Grinding On

Today seemed completely nuts.  Being so close to the end of the project with so much time invested already, we have to avoid running in circles.  It's easy to get caught up in the more broad picture.  Between all the team members and after today we easily have over 84 hours invested into this project.  Our group is passionate about being able to deliver a solid product to our company and feel a huge level of pressure.  But the focus is there, and after a 12 hour day with little in the way of breaks we are getting our "laser focus" back in gear.  When I say little in the way of breaks, I mean we stopped at the store to get some things to make up some dinner, and then it was back in front of the computers drilling away again.  Anna made some pasta and I made some Thai green curry chicken with veggies.  Both were delicious and helped refuel us to keep working hard now that we are back at the apartment.  This is real life, whether we are in Dublin or not, some work days require a lot more hours.  This is certainly not the first time I have put in more than 12 hours of work in a day, haha!  But in a weird way I love the grind too.  Mind you it is not something I want out of everyday, but a good long work day that produces results can be rewarding.  This blog post might be the most raw of them all in its fluid and straight forward nature.  I am trying to re-capture the moments and fluid thoughts as they come right now, so I am not even going back to edit this post.  This day had its ups and downs for sure.  There were moments I wanted to crawl under the desk and lay down to try to get the room to stop spinning.  So much information overload and trying to match information into usable things to drive us in the right direction and keep focused can be one of the biggest challenges to overcome.  One thing pointed out by Bevan that would be helpful would be to have a project leader for our team, even with 3 of us it can be hard when someone cannot fully take the reigns and say this is the direction we are going.  Yet we have managed all the same and with all the head spins we have come out on the other side.  The key is to not get frustrated when you cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel.  So many times we get glimpses and then it will disappear again.  Every time it disappeared today I tried to get us back on track to where we could see it again.  Each of us contributed to this end in reality.  I am grateful that each member of my team has so much to contribute, as this is hard enough.  Without their contributions none of this would be close to where it is at.  After the end of the day today, I feel like that light at the end of the tunnel is a little brighter.  I will be saying my prayers tonight that we can contribute value to our company.  My advice to anyone who goes on this trip to Ireland would be to push through the head spins.  Work through it and don't let it stop your progress.  I know that the value of this experience is beyond measure and that each of us will come away from this with better business sense.  Pictured below is the dinner cooking after our run home in the rain.  This is the grind, because right after this dinner we made it was back to work.