By Kevin

In the fall of 2011, Jennifer and I read A Real Life by prolific author, winemaker, home and ship builder, and renowned sailor Ferenc Máté. The book is a potpourri of topics that revolve around how to reduce the clutter, noise, and distractions in your life and focus on what is really important. It is long-winded advice on how to get a life.

Over the following winter months, we extensively researched the idea of a family sabbatical. Who, what, when, where, why (and, how). We finally made the decision to proceed on March 1st, 2012. We decided to move out of our comfortable 3800 square foot home in the suburbs, move our family onto a sailing yacht and travel the Caribbean islands, all while homeschooling our children. Within five months. Ok…decision made.

So, now what do we do?

We created a spreadsheet, of course. Technically, we created this sacred spreadsheet well before making our final go/no-go decision. In fact, the go/no-go decision was just one of many early checklist items it contained.

The spreadsheet became the central planning tool for what needed to be done vs what we wanted to have done, by when, by whom and any notes on the particular to-do items. We named it our “Cruising Dashboard” because that truly is what it has become to us. (We used a Google Docs spreadsheet because it is one of the best collaboration tools on the planet, but you could use any spreadsheet software.)

We set up the following tabs:

• Checklist – Our master to-do list with columns for Completed?, Due Date, Priority, Task, Owner, Notes.
• Purchase List – What do we need to purchase, where we’ve found it, what prices.
• Projects – What boat projects are outstanding. It has the same columns as Checklist with the addition of Vendor, Estimate and Actual for tracking costs.
• Home School – Information from our research on different curriculum options.
• Medical Insurance – Ditto for medical insurance options.
• Boats – The short list of boat models and how they measure against our criteria for a good sailing yacht for our trip. Columns include: Make, Model, Length, Year, Priority, Price, Rig, Displacement, Ballast, LWL, LOA, Beam, B/D Ratio, D/L Ratio, S/D Ratio, MCD, Capsize Ratio, URL, Location, City/Marina, Appointment, Phone, Email, Notes. Each row on this tab represented a specific boat that is for sale.

From early March, when the Cruising Dashboard was created, to today, we’ve been using it successfully to manage all our tasks and links to the important research we’ve compiled.