Birthday

So it’s really quite weird coming back to a blog after three years, reading text after yourself so much later that you’ve completely forgotten writing it. I’ve spent the time between last writing on this blog and now either not writing this kind of content, or writing in a diary. The diaries are really quite useful when going back, but the writing style (in my case) is more one of exhaustive completeness for future reference rather than readability. And so as you can maybe already tell I’m struggling to find my concise voice!

It was my birthday yesterday, and because it falls exactly between Christmas and New Year’s I now have a couple of days where I can basically avoid work for the most part. And so one gets to thinking.

I think the lovely part of writing a blog is that it forces you to step back and look at yourself in a certain way, imagining an unseen (and no doubt disinterested!) public being introduced to you for the first time. This blog for me was always a thing of hope, a public diary on the way to hopefully doing amazing things. A few years ago, when I was poor, I remember thinking that I should write a diary, and chronicle my journey from poor to what I hoped would be financially comfortable for more than a few months for the first time in my life. I’m kind of glad I didn’t, because I think in many ways I did it stupidly: I took too long, I worked too hard, didn’t learn quickly enough, left various messes that took ages to clean up afterwards; I didn’t read enough novels, or spend enough time on relationships, and so on.

And so this blog is, at least partly, an attempt to chronicle the next part of things, during which I do them better. Even taking the time to reflect a little and write a post or two a week is, I think, a sign of focusing energy in the right place.

And, so, what’s to come? Some of the things I’m interested in at the moment are:

  • How do you manage people, in a positive, productive way
  • How do you absolutely minimise the amount of time that you spend working, or at least the time spent working that you don’t genuinely, unambiguously enjoy. I’m constantly feeling like I’m behind, and never ahead, and I want to feel like I’m forging ahead somewhere exciting rather than running away from the chaos and mess and chasing my tail
  • Much the same as the above, what’s the best way to manage and separate work and the rest of one’s life
  • How can organisations that I control positively impact the world around them
  • What new ventures should I start, and how can these get off the ground as insanely quickly as possible
  • How do I best approach daily work to actually get things done

A day to myself

It’s Sunday, and I have the house to myself. As someone who is constantly short on time, a completely uninterrupted day alone represents an oasis of untapped potential. The battle is with the other side of myself, which quite rightly sees that my lack of r&r is a huge problem, and wants to fill days such as today with reading, cooking, playing music and watching films.

Unfortunately awareness of the mile long to do list interferes in the enjoyment of the latter. So I imagine that working like mad will at some point end up with me sipping tea in a place like this while reading novels and playing on the internet.

And so the question I ask myself is is it possible to actually do everything on said list, delegate the rest (as far as work goes)? The problem is that the list keeps growing. I guess it’s a matter of getting to a good critical mass and then everything is suddenly easy.

This is the thing with business. It’s easy, in the rich west anyway, to be relatively successful while working your nuts off. The trick is to do it without working too hard, or at least not working too hard for too long. In the end unless quality of life is getting clearly better then it’s kind of going nowhere on the smell of a promise.

So back to today. Since it’s been longer than I can remember since I successfully washed clothes, where success is measured by having cleanly washed clothes to wear, I’m starting by focusing on the basics. Washing clothes, a little cleaning, 1 hour walk in the evening, 1 hour of focused computer time later to solve a particular problem that I need to look at, and perhaps another hour if I can stomach it to proofread the last translation I hope to have to do for quite a while. In between this I’m going to watch films, keep sorting music and deleting all the crud that’s accumulated and that I never want to listen to, and sneaking off for a bit of reading every now and then.

fat and health

I’m on a trimming down crusade. How am I going to do this, you ask?

  • Swimming once a week
  • Running at least two days a week
  • Cooking more
  • Eating a good breakfast
  • Turning the thermostat down (this one’s a bit dubious, but hey, your body needs to restore core temperature somehow..)
  • Sleeping more
  • Eating slightly smaller meals
  • Avoiding unplanned snacking
  • Drinking more water
  • Wearing a fitbit, and doing at least 10k steps a day

Starting at 78.8 kg. Goal is 65. Goals are important for this, they say. Hmm. Ok. 75 by the end of March – 20 days. Quite brutal, but it’s time.

 

what makes me happy

Here’s the list, at the moment:

  • Lots of sleep. The more the better. I have never had a period of my life where I thought I was sleeping too much.
  • Being absolutely alone for hours at a time, and occasionally days. I have a massively long list of things to do, and being able to completely concentrate, with no chance of distraction, is just so amazingly lovely
  • Interacting for shorter periods of time with a large number of people, outside the above times
  • Exercise
  • Reading
  • Travel
  • The countryside. Though this relates a little to being completely undisturbed, I suspect
  • Tech systems that work. Working in IT we deal with plenty of things and processes that don’t work well, but a great number that do. Project management, version control, RHEL / CentOS / linux in general, VOIP (remember those massive PABXs?)
  • Automating things that I used to do by hand
  • Flying RC planes. Yep it’s pretty dorky, but so much fun.
  • Cooking