Tomatoes for strength
Three weeks of the Pomodoro Technique have structured my days and improved my productivity, and the push-ups I do during the five-minute breaks are making me stronger.
All posts tagged: productivity
Sometimes I tag very loosely or obscurely so the link might not be obvious.
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Trusting the process
Over the last couple weeks I’ve been very busy sort of advocating for a big set of projects at work and got my wish. There is buy in from a bunch of people who could otherwise stand in my way.
Then yesterday I started trying to figure out how to start these projects “the right way.” This basically fully stopped me. I had no idea how to proceed. I mean I need some roadmap stuff and some milestones, normal stuff. But I felt like there was a set of step-by-step instructions I was missing.
Then today I realized I should continue to barrel forward toward my goal and not get overly hung up on the process. Just use it as the guardrails it’s meant to be to help keep things on track. If I’m spending hours on the paperwork it’s my attitude and the way I’m using it to hide behind that’s making it into red-tape.
My secret weapon in the workforce is I find something I want and have reasons I want it and then go after it. This defeats almost everyone else in advance because they don’t know what they want and don’t know why they want to just live with the corporate inertia.
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The Unremarkable Bisy Backson
I don’t think this is a great article, You Can Be Busy or Remarkable—But Not Both. But when I read it—after a tremendously busy day—it struck a chord. Plus I couldn’t resist a title reference to the Tao of Pooh after seeing the guy referenced in the article was some dude named Tao.
I read something that said being lost is not about not knowing where you are, but giving too much focus and anxiety to where you are not. I don’t have any idea what the origin of this was, maybe some quote in my High School yearbook.
I think often the sense of anxiety that accompanies being busy is about knowing all the things you aren’t doing and letting that fill up your mind. Or allowing your mind-reading of other people’s expectations to dictate how you feel about your life. These things all are awful ideas.
Anyway I’m feeling a inspired to spend a more of of my time trying to relax, be realistic, and have some fun.
Update: I read what I wrote and was completely confused, so I reworded some things. See I was tremendously busy yesterday and my brain doesn’t work anymore.
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Reflection on beginnings
I enjoyed Michael Lopp’s article An Introduction to You, specifically this part:
We are in an incredible hurry building important things and have no time for nuance. We’re impatient. We’re busy. We want everything to move faster, so we make huge, comforting assumptions and slap easy to understand labels on complex concepts.
Though I’ve been thinking little about the idea of oversimplifying and therefore over or under estimating the contribution of a new employee. Rather the quoted section made me think about how much is often missed in the “incredible hurry” when building products and the systems and processes to support a business.
It would have resonated more with me if he had written the exact same article but if it were not about an employee, but a new technology being integrated into the same busy-worshiping company culture.