red light! green light! red light!

One aspect of my post-Linden career that is obvious but I hadn't fully grokked (note: how cool is it that Blogger's spell checker recognizes "grokked"?) is how often everything changes and how unexpected events shape my days and thoughts. I get off the phone and think I'm flying somewhere to do a week of work, then the next day get a call asking to put it off for a month. I take a meeting at Starbucks because someone kept pestering me only to discover a project that would be a blast to work on. I answer an unknown number on my cell phone and it's a recruiter with an intriguing CEO position. I'm walking to get water from the fridge at Catamount and Jed pulls me into a meeting that blows my mind.

And that's just the last week.

I do pretty well with multitasking, chaos, and lack of structure, but the mental shifts are striking. Part of why I only pick projects and companies that excite me is that I think about what I'm working on all the time. As anyone who met me knows, there wasn't much time over the last 7 years when I wasn't thinking about, talking about, or working on Second Life. It was -- and continues to be -- a project and company I love, so of course it always gets cycles.

Thus, it's a new skill for me to get spun up about something only to then put it on hold. Obviously, when working a normal, full-time job you do this all the time, but generally within the context of an overall context or direction. The new skill is also perform a context shift on the context itself.

I suspect this will make me a more effective multitasker in the future, but today it is still very much a learning experience.