I should be reachable in the latter part of the afternoon. (How to contact me)
This site won’t see many updates during the day today. But I plan to post some content tonight.
The last four workdays have involved either the release of a publication or a big speaking engagement. That all went well, as far as I can tell. Now I’m looking forward to a day of catching up.
I’m out for a while this morning, dropping my car at an auto-body shop (there was a fender-bender here when I was in Colombia in early April). Then I’m participating in a press call with the Security Assistance Monitor folks, who are publishing a new analysis of global military training data. After that, I’ll be recording a WOLA podcast with Sarah Kinosian, who just spent a week in Honduras where she learned some very interesting things.
After that I’ve still got a bunch of e-mails to send to colleagues, press, congressional staff, and supporters about our new defense aid programs report and database. I’ve been doing this little by little over the past few days and expect to finish today.
This is important: your project really isn’t “finished” until you’ve done a serious job of trying to get it out in the world. As Seth Godin writes, “if the ideas don’t spread, if no gift is received, then there is no art, only effort.” A few tweets and a bulk e-mail sendout, however well-targeted, are not enough. (My e-mail app ends up sending most of those directly to the archive folder.)
You need to sit and brainstorm a list of people whom you think should absolutely see it. Then you probably need to find contact information for the people on that list with whom you don’t interact much. For me, this has meant hours of looking through old e-mails, meeting notes, and Google—hours that I couldn’t spend when we were racing to finish the report and database. Then you need to send a SHORT, semi-personalized note to everyone on that list (something that is less likely to be deleted), letting them know about what you just made. My list has 103 people on it, so this is taking a while.
When not doing all of that today, I’m still helping set up next week’s border research trip to San Diego and Tijuana. And trying to respond to the e-mails that have accumulated in my inbox over the past several days. And taking my daughter to 5:30 soccer practice. I look forward to posting things here tonight, but I may be hard to reach for much of today.