At Home “PM”ing
Matt Rangel
1/24/2023
Over the weekend I had an overwhelmingly urge and motivation to finally build out my garage gym. The hard part for this is having my little helpers, a 6yo and 4yo, helping me with large tools and equipment. A recipe for success! Well, no, not really. Terrifying and incredibly distracting with each of them calling for my attention for something/anything, every 6.4 seconds. So the old measure twice cut once turns into measuring and measuring and measuring again with no cut in sight. But my wife and I had a plan. Our oldest recently discovered mom and dad get paid to do jobs, which in turn pays for everything that they want/need. The latest toy you covet? Costs us a portion of our time. How much? Well, my young human, I’m glad you asked!
Now that we have uploaded all the need to know info about an hourly job, he is off and running to do one full hour of yard work. Excellent, now we encourage our 4yo to assist and instead of being interrupted every 45 seconds we now buy at least 2 minutes to think before getting interrupted again.. Progress!
After drawing up what I needed to do on a scratch piece of paper with actual measurements of the lifting cage and the wall that I have, which took way longer than humanly needed, I wanted to check my work. I assumed that my wife and I had thrown away the installation instructions because we had moved and why would we keep those important documents when we could decide to keep several electrical cords, just in case. Prior to this day, I had looked for instructions online but didn’t know the exact model and didn’t want to chance grabbing the wrong information. My wife had sent me all she could find out about the installation instructions, but those were not the specs I was looking for. So, we marched on to triple check my measurements to ensure proper installation of this heavy cage so we don’t get to the middle and have to take it down and do it again. Very demoralizing.
Remember when I assumed? Well, I assumed that the installation instructions were not online until we took a step back to try again. We had to come up with the right google search terms to accurately find them. Enter make, model, **pdf** instructions into google and there they are!
This is a lesson that I learned very early on in my career and has lead me to great success in several roles. If you feel like you are assuming, asking specifically, even wording it differently helps. I am usually good about this sort of thing out on the job, but at home I switch hats and become a dad and husband, and my awareness becomes more present and less PMing.
Please check out my github repo and notes for more about my goings on and offer a encouraging word or thought!
Best,
Matt Rangel