Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Does panic create focus? Perhaps. Perhaps some of us would just rather avoid panic. I saw something silly this morning on some society media site. It read: I don’t procrastinate. I simply wait until sheer panic improves my focus, It’s a highly refined strategy that I have been perfecting for years. I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I like to plan my work and work my plan. Sometimes, however, thoughts hit me and that plan gets all jumbled up. Plan for, “I just thought of something.” I like to plan and work the plan. I like process. I like procedure. Let’s do this before that. Why? The past has […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Thoughts on writing and publishing a non-fiction book. This book strongly recommends having a plan for the business and a plan for the book’s content. I recently finished “Hungry Authors” by Liz Morrow and Ariel Curry, Rowan and Littlefield, 2024. I like the book. It focuses on knowing why you are writing […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The aftermath of Hurricane Helene in the mountains of the east coast reminds us of a basic. Hurricane Helene hit the Gulf Coast of Florida recently. It hit the coast hard. The worst damage and the most deaths, however, occurred in the mountains up the east coast of the US. This is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips No matter what is in a document, believe what you observe in the here and now. Believe reality. While writing this, we are in the middle of having the carpet replaced at work. The big room where I work is filled with cubicles (one of the great torture chambers invented by man). […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We reward the fireman, the person who extinguishes a fire. Did the fireman, however, start the fire? I used to see this often. I worked in a place where engineers would plan projects and deliver systems per their plans. The trouble was: the engineers were terrible planners. They were good system designers […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Meet me at the big oak tree outside of town at dusk. They said something like that in the old Westerns. It makes sense to still do this. There was always a showdown or something in the old Westerns. The big oak tree a mile outside of town at dusk. How did […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There is the meta-plan or the plan about the plan. There is the meta-rehearsal or the rehearsal for the rehearsal. There are many other meta-this-and-that. They are quite useful. My wife and I have been married since 1983 (40 years as of the writing of this post). I recall our wedding rehearsal. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Despite what I have noticed the past couple of years, declaring an emergency does not allow us to do whatever we want. I’ve noticed something about folks and those emergency flashers on automobiles. If you turn on your emergency flashers, you can do anything you want. Great things these emergency flashers, huh? […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Linear Regression is an old, basic technique to predict the future given the past. It seems that its utility has been forgotten by many. How did we get here? Why didn’t anyone see this coming? These are a couple questions I heard recently when groups of persons gathered to discuss … well, […]

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