, meatspace maintenance, financial management, endless errands, and heaven forbid, the nightmare of commuting... no wonder anyone who gets anything done outside the structured framework of business is almost idolized. I look at these boatlets and cringe at the time wasted enroute... time forever lost in the phosphor vapors of pointless web surfing, the torpor of putzing, the relentless distractions of waiting on hold for customer service idiots and chasing around to fix problems caused by institutional ineptitude.

It’s all easy to rationalize, but then, isn’t that the whole problem? It takes madness to pull off something like this; it takes crazed obsession, wild-eyed extremism, demonic focus... that hearty roaring piss ‘n vinegar of testosterone-infused youth. My partner looks to me for guidance, and as the Senior Technomad here at NRL I buck up, scan the task lists, issue directives, dive into a project. It’s much harder than it used to be, but the Microship, now thrice wet, hovers in the lab like a cruise missile, poised to deliver my explosively restless nomadic spirit to the hotbed of adventure... despite the fact that <red alert> I’m getting dangerously comfortable here.


Volunteers and Geek’s Vacations

It’s a bit of a challenge, doing something this complex without Deep Pockets and thriving teams of engineers, technicians, machinists, and programmers. We depend heavily on volunteers, obtainium, favors, hand-me-downs, and complete personal dedication to the exclusion of normalcy in all its insidious forms. I periodically update monstrous PERT charts to get a handle on the myriad tasks comprising physical fabrication and system design, each a composite of over a dozen densely packed laser-printed sheets. We pin these to a big board, stare at them frequently, and color boxes yellow when completed. I make lists, then categorize them and underline the CDT’s (Clearly Defined Tasks). The more I accomplish, the longer the lists get... for the more detail I perceive.

Beyond that, it’s hard to use formal project management tools, which exist to assign resources to tasks. We’re resource-limited, so the trick is to just do something whenever possible, periodically going into a productivity frenzy of all-nighters in order to make a self-imposed deadline or publicized event.

Our Nomadness mailing list on the Internet (sign up on our website, or email me) has proven to be an amazing resource, giving rise not only to an endless source of ideas and solutions, but also to the ever-popular Geek’s Vacation program. This works simply: we invite brilliant tech wizards to come stay with us for a week or two at a time, focusing intensely on some subsystem or fabrication project. In exchange, we put them up in our house, provide food/espresso/beer, do a little local sightseeing and ideally share some Time On Water, and make lots of introductions. We’ve found that the culture that surrounds our technomadic projects is so rich with creative people that this networking is the big draw, and indeed we have seen everything from business partnerships to marriages spin off of first meetings in the bikelab or boatlab.

But mostly we push ahead, year after year, trying to hit a moving technological target without giving in again to the BEHEMOTH Effect, lured by the amazing waters just outside our lab and the vivid dream of aquatic technomadness that launched this project one night, so very long ago, on a moonlit lake in the Adirondacks...

Keep an eye on the Live News page. Things are about to get very strange!