Yesterday was a special day, the annual self-appraisal meeting has proven to be an effective mean to discuss some of my thoughts and concerns about the past and future. But it also proved to be a good introspection exercise about what could be improved.
The ‘after’ feeling was that I had excelled (and ever surpassed some of the expectations) in a number of ways. The only exception is my capabilities to plan and organize myself. The (-) on the title is only related to this exception.
I must admit that improving this aspect of my work has proven to be more difficult that I expected. The major problem seems to be finding a workflow able to cope with all my everyday needs.
I’ll promise to keep trying to pro-actively improve this issue!
I proudly admit that during my child hood (pre teen years), I had a ZX Spectrum 128k + 2. My first PC came later, two years before I entered entered the university. And the Internet only became available during my undergraduate studies. For this I must admit that every business of the heart (or should I say business of the ‘raging hormones’) was handled face-to-face with the loved one.
I was somehow shocked to learn that more than half of the Portuguese population prefers to use instant messaging tools instead of face-to-face communication to exchange their “most intimate thoughts”! Even worst than that was learning that of about 31 weekly hours (1612 annual hours) each teen uses only 87 annual hours looking at soft-porn… preferring to spend their on-line period looking for diet recipes or researching about cosmetic surgeries!
Let’s see if I understand kids today. They prefers to stay at home ‘chatting’ instead of having an actual date, and they use the Internet for things other than searching for porn…
I’m feeling old!
Some while ago a friend made me a proposal to write a post about what I consider a Life Changing Meme. First of all, I had to lookup the actual definition of Meme because, as it was presented, it seemed like a fancy name for a blog version of a chain letter… I hate those things!
According to the good old(?) wikipedia, the term Meme refers to an idea or behavior that is transmitted for one person to another, and it was used (by Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene) in order to extend the evolutionary principles to the field of ideas, making ideas evolve by natural selection in similar ways to that of biological evolution proposed by Darwin.
Looking at the subject, a Life Changing Meme should refer to ideas capable of changing the way you live your life or that have direct impact on your life philosofy. Here are some introspections about what could change my life style (in a good way):
- Improve the way I manage my time
Time can’t be controlled by anybody, but it can be managed. A better management of the time I spend working or with the family would do me wonders. After some thought, the time spend with my dearest ones is quite small considering the time spent at work. If less time was spent working, a lot more time would be available for the things that deserve far more attention that they are getting now.
The main problem is that I usually get deeply involved with work and forget the surrounding environment. This is something that I need to change. The first step is to define priorities and stick with them.
- Spend more time with my family
Following with the last topic… They are my priority!
- Decrease the multi-tasking activities
I really enjoy doing different things at the same time, but I need to moderate the number of parallel tasks I’m performing at any given time. The number of stuff to be done starts to overwhelm me.
- Be less pessimistic
To those who know me, I’m a pessimistic by nature and it gets worse when stress starts to increase. This doesn’t mean that the goals are not achieved, but simply that I prefer: to get to a meeting 10 minutes before it starts than 10 minutes after; or, to work more 30 minutes today than having to arrive 30 minutes earlier tomorrow; or, to test the final version twice the time that was expected instead of ‘hopeing’ that everything turns out OK.
Sometimes this pessimism influences the people around me, and it is something that I really need to be careful about.
- Improve personal management of expectations
Managing personal expectations is something that I find quite difficult, specially because the expectation levels are usually set to a very high standard. If expectations were more adapted to the reality, things would be more easy!
- Improve personal organisation (ongoing…)
Some steps have been taken in the last year months in order to improve personal organisation. Some improvements have already been seen but there is still some work to be done. I find a little paper scrapbook and/or e-tasklist (like Basket) to be very important.
- Select one hobbie
I need to have one… just one! Choose one, and stick with it… Blogging seems to the the one!
These are just some of the ideas that could change my life for the better… but there are a lot more things to do to improve life quality!
Tomorrow is school day, again. This does not mean that I’ll be starting to attend the SEE program at Stantford University, it just means that my days has a PhD student are about to start.
