About Me — Derek Reinhard

2 min readMay 31, 2022

60+ years of a whole lotta “was”, “been”, and now “am”

Aircraft contrails against high clouds — Photo by WonHo Sung on Unsplash

I’ve been writing in some form since my early teens. Journals, poetry, and short stories for the most part. I even studied poetry under Jack Myers at Southern Methodist University. I remember him telling me that, if I am still writing poetry after I hit 30 years old, then I am a poet. So maybe I am.

Creative writing was displaced by personal tragedy in 1980 and dropping out of seminary in 1981. I then spent a couple of years listing about, wondering what I would be if I grew up.

I got interested in personal productivity systems working as a mainframe computer operator. I got married in 1983 and joined the US Air Force in 1984 (if you want to avoid deciding what you want to be, join the military because they will tell you what to be, grown-up or not). My recruiter said I wasn’t smart enough to be a navigator but I could be a pilot. Flying engendered my love of checklists.

I went from computers to flying fighters to combat plans as an Exchange Officer with the UK’s Royal Air Force. After I retired from the USAF in 2004, I assisted the USAF in wargaming as a contractor. I then did a brief stint with a small commercial company, then earned my Project Management Professional (PMP) certification, went back to federal service in 2011, assisting a branch of the Department of Veterans Affairs with their internal productivity for 9 years.

I RETIRED retired December of 2020 and began writing brief books on how to use different productivity tools with David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology.

I started writing on Medium and Vocal Media and answering questions on Quora in April 2022. I publish “Productive Like A Fox”, a newsletter, on Substack.

So here I am (all in one place), now being a writer, coffee-lover, and traveler.

Another About Me in About Me Stories

Thanks for reading!