In the past couple of years, my job description has started including project management tasks. I've never had any formal training in that area, but I've picked up some tactics here or there and lately have been trying to fold elements of Scrum, a framework for Agile development into my workflow. I've also been talking with a coworker from another department, trying to resize projects down into completable, manageable tasks. Today she sent me a link to this post by by Sara Wachter-Boettcher from A List Apart titled Just Do One Thing. As I read it, it resonated as something that expressed what I've been trying to convey in terms of project management.

And then I realized I had to take the same approach with this week's Game Master tasks for Pathfinder. When I was working on this last night, the task started to become insurmountable. I have non-player characters to create, a town to populate, adventures to plan, and sometimes when I sit down to it, I don't know where to start. The answer is simple, really. Just do one thing.

Now, the interesting part of this is that I don't always end up working that way. For example, I was trying to look up armor and weapons for an NPC when I stumbled upon the costs for food and lodging, which was another item on my to-do list. I found out that you can itemize all of that stuff, or you can just assume a certain cost of living associated with a character and not have to itemize things like food purchases under a certain amount. There's nothing sure in this world except death and taxes, and apparently that extends into the Pathfinder world as well. I haven't found the tax codes yet, but I did find information about the life expectancy of human and various non-human races.

It's going to be interesting to see how game prep and blogging go with house guests the rest of this week, but the plan is to keep plugging away until our next session this coming weekend.

Oh, for what it's worth, you can buy a nice chunk of meat and a hunk of cheese for 4 silver pieces.