Today (written about yesterday)

I almost didn't make it today.  I've been waking up faithfully at 5:45 AM to study for the CCENT.  I only have three chapters to go to make it through the entire book, and then its study and test, study and test for a few weeks before taking the actual test.  But this morning I didn't want to get up.  I got up, walked into the kitchen to turn off the alarm, and walked back to bed. 

And a part of my brain started screaming.  It said something like this, or maybe it was other motivational things.

What did you just do?  You got out of bed to turn off the alarm, set another alarm for an hour later, and you've walked all the way back to lay down. 

But I'm tired.

Wah.  Go cry to someone else.  Do you like what you've been getting?  Because if you do, rolling over and going back to sleep is great.  But I know you don't.  So get your lazy butt out of bed and go study.  If you keep doing what you've been doing, you're going to keep getting what you've been getting. 

But I'm tired.

And somewhere in all that, I got out of bed again, roughly ten minutes after I was supposed to.  So I got up, and I studied.  And I finished with chapter 21 and started chapter 22, two days ahead of schedule.  Maybe taking the CCENT in late February is a little late.  I might be able to move it up to early February or late January.  Why?  Because I finally got the part of my brain that advocates for me to wake up.  That tiny little piece of motivation that everyone is out screaming to find.  I finally beat mine into submission and got him speaking the correct language at the correct time.  It only took a good six or seven months. 

Task Orientation vs Time Orientation

Over the course of my reading, I think I've read a lot about time management.  Time management makes perfect sense.  If you properly manage your time, then you get more out of your day.  And that works great for people who aren't an in interrupt driven job.  That's my real problem.  I can plan my day as much as I want, but people do what people do, and machines break.  Depending on what breaks, I may not even make it to the office.  And for the plans I made?  Those go completely out the window.

So time management doesn't work for me.  I want it to work, but it doesn't.  If I could follow all the wonderful time management principles then my day would go wonderfully.  But task orientation works slightly differently.  Task orientation is more concerned with producing results than it is about following a clock.  And that fits more into what I want.  But no one ever talks about task orientation.  I think it's because time management focuses on the wrong thing and is based on the wrong ideas.

All my life, I've been expected to perform.  In order to perform, tasks have to be completed.  As skill grows, the time needed to complete the same task changes.  Time becomes less important than completion of task.  Should I spend more of my time trying to determine how long it will take me to finish a task, or should I just go from task to task as I finish each?  Initially, a problem may take me two hours.  Thirty or forty repetitions in, it only takes 30 minutes.  But everything is still based off the time it took to do the first.  So I finish four tasks of the project my phone kicks back and reminds of the second task of the four is now supposed to start.  My phone is time oriented and is behind what I need to do. 

So I think I came up with the Java project.  I need to make a program so I can work towards producing my task oriented day.  As each project or section is finished, that can be completed.  And whatever I prioritize next jumps into my list, constantly giving me a task to work on.  I think that's what I'll do. 

The not so smart phone/ Task orientation

I keep thinking about different things while messing with my phone.  I have a Motorola DroidX for work, and it feels somehow incomplete.  It's kind of like the framework has been built for what I want, but what I want out of the device just isn't there.  But it could be.  I keep thinking of the smart phone as a life management tool, not just a phone.

The parts are all there, but it's a disparate system where nothing matches up and tells me anything I want to know.  For example... there's a GPS in there, and I want to know where I've been all day.  Did I just wander to the office and stay there or was I out hitting dozens of stores?

I want a task list.  I do something like this with Outlook and GMail calendar, but that's not quite what I want.  I can't necessarily dictate what I want to do at every moment in the day, but I want to know what I need to do.  Let's say I have four tasks: T1, T2, T3, and T4.  These are things that need to be accomplished, but there isn't anything relating the tasks.  There may be a T1.1 in there, but T1 doesn't have to be completed to work on T4.  So I drive around and finish T1, and mark it off my list.  But then I have broken stuff to work on, and I end up just a few feet from where I need to do T4.  So I complete that task.   Now, T1 and T4 are complete. 

With gmail calendar and Outlook, if I finish the tasks out of order, I still get notifications about needing to go do T4 at 2PM.  I also have to go back at the end of the day and mark tasks as complete or incomplete.  I guess gmail and Outlook are more time oriented than task oriented.  But in my job I need task orientation and something that works towards task orientation. 

And if I create something that's task oriented, why can't I make something that has multiple subtasks for each individual task?  Example: T1 now has T1.1, T1.2, and T1.3.  These are all dependent on each other, and T1.1 has to be complete before I can complete T1.2, and T1.2 has to be complete before I start T1.3.  Now, if I finish T1.1 with the system I'm using now, I have to head back to the office, look through my task list table, and add T1.2 into my calendar.  That's not very efficient.

What if I add GPS capabilities into the device, and map a task to the GPS location?  So I need to buy milk, and I decide I want to buy it from Wal-Mart.  Next time I drive within a few miles of Wal-Mart, my phone yells at me and says "hey buddy, go to Wal-Mart and complete task T1, 'buy milk'".  Now that would be a smart phone.

