DreamLine Items to Task to A Personal Assistant

Well, until I have my income on autopilot, a regular income stream would be handy. That's that traditional job thing, for those of you NRs who have forgotten. Tim told me to use my strengths, so I'll try to keep it in the field of forensically typing mitochondrial DNA sequences. I mean I do know more about it than most people. Later, Tim says to find a deep niche. Not sure if this niche meets all the qualifications, but it sure is a deep narrow niche. And I'm in it, professionally speaking.

I hate looking for jobs, does anyone like it, and according to the reports, you can outsource a job search. Well that will be my highest priority task.

But that is an awfully big task, and a lot rides on it. I haven't worked out this remote work assignment relationship thing, so I'll try a different, almost throwaway task as a training run. Tim's book suggests pushing comfort levels, so I'm going to blow away (hopefully) my greatest physical fear - scuba diving. For a simple task that doesn't involve trashing any job opportunities or anything else of real value, I will ask for a report of the certifications available to scuba divers and instructors, and a comparison of certain features of each of them. I stay safely out of the water while tiptoeing nearer the real scuba dive, and I get to practice specifying and guiding a remote assistant.

My autopilot income needs muse candidates. One that comes to mind is a how-to book for software developers who like to travel -- while keeping their jobs. Tim gives steps to identify markets. Given that I have had yet another cup of coffee and I know where they are in the book, I'm not really able to exactly read let alone follow them. I know -- I'll break out one of the steps and list it to a personal assistant to try.

Lastly, my time is best spent making our lifestyle better and this means the autopilot money is going to go to freeing my time up to spend with my daughter and on our dreams. The laundry, however, will still need to get done. My daughter will still need to go to the park more times than I can standdddddd. My fourth requested task is to identify and, with my instructions, vet local help for our household.

Personal note: when I've tried to improve my life, before, I've not added a comfort challenge and I've had no one to whom to delegate the tasks I'm not good at and don't enjoy. I can have someone check references for me -- and they'll use my list of questions and report to me the answers? What a great pre-screen this is. The idea of trying scuba (again) certain invigorates my metabolism -- tempting yet horrifying. Fascinating like an impending train wreck.

To other moms: we defer because we care, to paraphrase the company motto from Monster's Inc. Since my daughter joined me at 9 months of age, I have been away from her only for work and for two Valentine's Dinners. No mom's day out here. I feel compelled to be with her all the rest of the time because I missed out on her first nine months of life; you feel compelled even if you were with her from the start.

I've served two masters, my child and my employer, and tried to do my best for both and never feel successful. I have had a few times when I could do both, and on travel. But most of the time it is an unending treadmill - my job ending just gives me a crazier responsibility to find another job, and so on.

After a reading session (yes, daughter was in the tub and I read seated on the closed toilet), I was so excited at being 'required' (for my blog of course) to test my comfort zone and try scuba, that I emailed a certain male and told him to get appointments with a sitter and a restaurant for Saturday night.

Remarkably, even facing the prospect of putting out a hundred of our last 2008 pre-crash dollars, and having to face me alone for an evening, he got excited! Now my daughter has two happy, energized grownups instead of the regular drones!

So not only have I listed dreams, I have listed little doable steps toward achieving them. Stay tuned...