After the climb of Slippery Slab Tower, I headed into Cashmere to hang out at Robert’s cabin for a short retreat.  The great thing is that there was no internet connection, phone, and so on.  I was planning to stay there for about four or five nights, but ended up staying less after Daniel confirmed a Wednesday departure for a trip to the North Ridge of Forbidden Peak.

Though I ended up staying for only two full days, I accomplished a lot.  Basically, my schedule:

• Wake up, have breakfast
• Dig a little section of trail on the property until about 8:30 or 9:00
• Work on WordPress development
• Have lunch
• Go into town to check email and do a little bit of internet surfing, two hours max
• Work on more WordPress development
• Dinner, read, go to bed

Actually, it was a great break from the usual routine and it confirmed suspicions that I had about my personal productivity.  One of the problems in China was that the internet was so slow that I’d be working on a certain web page, but it would take a little to long to load.  So, I’d tab over and open another page, another site that I needed to work on, investigate, read, or whatever.  Naturally, that page would take a while to load as well, so, I’d open another tab and repeat the process.  Eventually, I’d have ten or so tabs open and rotate to each one as they finish loading.

Switching focus between tasks is undeniably costly.  After a few weeks of this, it became apparent to me that this rapid switching between tasks was costing me a lot of time.  Spending time at the cabin away from the phone and the internet empirically demonstrated that being away from these distractions causes productivity to jump.  So, in only two days I wrote a WordPress plugin that reads a folder on a website and displays each of the files as downloadable links.  This was the first time that I’d written anything in the PHP language.  Not only that, but I also created two admin settings pages that integrate into the WordPress admin panel:  one for uploading files, and one for deleting files.  If I were working on this project in a normal environment, it would probably take me a week to write this.  So, how do I enforce this undeniable law of productivity in a normal environment?  Well, I hope I can qualify this better in the future, but to start with, setting distinct time limits on tasks, in units of hours only, is a good start.  Also, simply accessing the internet at specific times helps too.  I may have to get back on my email checking schedule…

Anyway, thanks, Robert, for the opportunity to stay at the cabin.  I enjoyed it.

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After a relaxing week back in Georgia, I packed up my cumbersome bags again and headed off to the Hotlanta airport.  As I was boarding the plane, delighted that I’d been upgraded to first class, a guy started chatting with me about my guitar.  Turns out he knows Robert and we met the following day and chatted about all kinds of stuff from China to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra set to perform the Brahms Violin Concerto…featuring a pianist!  Anyway, a great contact to make.

Visiting Matt was typical – lots of reliving high school days, playing computer games, and so on.  Of course, one of the most important things we did was work on new Frozen Taco songs.  Oh yeah, and we officially released the FT website and Facebook page.

As for “normal” stuff, we visited Navy Pier (there’s a new upcoming FT song that mentions it), Millenium Park (I really liked the opposing video obelisks of kids’ faces – see the pics) and kayaked the Chicago River.

Though many people told me that Chicago is a beautiful city, I had my own assumptions that it was just another city.  The rumors are true; I was very impressed with downtown Chicago.  It must be one of the most beautiful cities of the USA.  I enjoyed recording guitar in Matt’s apartment thirty stories up while looking out over the canal.  But, I have to say it was the kayaking trip that showed up the full beauty of the city.  It was the inspiring beauty of the city and the company of friends that kept me going; we kayaked a good six miles easily, most of the time contending with waves and avoiding the other boats, and most of them we much bigger than us.  Enjoy the pictures.

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