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This afternoon's musing is brought you to by a medium-sized Tim Horton's coffee with a single cream, and the letter Q. It's 3PM and I'm just now able to sit and write. What a day this has been; stress free, but very very busy.
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I woke this morning to a massive outage with one of our systems at work. Everyone was in a panic and things were hectic. I strolled into work, sat down at my desk and began plugging away. Emails, pouring over logs, checking code and all of the fun things we as developers live for. Of course there wasn't much to be done from my end since the bulk of the problem was a mis-executed procedure on the other end which resulted in the main ticket system going down HARD. I did notice a few issues on our side which were unrelated and promptly made a few fixes which I will need to deploy tonight. Of course things are calm and quiet now, but the thrill of the job is still pulsing through my body; or maybe that's the hunger of a missed lunch :)-slurp-
It's day 5 and I'm still stress free. I haven't worried about work all week and it felt great. I've been relaxed, smiling, laughing and enjoying my time here while being quite productive. It's been a good week and definitely something I'm going to keep in mind in the days and weeks ahead. Speaking of "days and weeks ahead", I have decided to add a little plugin to the site which will allow me to track my stress levels. With each blog post, I will try to remember to add one of these so you, the reader, can see what my current stress level is at. Hopefully this will be relatively small with my new method of dealing with stress, but there may be days when I can't contain it and the stress levels may rise. It should look something like this:
[progpress title="Stress Level" goal="100" current="2" previous="1" label="stress"]
Hopefully that looks ok. I haven't used this plugin before but according to the documentation, it should work just fine for what I need.
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Well folks, work beckons and I must answer it's cruel wicked call. I will be working well into the night tonight so wish me luck. Don't forget that the second full moon within a single calendar month is called the Blue Moon. More on that later.
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Cheers,
Al
Well since I had no work yesterday (and no stress), and today has been pretty much stress free, I guess you could almost say my experiment has been a success. Tomorrow will be a week and I will find some way to document my findings and publish them here. In fact, I just gave myself a great idea for a new section on my site to keep track of stress and stress levels; keep an eye out for that to show up soon. Tomorrow being Friday, I doubt there will be much in the way of stress happening. Although I do have to work Friday night for a few hours, I'm sure it will be stress free and relaxing. I will say, my frame of mind while at work has been different. I don't let things build up and bother me like they have been. I don't get down about the job and I greet each task with a smile. The key to keeping your shit together while at work is prioritizing and I will definitely write more on that at a later day. Let me just add that not everyone knows how to prioritize and those who say they do are usually doing it wrong. There is a right way and a wrong way to prioritize and hopefully I will be able to help someone out there with my experiences and suggestions.
Though technically it is morning, it is almost noon my time. I've had a busy stress free morning this morning and have been loving every minute of it. Yesterday turned out to be quite successful. It started off busy, but I made a conscious decision to not feel stress over it. I spent the majority of the morning pouring over email threads that kept me busy most of the weekend. I believe I mentioned yesterday that I ended up spending a good chuck of my weekend working and then I was working again last night. In fact, other than the drive from work to home, I worked from 9AM to 10:30PM straight. It sounds stressful, but when you have a no stress attitude, it was really a walk in the park. As a result of the extra hours over the weekend and last night, I now have no work tomorrow; nothing like a break in the middle of a no stress week to help alleviate any stress that may come.
Overall I'm quite happy about how things went yesterday. Despite being busy and having lots of work to do, it was really quite care free. I did my job, put my head down, had a few laughs with my coworkers and overall had a good day. I had a smile on my face which (as my coworkers can attest to), is not that common these days. You see folks, I take my job seriously and I do a god job in that. I spend a lot of extra hours working and ensuring things are running as smoothly as possible. I lead a team of developers and often I take on work that could otherwise be delegated in order to help alleviate some of the strain and stress on my team. I don't mind working the extra hours because at the end of the day if the customer is happy, work is good. We are working on a major development project right now which has a lot of eyes on it. The team has done an amazing job pulling together and getting the project finished up and we are getting close to a finished product. I'm happy with the way things have gone so far. We've had some bumps in the road along the way, but we have worked through them and things are moving along. While the team has been focused on this task, I have been trying to take care of the other things that go on in a development team such as this. I've found myself up many nights developing, debugging and doing code reviews to ensure my days can be focused on the things that are needed. It has been exhausting, but rewarding at the same time. I get things done and thanks to my team, we have been successful and are perceived a success.
It's Friday! TGIF, Day of Frigg, Fredag Day, Day of Venus or whatever else you want to call it. For me it signifies the end of a brutal work week and the birth of a relaxing weekend. In some cultures, Friday is considered unlucky (or Dies Infaustus) and if you read up on it, there are so many different superstitions around the day I find it hard to believe that anyone can be happy on such a glorious day. Of course the only reason most of us like the day is because it ends our work week.
I am also looking forward to starting work next week. If you haven't read the last couple musings you're probably picking yourself off the floor from the shock. I should have made sure everyone was sitting down before announcing such a shocking statement. If you haven't been following along the past couple days, you won't know that I plan on performing a little experiment next week to see if I can reduce stress levels and become more productive at work. I performed this same experiment a few years back (ok, 8 years back) and it was quite successful. The big difference here is I don't have a vacation waiting for me at the other end. This will be a true test.
I'm sure I already have a musing with this title in here somewhere (have been doing this since November 2003 after all) but I figured what the hell. Happy New Year!