In honour of the new year, I’ve decided to start once again with posting on my web log. Just as every journey starts with a single step, this post will be off the top of my head to help get me started in the right direction.
The biggest reason why I have neglected to post over the past 6 months was a failure to properly schedule my time. At the end of August I became in two large projects, one at work and another in my free time, which seemed to be all-consuming and ate up all my free-time. At the time I felt like I did not have time to do many of the smaller, but important things I wanted to do.
I’ve written in the past about urgent vs. non-urgent and important vs. non-important. What do you do if you have something that both extremely urgent and important (UI), but so demanding that it gets in the way of other UI projects? The answer is seemingly obvious, but much harder to implement. The answer is to learn to gauge how much time a task will take and switch between tasks in order to complete the most tasks.
Often you may have many smaller tasks that may only take an hour to complete, but you are so focused on the larger tasks you neglect to switch to them. I now realize in hindsight that it was my reluctance to temporarily abandon the biggest projects that was starving the minor ones. The irony here is that part of my work in my job involves process scheduling in the Linux kernel. Especially an enhancement which allows you to designate how much time is scheduled for each process group.
Another related failing was that I became so focused on clearing the to do items currently on my plate that I failed to set back and look at the bigger picture. I didn’t step back and look for the greater things that I wanted to accomplish. Those things that were important to me, but weren’t necessarily on my daily todo list. Not only was my ability to schedule broken, but my ability to plan broke down as well.
Often the verbs schedule and plan are used interchangeably without any distinction between them. I made this mistake myself for the longest time before I reading an article outlining the difference between the two. The author suggested that the distinction between scheduling and planning was that “to schedule” was to decide when and who but “to plan” was deciding what and how. I was stuck in a tight loop where I (who) was only scheduling in the two most demanding tasks now (when) and not taking time to consider other things that were important to me (what) or even other ways of getting my current asks done (how).
Now, you may be wondering what the result of my errant behaviour was. At first I was extremely productive. I tore through problems that were completely foreign to me by bootstrapping myself with the necessary skills. I absorbed a lot of information in a short space of time and used it to slowly decompose the problems and mechanically find the solution. This worked really well for a while, but over time this breaks down. Without any time to relax or “prime the pump”, I soon became tired and increasingly stressed. In addition, heuristic methods aren’t always the most efficient or effective way of solving the problem. They will produce results by brute force, but often a planned and carefully thought-out approach will be much faster.
My new year’s resolution is to learn from this experience and learn to work smarter by taking the time to plan what I want to do. Most importantly, this includes taking the time to relax and enjoy life by doing those things I enjoy in my free time.
Have I wasted 6 months of my life through this mistake?
Certainly not. I made huge progress on both projects and now am enjoying a lull after clearing much of the work out of the way. I also have learned an incredible amount, technically, on both projects which will help me greatly in the future. However, now is the time to reap that which I’ve learned and shift to a planned and directed approach to getting things done.
There’s so much to do in life. I’m glad that I’ve learned first-hand how important it is to plan what you want and make sure to schedule in planning regularly.
On that note, I wish you all a Happy New Year. If you want to find me I’ll be working on my other New Year’s resolution. I’m learning how to stop when skating without having to crash into the boards.
