monoblog

I find myself often engaged in thought, creating a blog entry in my head - far more often than not, that entry never sees the light of day. When I discover how to turn thoughts into actions, I will be SO much more productive…

Which brings me to another topic I’ve been thinking quite a bit about lately (or on and off for the last 5 years, if you check out the history…) - how to make more time for the things I consider important. As I become more aware of my own actions and how certain choices lead to others, I am starting to narrow in on the simple fact that I haven’t clearly defined what is important. There is a long litany of items that I “want” to do, or “need” to do, and I end up making time for little of them and feeling frustrated by it - because there are simply too many.

For example, I downloaded 30 research papers today - why? I’m certainly not going to have time to read 30 papers - I’ll be surprised if I even read one! I was also noticing today at work that I have two monitors - one of them happens to be > 30" and the other is 24". I don’t need two. If I focused on one then I would become more efficient using it. I currently have three books from the library - why? I wasn’t able to finish reading the last one, or 7 out of the last 10. The list goes on and on.

My desires are simply not in touch with reality, which creates more frustration and ends up with less performance instead of more. As my mentor says, “simplify, focus, and execute.” Simplify means choose - choose what is important and ultimately, what isn’t important. That’s difficult; the choice feels like so many doors will be shut, but more likely, it will open many doors that happen to lead somewhere! Focus means being comfortable with the choices you’ve made; you can’t revisit them at a frequent interval or no progress can be made.

I’ve got some choices to make. I recently was surprised when someone expressed interest in purchasing the MG. Not surprisingly, I haven’t heard back - the car is simply not attractive at the moment. However, the idea of parting with it became exciting - it was one less item to worry about. I’m really torn on what my hobby will be at work, or whether I will try and stay technical at work, or whether I’ll actually invest some energy in Japanese, or whether I’ll prepare for the CS GRE, or … too many choices at the moment and by focusing on “all” of them, I’m making progress on none of them.