Life is a Project

  When a massive storm swept through the Michiana area, I found myself facing a challenge I hadn't anticipated—power outages that threatened to disrupt finals week for my students. As a displaced federal employee and author of Life is a Project , I knew I had to act quickly to ensure they wouldn’t be negatively impacted. Having recently moved from Arlington, VA, to Gary, IN, I hadn’t yet stocked up on emergency supplies. At first, I worked out of a local café and a McDonald’s, grading discussions and keeping up with my responsibilities. But as the outage stretched on, I realized I needed a more sustainable solution. Thinking strategically, I turned to my Marriott rewards—mindful of my strict budget—and booked a hotel with full-size refrigerator, allowing me to take my food from home and prevent it from spoiling while maintaining a functional workspace. Fortunately, I had already purchased a pink igloo cooler. This experience reinforced everything I believe about life as a proj...

Recently we have been getting a lot of rain in Germany and I have been trying to schedule my runs around the rain storms.  For those familiar with risk management as defined by the Project Management Institute , there are a few different options to handle a risk once it is identified.  The four options are risk avoidance, acceptance, transfer and mitigation Risk transfer is when you can pass the risk on to someone else or another company.  This is great for IT projects, but not really an option as a runner.  It would be great to have someone else complete my run for me, but that doesn't actually help me with my training. Risk avoidance is a technique which I have been practicing the past few weeks.  I research the hourly weather charts and then try to calculate the best times to run with the lowest probability of ending up in a rain storm.  This reduces the chances that I will be in a rainstorm and getting struck by lightening.  Of course not runni...