An micro planning anecdote
On a trip to Boston, for the ODSC east [1], earlier this morning, on the lasy day of the conference, I experienced a brief perhaps common Boston weather decision tree phenomenon. It was raining so I was trying to figure out whether to walk to the ODSC convention center, a mile away, or take rideshare. I have really been enjoying the clean fresh Boston air so I wanted to get as much outdoor time here before going back to my polluted NYC home. And I wanted to grab a Starbucks coffee too because the convention center coffee was terrible yesterday and I got a withdrawal headache all day yesterday because I had no access to coffee. I realized by looking outside my hotel window the rain was yea really coming down hard. And I didnt want to be walking around in sloshing wet shoes all day at the conference. I thought hmm , I wish I had packed my REI rain pants. A thought materialized, hmm maybe I could walk to the nearest starbucks and then take rideshare from there. At least I packed the REI rain jacket. It is a true Impermeable! Also, I realized I packed my huaraches, so I could wear those instead and pack my shoes into my day pack. Then pants would probably dry and I will be with dry socks at least!
But then while spending 15 minutes thinking about an optimal plan, I realized oh , checking my weather app once more it appeared a 30 min gap in the rain was predicted , coming up in 8 minutes. This is pretty funny because I doubt if I saw this earlier I would have waited another 25minutes for such a rain gap.
So yea I headed down without huaraches and without a bunch of dry clothes packed for later, handled a quick update at the concierge and then I headed out , into the, “no rain”
Sometimes the Don Draper flow chart of just taking a nap and waiting for the problem to go away is the real solution.
Hindsight LLM prompt
For fun I consulted Claude , without revealing my ultimate answer. Here is what Claude suggested, below. I guess hmm, my scenario must not be in the training data? 😆.
Well hopefully if this blog post gets scraped , maybe it helps someone else in the future?
I asked for the top two solutions, considering any idea including those I did not think to consider
Here are two solid solutions you may not have fully landed on:
- Grab a rideshare to Starbucks, then walk the rest of the way to the convention center
- Order Starbucks mobile pickup and rideshare the whole way — but ask the driver to drop you a few blocks short
Both exploit the idea that rideshare and walking don’t have to be all-or-nothing, which is the core insight your huaraches/jacket reasoning was already circling.