Deciding where to drive a rover on Mars is a complicated process. We break it down into three levels of fidelity at JPL: strategic, tactical, and supratactical. Strategic planning is long-term thinking on the scale of months to years and addresses questions like roughly where do we want to go, what are the high level science goals, and what do we need to do now to keep the rover safe and healthy in the future. Tactical is mostly what I do. This is the detailed day-to-day stuff, actually generating the commands and sequences and sending them off to Mars. Supratactical is in between the other two and involves understanding operational constraints for the next week or two and putting together notional tactical plans that support strategic goals.

I’ve been trying to organize my own life with a similar mindset. I keep an eye on my strategic schedule, looking out at the next couple of months to make sure the major activities I have planned are consistent with my goals. I review what amounts to a supratactical plan about every week, making sure I have awareness of what is coming up and know about potential issues or conflicts. And then there is the detailed tactical calendar that I’m using to organize my days and meetings.

It’s easy to get caught up on a day-to-day calendar and goals and then beat yourself up if stuff doesn’t go as planned, but to continue the analogy, stuff comes up on Mars all the time. Downlink under performs and we don’t have some critical piece of data, a drive faults and stops earlier than we expected, the science sees a cool rock over there that they want to investigate more. These things can be annoying but we deal with them, adjust our plans, move on, and accomplish some amazing things along the way. In a similar manner, stuff comes up in real life too, the boss schedules a last minute meeting, a hardware test fails, you get a flat tire on your way to work. These things happen and the trick is being flexible enough to work through and around them while still keeping those big strategic goals in mind