Today was interesting.

Man Child, as we mentioned yesterday was suffering from either some kind of bug or a dehydration headache. We are going with the latter. Anyway he was not feeling too hot this morning but (with a little encouragement) pushed through to make it to football practice. (He did fertilize the field a few times today which would not be bad except the field is artificial turf.) we are proud of his perseverance.

After Devin and I coerced him off to practice, I made it into the office around 8:00 AM. There was something missing. Oh yeah Ellen Anderson, the other wonderful lady in my life was still on Holiday making jam somewhere in Oregon with readers Betty and Mike.

Ellen checked in with me and she is having a great time. I look forward to her return though as I know I have been invited to about 11 meetings this week and I spent most of the day checking to make sure I was not missing any of them.

After clearing up a trough of e-mails, I could concentrate on my desk

It looks intimidating, but it is mostly a process of HPO, or as I was taught, Handle Paper Once. Here is how it works.

If you pay attention to this I swear it works, though if you visited me you might think this is do what I say not what I do. (Some truth to that.)

Take your big hairy stack of paper and have a pad of paper by its side. Take each piece of paper and ask:

Am I the only person in the world who has this piece of paper?

If so, what action do I need to take?

Write it down on the top line of the pad you have.

If you need the piece of paper to take the action, put it to the right of the pad of things to do you just started.

If you don't need the paper, recycle it.

Repeat for every piece of paper in the stack.

At the end, you will have a manageable list of things to do and much shorter stack of paper.

Ok I know, in this day and age a list of things to do on a paper pad? How Luddithian of me. (I'll let you figure that one out. Hint Luddite) If you want to use Outlook Tasks or one of the 4,000 to do apps on your iPhone, that is cool.

Before we could finish that, I had a visitor to my office, a member from the Philippines. Sometimes it is easy to forget how members (PADI is a member organization so members are what we call customers.) perceive our organization and how cool it is for them to visit our headquarters. I will always make time for them and show them a little bit about PADI history. While showing them around my office I noticed him spyng a picture below my TV. He was impressed, but said nothing.

It is a picture of my daughter Kristin when she was interning for Playtone Company, Tom Hank's production company. The first time I saw the picture, I asked Kristin to go back to Tom and get it signed. Here is the picture:

The inscription reads Kristin, You are a shining star in the Playtone Galaxy, Tom Hanks. Way cool

I often mention I keep Bloomberg on all day long at the office. Here is proof.