Two years of working as a software engineer made me realize that experience is very important, and that I have a lot to learn and do before I can call myself a experienced software engineer. I’m working on that issues, trying to read about new methodologies and techniques by myself and learning to apply them in the everyday job.
But there is also some other fields I’d like to improve, a lot more close to research new knowledge than to applied engineering. This is one thing that is seems to be missing from the current job. Let’s see if the ‘part-time’ PhD provides some new insights on other fields of knowledge.
I love photography and any thing related to it. Photo journalism is one of the many areas that I enjoy and the work of Michael Kamber (for New Your Times) just made me really thing about life. The work presents shoots taken during a USA military mission in Iraq, during which the 2nd Brigade Combat Team was attacked (suffering a casualty). The quality of the photos and the comments of the photographers made me think about how fragile is human life. I think one of photography’s main goals should be to make people think more often about that.
©Michael Kamber for The New York Times
… and I can’t sleep!
I just got up from bed, after a really quick sleep, because I can’t stop thinking about work. This is one of those nights when every time the mind starts to wander it always goes to something work related.
I was supposed to get a few days of vacations starting tomorrow, but that isn’t going to happen. The release has been delayed, and my free had to be sacrificed with it, again. I just hope the delivery gets done soon, in order to have a full stop in the current activities and so creating some time to re-group my thoughts from the future.
Things change. Sometimes without anyone taking notice of it… and the last thing I noticed that changed was Capri-Sonne. Yes, I mean the well known juice that comes in those puffy packages different from any other juice packages. It’s not a metal can, it’s not tetra pak carton, it’s Capri-Sonne!
Capri-Sonne was elected to be my latest vacation official drink. During a late afternoon, the beach brought to my attention the ‘new’ fact.
The orange straw, that comes firmly attached to the back of the package, no longer falls inside. The package design has been remade to avoid that. I don’t exactly what changed, but the fact is that my first grade school trips horror is no longer possible!
Whenever the straw didn’t fall into the package, it was just because the straw pierced the package front-to-back. That is also very unlikely because the new design includes a very soft membrane very easy to pierce.
I hadn’t had a Capri-Sonne in a long time, but now that I’ve tried it again… it brings memories.
I usually use my own car to travel to work everyday. Unfortunately, the public transportation (the BUS, or as called in the province of this small Portugal, “carreira”) near my home is quite scarce, and I only tend to use them when strictly necessary. On the other side, I some times use the car to travel half the way and them take the train the rest of the way.
The last option has a lot of benefits. The first benefit is related with the smaller carbon footprint os using the train (instead of diesel “tank”*). Secondly, this kind of travelling provides with much more time for reading. And I love reading…
So, with don’t I use the train every single day? Because it takes me almost one hour a day more than when using the car.
* “tank” is the caring name I use to refer to my sweet old car!
Let me start by saying “I need a vacation”.
That being said, today’s thought goes to my obvious lack of concentration. I suspect that not being on vacation for six months in a row is the major cause of sensing some difficulty in concentrating. And worst of all, this is becoming evident for the people around me. This week, several events have brought that to my attention. Dramatically…
I’ve never considered myself stupid, but this week:
- I was unable to find a word in a book index (of course the word was there)
- I forgot the hours of scheduled meetings (4 out of 5)
- I was unable to find an evident option in one of the applications I use regularly
- and… I forgot the forth event… I know, depressing…
I need to go on Vacation, soon…
When you enjoy what you do for a living, your job can be the main motive for getting out of bed in the morning. Not considering other factors, such as family, this is fine and can be the right way to get the personal gratification everyone needs.
As we should all know, in a work environment, dealing with tight schedules is difficult. An even greater problem arises when work becomes an obsession (persons with such an obsession are known as ‘workaholics’). The compulsion can drive a person to start working at home in order to try and finish the assigned tasks, or to stay late in the office.
Such an environment doesn’t help the worker that can let himself into depression. Depression can arise due to the permanent delay of gratification associated with the termination of a task. This state is known as burnout. Here’s some articles on the subject [1] [2] [3] [4].
