People ask how retirement is going and I say good, busy. It’s a fine answer at a cookout. It’s also a report with nothing behind it, and I spent thirty-five years refusing to accept exactly that answer from anybody who worked for me. Good compared to what. Busy doing what, and was that the thing you said you’d be doing. What set it off was hearing myself say it twice in one afternoon, to two different people, in the same order and the same flat tone. Good. Busy. It came out prepackaged. In my experience that’s usually a sign the person saying it stopped checking a while ago. So a couple of weeks ago I did to myself what I’d have done to any business unit that kept insisting it was having a great year without producing anything anyone could look at. Eleven months out. Actual against plan. It went badly. The interesting part is that it went badly before I reached a single line item. A variance report needs a budget. You cannot measure actual against nothing. And I did not write one down. Not a page, not a list, not the back of an envelope. I walked out of a thirty-five year career last October with no documented plan for what the next stretch was supposed to contain, and then spent eleven months grading my progress against it anyway. In my head. On a rolling basis. Revising the standard as I went, always slightly in my own favor. I’d have taken somebody apart for that in a review. Politely, but apart. So the budget had to be reconstructed, which is the worst kind of budget there is, assembled after the fact from memory by the person being measured. But it’s the only one available, and I know roughly what I was telling people last fall, because I said it enough times to have it memorized. Read a lot more. Be around for the kids in a way I hadn’t been. Get in decent shape. Take the time to figure out what the next thing is, without rushing it. Travel with Beth for real, meaning something other than the airport-hotel-airport version I’d been calling travel for most of my career. This image is clearly AI generated, because my printer is still in storage and my dog is not that big. Also the hair thing. Five lines. Here’s where they came in. Reading is favorable and it’s not close. I’ve read more since last October than in the twenty years before it, across history, fiction, and a lot of things I picked up for no better reason than a cover. I couldn’t give you an exact count, which is worth noting. The one line that came in ahead is the only one I never bothered to track. Make of that what you will. Writing is favorable too, and it wasn’t in the plan at all. I write most days now. That would have gone on the deck as an unbudgeted favorable, which in my old life was never quite the win people wanted it to be, because an unbudgeted item means the plan was wrong when you wrote it. I didn’t miss on writing. I didn’t know to include it. Then the kids, which is where I found out I’d been measuring the wrong thing. Be around for the kids in a way I hadn’t been. That’s one line in the reconstructed budget, and it was never one line. It’s three accounts with three different right answers, and I’d been adding them into a single number and then feeling vaguely bad about the total. Jake lived with us until June. We all went out to Irvine for Nationals, and the dorm move the week after was as good a stretch as I’ve had this year. Then Junior Pan Pacs in Vancouver, where he traveled with Team USA. Before Irvine, we had seen him once in five weeks, over a dinner we initiated. And the honest treatment of that line is that it’s fine. He’s eighteen and he’s supposed to be launching. If I write it up as a shortfall I’m rooting against the exact thing I moved eighteen hundred miles to support. The move was never about seeing more of him. It was about being ninety minutes away when it matters. That account is performing. I’ve been reporting it as a miss because it feels like one, and feeling like one is not a basis for a number. DJ is in Boston, working, living with Abie, and doesn’t need much from us right now. There’s no budget in that account. Reporting a variance against it is noise. Which leaves the one that was actually the point. Brandon and Lindsay are in Greenville with Finley and Swayze, who arrived in June. Eleven months, and I have not been there once. The first trip is booked for October. That’s the whole report. One line that genuinely mattered, and the number is zero. I want to be precise about why I didn’t see it, because vagueness is how you launder a bad number. The aggregate looked defensible. Two of the three accounts were fine, so the kids came out mediocre as a total instead of alarming, and the only figure that mattered sat inside it where nobody had to look at it directly. That is the exact reason you don’t report at the aggregate level. I knew that professionally for thirty-five years. Fitness I’m going to report as unfavorable and decline to elaborate. And the next thing, the one everyone at the cookout is actually asking about, figuring out the next thing, is a straight zero. Two feelers came in this summer and I turned both down without a framework for deciding, because I don’t have one, because I never wrote the plan that would have contained it. No progress. Not slow progress. Nothing on the line at all. Travel is the line I’d fight my own auditor over, because there’s a version of it that looks respectable. There were real trips. Irvine in the summer, all of us. Boston in June to get DJ settled. Vancouver. Every one of them went into an account that didn’t need the money. Somebody else presenting that would have gotten flagged in about four minutes. The travel was real and the travel was good, and all of it funded Jake and DJ, who are both fine, while Greenville got nothing for eleven months. I didn’t decide that. Nobody decides that. It happens because swim meets have dates attached and a grandchild in another state does not, and the calendar quietly allocates your year to whatever showed up with a deadline on it. And none of it was just travel with Beth because we want to travel and visit new places. The rest of the flights were Phoenix a week after Boston, then movers, then the drive out. Logistics with a boarding pass, and not one hour of it is what I meant last fall. Now the part that would actually matter in a review, because the size of a variance is never the useful thing. Anybody can report a gap. What you get paid for is knowing what kind it is. Timing or permanent. Something that reverses on its own next quarter, or something structural that will look exactly the same twelve months from now unless you do something about it. And I have a very good story for every unfavorable line. We sold a house. Everything we own is in a storage unit off a highway. We’ve been living out of short-term rentals since June and will be for the rest of the year. Naturally the kids number is soft. Naturally nobody has traveled anywhere for pleasure. Naturally I haven’t sorted out my professional life while I don’t have a permanent mailing address. It’s all timing. Every bit of it reverses. That’s a genuinely strong explanation. I believe most of it. I also sat through that explanation a thousand times from the other side of the table. It’s timing. It’ll come back in Q4. The pipeline is there, it just didn’t close. And I’d say I believed it maybe a third of the time, and the tell was never the story itself, because the story was usually true. The tell was whether anything in how they operated had changed to make the reversal happen, or whether they were just describing conditions and waiting. I have not changed anything. I’ve been describing conditions and waiting. So the finding isn’t really the zero in Greenville. The finding is that I ran eleven months of my life with no plan, no tracking, no review, a headline metric that turned out to be three unrelated things wearing one label, and a fully prepared explanation ready for every miss. I didn’t notice any of it until I sat down and formatted it like work. Thirty-five years of professional skepticism, none of it ever pointed inward. I’m not going to build a personal scorecard. That’s a level of self-management I’d find insufferable in someone else and I’m not doing it here. But I am going to write down the five lines. On paper, in advance, before I get to say how it went. That’s not much of a system. It’s still more than I had last October.