This morning, when I woke up in Harlem, I was faced with a series of problems.

We are in the city for a mere 12 hours, staying at a friend’s place on our way back to Vermont, but as is usually the case, and is maybe an example of my excessive enthusiasm for travel and novelty, I find myself wanting to do everything in that brief span of time.

The first problem:

The sun is up at 5:38 AM and it’s projected to be 92° today. The National Weather Service has issued a heat warning and that puts some constraints on when I might safely get up and go about the city. I wilt easily.

The second problem:

I like to run in new places and traveling is exactly the opportunity to do so. I’m usually a morning runner - sometimes very early morning - so perhaps this dovetails with the first problem and I can get out around or before sunrise, before the massive nuclear fusion reactor is over the horizon. But I can’t expect to go all that far, and Manhattan is vast. I should keep my radius tight around the North end of the island.

The third problem:

. . . is the stuff I want to visit and the things I want to obtain for my family, still sleeping peacefully. Actually, there are several sub-problems to the third problem. First: Hungarian pastries. There’s a legendary shop in Morningside Heights. It doesn’t open until 7:30. Next stuff to obtain: bagels. Lord help me, there’s a Dunkin’ that opens at 6:00 but ain’t nobody want that so I need to wait until a reasonably high quality bagel shop opens at 8:00. Next stuff to obtain, and the most complicated, is coffee. If I run before coffee it’s a slog. If I get coffee while running it’s passable. I also would like to - /I feel obligated to - bring coffee to my wife who will wake up at some unspecified time between 6:30 and 8:30. The first decent espresso joint isn’t open until 6:30 (I dunno Jay, this city sure seems to sleep quite a bit). The first decent espresso that I could safely carry back - i.e. less than a mile away - isn’t open until 7:00. And hey, I wouldn’t mind seeing Grant’s Tomb while I’m in the neighborhood.

The approximate distance order of these places from our lodging is as follows, closest to farthest:

• 7:00 AM espresso place
• Bagel place
• Hungarian pastry place
• Grant
• 6:30 AM espresso place

How do I fit all this in?

Swimming in data

This is a question that could be answered with the information at hand, because there is a lot of information at hand. Strava is excellent at planning routes. Google Maps is agreeable at telling me when places are opening and approximately how far away they are. The National Weather Service is very good at telling me when to seek shelter.

These services are all made possible with an ocean of data. In Google’s POI case, that data is proprietary - and expensively-obtained - but nominally provided for free. In Strava’s, it’s cleverly based on crowdsourced user experience and open-source datasets. The NWS is righteously funded by you and me to offer its predictions for free and with any number of API endpoints. My own employer is famously good at offering the sort of weaving tools for geographic applications that could tie one service to the next, coming tantalizingly close to James Killick’s “Possible Magical Product” of a planning app. I’ve even taken small shots at this myself in the past.

I could put it all together, but the question now changes to:

Why the hell would I do that?

I’m presenting myself with this complex time management problem and it’s . . . unnecessary. It exists as an outgrowth of my own travel style, as well as my anxieties and desires. I could see a series of API calls that would string together a lovely route, matching bakery hours, and maybe even including some peripherals like park benches on which to stretch while waiting for cafes to open. But I don’t think that the market for this is terribly large, nor frankly is this mindset anything that I would wish on someone else.

Emerging from the flow

Rather than building the perfect app to make all of this craziness go more efficiently, I would instead recommend that someone else slow the hell down. Sleep in. Get the late coffee. Get the late bagel. Don’t try to please everyone. Don’t try to show off. All of these drives and pathologies are baked into my synthetic coordination problem, and they suggest that I need a therapist more than I need One App to Rule Them All (Don’t worry, I’m on it). I don’t begrudge anyone else who feels that such an app would help them, but I suspect it’s not the solution to anything that bedevils me this morning.

But there’s hope as I sit here at the Carl Schurz statue in Morningside Heights, overlooking a truly beautiful-if-terrifying dawn, and metabolizing my 6:30 espresso. There’s hope as I ponder turning off the damn running log on my watch, strolling over through Columbia (if it’s even possible anymore) and down Amsterdam Avenue to get some strudel. There’s hope because I’ve paused to think about it all. And because Schurz has a very comfortable bench dedicated in his name, I’m going to take some deep breaths. I’m going to start observing the city as it wakes up, and I’m going to cast all that data into the Hudson River.