I am my own worst enemy, because I am answerable only to myself. Each day I have a plan, either written or in my head, and each day I fail to accomplish what I set out to do.  There is always something more important that crops up. 

I know from personal experience in managing teams that 40% to 60% of my day will be unplanned, putting out fires with staff, projects, risk management, politics, major crises. To keep this in perspective, I subscribe to the "jumping monkey" theory of work, i.e., monkeys will jump to me from someone else's shoulder: jumping upward from a direct report, sideways from a partner, downward from a boss. I also jump my own monkeys to others, up, down, and sideways. The idea is to make sure the monkey keeps moving, ends up on the right shoulder, and gets fed or disappears. I'm pretty good at keeping those suckers moving, although occasionally I'll glance backward and there sits one I thought had jumped, grinning at my naivete. Sometimes they bite.

But in the no-job travelogue, there are no staff, associates, or executives, just me. I am all three. So, there should be fewer monkeys, right? Not so. My monkeys are all of my own making; most come from fear and uncertainty. They jump from one shoulder to another, and more keep showing up every day, so that it seems there is a troop of Kipling's howlers driving me to the ruins, chanting  We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true.

I'll find any excuse not to deal with them: I need a haircut, have to pick up something at the store, must finish that next chapter in the book I'm reading, and I'll get to those monkeys later. Except that later means more of them. 

So here is what I have to do: I have to go after the biggest, meanest monkey I have, and get rid of it, while keeping the others at bay. Then, I'll go after the next biggest one, and so on, until the population is manageable and I'm moving forward again in my own direction. That's my plan.

I'll start tomorrow.