Addition Thanksgiving morning: Your responses in the comments below have already gotten juicy-good and taken this to the next level. Don’t miss ’em. And thanks!

Thanksgiving starts my annual season to reflect and look ahead. It started five years ago – my first blog, “The New Life of Patient Dave,” was born at Thanksgiving, just after my cancer. Each year since then it’s been my time to ask: with all I’ve seen in the past year, people I’ve met, concerns I’ve heard, what’s next? Who will I be in the coming year?

And this year I need help. Tool help, to organize my thoughts. Because there are a lot. So if you’ve faced this too, what have you learned?

The work ahead:

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The other day I recalled Ted Eytan’s old series My Own CIO, from the days when he cobbled together the tools he needed. That was my first clue that in today’s world, an individual can compete with the big boys … or at least not be constrained by lack of power tools.

I hope to continue in that spirit here, adding posts as Ted did, in the hope that others – especially other e-patient speakers – can benefit as I did.

Travel: a logistical nightmare

The other day I noted that evangelism requires taking it to the field, and my schedule page reflects that. This is complicated – a lot – by the reality that a peak conference season often requires traveling from one event to another, coordinating plans between different travel agents, which makes it hard to pick the right flight in advance, and often involves added costs later when plans change (ugh).

Here are the tools I use all the time.

• Selecting flights and hotels: Kayak.com and Southwest.com.
  • Kayak is absolutely awesome in the flexibility it gives you for departure and arrival times, length of layover, alternate airports, etc etc.
  • Kayak also lets you specify which airlines, or what flight network you want. Mine is StarAlliance (United, USAirways, etc).
    • Southwest doesn’t participate in consolidators like Tripit and Travelocity, but they’re my favorite alternative to StarAlliance: their standardized planes mean they have no crappy seats, no cramped mini-planes, and they have a hub at my closest airport, Manchester NH (MHT).
  • Kayak support is awesome. The guy who runs it writes promptly and intelligently!
  • Note that Kayak itself doesn’t sell the tickets – you buy from whatever website sent Kayak the quote. Fine with me – that means Kayak doesn’t need a redundant customer service staff.

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