Financial Deadlines

As part of my severance grace period I have many deadlines to submit documentation and set up financial vehicles (i.e. RRSP’s, LIRA’s, etc.,) by certain dates.

I also have deadlines for giving back equipment to my soon to be former employer, which will then precipitate me buying my own computing equipment (I am currently typing this sitting on an exercise ball on my 4 year old son’s computer), and various other dates of importance over the next 6 weeks. All of these dates must be noted and dealt with, in a timely fashion (procrastination is not an option).

Deadlines sometimes are very artificial, even though the folks enforcing it feel they are important none the less (e.g. your boss claiming you must have a report completed by a certain date, when there is no good reason for it), but in my situation these dates are real, so I think it is important to have a good scheduling package or scheduling heuristic to ensure you do not miss these important dates.

I mostly use Outlook’s calendar capabilities to track these dates, but I am also now using Google’s Calendar as a backup, since my calendar in outlook is attached to my employers Exchange server (which I will lose access to some time very soon), so I do not lose the important dates in my life.

Financial Deadlines lead to Financial Plans

Each deadline is the obvious end point, or delivery point for a Financial plan, but the entire plan around it is really what is important. I can’t plan very well, but I find that as soon as I put down a deadline, a plan will start forming in my mind, out of necessity, but without that “marker”, the plan seems to disappear in my day to day “business”. I see deadlines like the triangles on a Gantt chart (for those of you who do REAL planning).

Interviews are Cool

An interesting day in our house, as I had an interview for a job, which seemed to go quite well (I viewed it as practice, so wasn’t very nervous about it), and my wife also had an interview later in the day.

I came back from my interview and bounced one or two of the questions from my interview off my spouse, she thought about them, and came up with answers, and sure enough, she then got asked similar questions, at her interview. I thought that was pretty darn interesting to see that kind of synchronicity in life. It is also interesting because my job interview was for a job that had nothing to do with the job my wife was interviewing for.

The questions?

• How do you solve a problem? This is a very open ended question that you must think about where you are, and in what context the interviewer might be asking you. Simply saying how you balance your cheque book might be an answer, but if you are interviewing for a job as a Lion Tamer, it might not be topical.
• Describe a situation where you had a problem with a co-worker and how did you deal with it? Again, important to not go “negative”, choose a situation where there was good resolution for both sides and you show your ability to deal with conflict and resolve these issues. Simply bitching out a former co-worker, will get you off the “invite back” list quicker than letting loose a nasty fart.