Preparing for the Rubicon
I've been studying how to obtain a non-lucrative visa for over six months, that's when my family and I seriously considered moving home base overseas. Learning requirements and preparing our documents has been my sole domain, until now. This morning Janis finally got involved. Adding another team member to the project means I need to create a model for how to communicate the tasks in a very different way.
What I've accomplished so far
I count about eighty things we still need to finish in order to hand over our applications. About half of those are time sensitive.
We have accomplished the following:
- Gathered enough money in one spot to show we can live in Spain for one year without income
- Got buy-in from family members
- Visited Madrid and Barcelona, (our target city), where we lived as natives
- Transitioned our life to make this big leap by selling our house, moving to a rental, letting go of lawn mower and figuring out how to transition education for a teenager
Even with all this movement forward, we've still had "the week where we decided it was too much and we should push this whole move off for a year."
This turning point created a funny situation in a parking lot one late afternoon in April. I was personally afraid to commit to going, so I decided to base our decision on the flip a coin, much to the horror of Janis.
Thinking about flipping the coin brought clarity. I realized I was afraid that the coin would land on the "we stay" option. That's all I needed to commit to moving.
We all had our individual processes for determining whether we wanted to go to Spain or not. We all emphatically decided yes. That parking lot moment ended the week long thought that we wouldn't go. Looking back, it was a very important milestone.
Great, what's the rub?
The visa process is very: "do this, then that". It uses many timelines that are only loosely coordinated towards an end date. This makes it hard to represent the process in small chunks. It is also hard to show deadlines for when things are due because it's dependent on how long this bureaucracy takes to get this document so we can send it off to this other bureaucracy within their deadline.
I thrive in such a situation, but Janis' strength is in seeing a more straightforward path and consistently going towards it. So this is not easy for her to track. The process also sucks for inter-communication.
So, how about that rubicon?
This project takes between six and twelve months and I can't do it alone. Somehow I needed to get to a point where I can effectively communicate to Janis. She needs an overview and hopefully a timeline, but I can't give her an overview without giving her way too much detail. I can't give her a timeline that is anything but ambiguous.
The solution to this problem ends up being a couple of poster boards tacked to a wall with around forty sticky notes. There isn't a sticky note for everything, that would be too much detail, but the ones we have are helpful for tracking important milestones.
There aren't set dates, either. We only have a general order based on document dependencies. All in all, this visual has helped us hit a perfect balance between my strengths of working high level in a chaotic environment and her strengths of working with consistent actions toward hard deadlines.
As an added bonus, because we color-coded the sticky notes for who the task is for, it looks like a game board. It's like having the game of Life or Chance on our wall. However, unlike most board games, we all have to finish to succeed.
All of a sudden this move has gotten real for us. It is no longer an idea about moving or experiments to see if we'd like to go. There is a game plan and lots to do.
We've passed the rubicon, folks, God help us all.