Engineering Studies, Careers, and Transitions

Month: August 2017

Support Your Folks in the Field; You Might Be One

There is a lot written about how to prioritize your work tasks. Everyone tries to develop a matrix where we sort the urgent and the non-urgent; the important versus the unimportant. We may try to avoid or fall into the trap of “last come, first served” to the cubicle. We have a host of lists and tools to organize our day. There is a steady stream of emails, Outlook Calendar reminders, people at the coffee machine, etc. It is hard being white collar.

Now here is a very simple algorithm for deciding which tasks should leapfrog which, in your office work as an engineer: supporting your people in the field is the top priority.

Prize: figure everything out while sweating in 40 deg C on 2 hours of sleep

How does this make for a reasonable principle?

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Approaching Donor-Advised Funds – Change Your Perspective

Several years ago I had come across Donor-Advised Funds (DAF) as one avenue to do charitable giving in the mid/late career phase. It occurred to me that the mechanics of a DAF can be configured to parallel in many respects the aims of people like me that try to center their own lives and ideally their communities around sustainable trajectories. There are some tactics to alter how we might value setting up a DAF that might encourage more people to follow this path. I may have approached my DAF differently if I had learned about some strategies sooner, perhaps even as early as 5-10 years before implementing one. For those of you in high tax brackets and still with a healthy set of deductions to itemize, a DAF can be especially advantageous. So if it helps, here are several considerations to ponder well in advance.

Think several moves ahead

 

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