HAVE TO Reduction Reason #1

Life is short and too uncertain. This really hit home this morning when I received a phone call from the mom of one of D2's good friends. She called to thank us for helping C, D2's friend, get his drums to school for a talent show last night. It really was no big deal for us. C is a part time son here, just as D2 is at their house. We joke that we share our boys because they are almost always together and usually at one of the two houses.

But C's mom didn't sound very healthy this morning. I was aware that she had breast cancer at one point and D2 mentioned something this week that made me think she might have Congestive Heart Failure. His reaction to my questions indicated that he didn't know much about it - including what that would mean if it was true - so I left it alone. But it turns out that the alarm bells in my head were right. She has been told that she has 2-3 years left, but that is really just a guess. He heart function is pretty low. And she hasn't told her kids yet. She just wanted to let me know how grateful she is that C feels at home with us and asked, if anything happens to her, that we look after him.

In the face of news like that, very few things are making the HAVE TO cut today. The fact is that no matter what we plan for the future, there are no guarantees that we will see it. I'm not advocating a complete transformation from the ant/save for the future mentality to a grasshopper/just live for the day thought process. Once again, there needs to be a balance between the silly HAVE TOs and the actual requirements for life. It seems very odd to me that it takes a jolt like this to really get through to me. But, coming as this does in conjunction with a very unusual work week, it is more than enough to make me reconsider my own priorities.

Mixing monitors

Being married to the band's soundman, I get the opportunity to learn the technical aspects of making amplified music sound good. Since we are doing our own recording, there is a whole new world of research to explore. In this case, the research done to find D2's birthday speakers also netted the band a pair of monitors to be used specifically for mixing.

The problem with most speakers/monitors is that they actually contribute to the sound that you hear. For example, if you have ever played a CD in your stereo (car or house) and then taken it to a different stereo, you will know some of what I mean. Even if you matched systems and EQs, different speakers actually could make the music sound different.

Normally, this is a bit odd, but not a huge issue. However, if you are the band mixing tracks together so that the cello and penny whistle come out in front here but get buried behind the vocals there, for example, it is pretty important that the monitors don't do that. These monitors are "flat" in that they just transmit the sound as purely as possible without adding or subtracting anything.

In other words, if you want to also use these - purely hypothetically you understand - as your computer desktop speakers so that your 15 year old son doesn't have the best speakers in the house, then you would need to be a sound man. Most people have a standing preference on how their music sounds (more mids, less bass, more treble, whatever) - but there are an infinite number of ways to record sound. So, to get every different CD sounding the way you want with these speakers, you might have to change the EQ on each one. Most people just buy some speakers that color the music in the areas that they find appealing.

Of course, in my head, this is related to my "have to reduction" idea, too. The fact of the matter is that reducing have tos is a social problem, because most of our have tos are basically the things we prefer. They are either a) expressions of our values or b) something we just haven't bothered to think about. (And really b) is a subset of a) because not thinking about it means that it isn't very high on our list of priorities.) So, to reduce our have tos, we have to decide to think about them and then sort them all out according to our individual values. Speaking as a Have To Reduction Consultant to-be, it is pretty important that I figure out how to convince people that the process is value added. Otherwise, I should just invest in a list of areas that match different shadings of have tos - just like all of those different speakers match the common sound preferences. Tricky, yes?

Cutting down on the "have to"s

I'm sure that it will come as no surprise that I have been thinking about my job lately. More precisely, I've been working on remembering what exactly I like about it. Since I've also been thinking about what I could be doing next, which seems to be completely different than what I do now, I was trying to figure out how it is all related. Quite frankly, even for a pattern weaver like me, it was a bit of a stretch. So, on one of my recent insomniac nights, I pulled out a few big sheets of paper and a Sharpie and did a mind map.

Mind maps are great tools for putting everything in your head onto a piece of paper. There is a description here that looks pretty accurate. Usually, you start with a central idea and then work out all of the connected pieces. I've used them with my project teams to brainstorm. They are also great for identifying relationships. I had to work backwards this time. I started with a bunch of pieces and then eventually figured out the relationship. Then I started over - with the central idea - and built out some new ideas from there.

The process was revealing. It turns out that all of my interests are related to limiting the number of "have to"s. For reasons that I can't quite explain, it seems that many of us have allowed ourselves to be loaded down with things that we feel we have to do - but they are not necessarily real requirements. I feel that I have to behave a certain way to be effective in my job; but other people behave differently and get things done, so it really isn't a requirement. Advertisements try to convince us that we need certain things, but do I really have to have that shampoo to have silky, shiny hair? Do I really want a promotion in a company if I have to work 50+ hours a week to show that I deserve it? To me, these are silly "have to"s.

The trick is to balance these silly requirements with what I (or you, or whoever) consider the real "have to"s. If the job I have is the only way to get the money I need to raise my kids, then whatever they say I need to do is now a real requirement. Unless...

It is the unless that gets me. Call it the "we see things differently" approach to life, but I believe that there are ways around this. Even some minor lifestyle changes could possibly make me much more indepent - which in turn gives me more choices about who gets to tell me what I have to do. Improving business processes so that I can go home on time, increasing my home's energy efficiency so that I give less of my money to SRP, being a smarter consumer, adopting a healthier lifestyle that allows less interaction with our dodgy health care system - these are all things that I have researched just to give me more options.

My job has been about just one small part of building a lifestyle with more options. My research has covered broad scope into apparently random territory - but it really is all along the same lines. I don't think that there currently is a job called "Have To Reduction Consultant" or "Independents Are Us", but I do know that some form of that is what I will continue to do for the forseeable future. And while the mind mapping that got me here won't necessarily cure insomnia for everyone, at least having some of these crazy thoughts out of my head is helping me to sleep at night!