Mists of Pandaria

So I decided to pop two quarters in the World of Warcraft machine and see what Mists of Panderia was all about.  It was probably closer to $45 in all truth.  But...  in the end, it's WoW with newer, pretty graphics and bears and Chinese mythology.  There really isn't much more to it than that.  Blizzard has done a good job of creating a game that gives players a reason to keep showing up and hitting the feeder for another food pellet.  Daily quests and achievements are jsut things they use to get people to show up day after day.

I'm not mad with Blizzard.  They want to make a buck and feed their workers.  And they came up with a game that gives people a reason to keep showing up.  But if you've played WoW, it's still WoW.  Once again, Blizzard hosed the fight mechanics so you have to relearn those all over again.  And they changed the way skills level up, so you have to grind dailies in order to level up skills and get better equipment beyond a certain point. 

So in the end, Blizzard made a game that wants you to keep showing up.  But I don't want to show up as much as I used to.  I've grown tired of the "find 8 things by killing 50 enemies and return it to me" quests.  I've grown tired of escorting weak pathetic idiots that take the WORST POSSIBLE PATH through an area because they are trying to escape.  Protip: if you are trying to escape, use the wide open forest ten feet behind you instead of going through the enemy encampment.  One bitey forest creature is a lot easier than 50 pissed off elves.  Seriously.

They do put a lot of character into the expansion.  The Virmen have been my favorite so far.  Virmen are giant rabbit creatures of questionable intelligence.  At one point, they bury tools to attempt to grow more tools.  I like these things for their humor.  Most of the rest of the races/creations aren't as interesting.  The worgen from the Cataclysm expansion were more interesting as a general rule, but they had a better back story and character growth.

The Pandarians themselves are all vaguely Chinese as is the entire continent of Pandaria, but I can't help but see this stopover in a strange continent as being a two page side story as opposed to a major event.  It just doesn't strike me as grand as going to Northrend was.  There's something about the entire territory that screams "time for an expansion and we're out of ideas" as opposed to a well fleshed out territory.  Pandaria is shaped a lot like Northrend to me. 

In many ways, that's my whole problem with the expansion.  After numerous great expansions that provide someplace to go and a new mythology everywhere, we end up in...  Pandaria.  It's just not as impressive as I expected it to be.  It strikes me of lots of polish in the build and quest, but it's all just a framework to get people showing up day after day and paying their $15 a month.  There's less heart to it.  But that's just me.

New Years Resolutions

So, a few days into the new year and I haven't written a new post.  I guess I should.  That's why I've got this thing up, right?  Producing new worthwhile content all the while trying to reap a profit from the whole proceeds?  Ok, so I'm only so altruistic.  Maybe.

Moving on.  I've set a few goals for this year.  Maybe they are simple.  Maybe they are not.

1) Get my baby emergency fund finished.   That's $1,000 in the bank for emergencies.

2) Pay off and cancel all the credit cards we have.

3)  Buy a house. 

4) Pass the CCENT and CCNA.

5) Learn Java.  Get a finished program on the Android Market.

So...  goals are one thing, but how am I going to accomplish this pile of stuff?  It's great to have goals, but what in the world are you going to do to make those goals a reality?  Let's say I wanted to go to Paris, France one day.  I don't, but it's a good example.  So if I wanted to go to Paris, I would create a list of stuff that I would need to accomplish in order to reach Paris, France.  I'd need a passport and a large sack of cash to pay for it all.  But how much cash would I need?  To know how much money I'd need, I'd have to figure out how long I wanted to stay.  If I wanted to stay for a just a few hours, then my cost would be a plane ticket and maybe a meal or two.  If I wanted to stay for a month, the plane ticket wouldn't be as big of a cost.  All the other little things would end up being the major cost. 

I said all that to say that goals are pointless unless you start making some sort of plan to accomplish them.  So what's my plan?

1) Wake up at 5:45 in the morning.  Study from 5:45 until 6:45 when I wake up the kids.  I tried waking up in morning before.  And it did great, but then I tied it to my wife, and then when my wife quit waking up at 5 in the morning, I quit.  Now, it's not tied to her.  It's tied to me.  If I want to get paid more, I need to pass the CCNA, and in order to pass the CCNA, I've either got to borrow money and take a class or teach myself.  Teaching myself is less expensive.  I just have to have more discipline.  And that's what I'm working on.

2) Pay off and cancel credit cards.  My credit card debt isn't horrible, but it's more than zero.  I'd rather it be zero.  The borrower is slave to the lender.  I'm using all I can save for my baby emergency fund and making minimum payments on everything, but that doesn't get the debt dealt with very quickly.  So the action step here is to wake up every Saturday morning I'm not on call and go donate plasma for $15-20 bucks a pop.  "That's not going to make much of a dent" is what you're saying.  But let's look at this logically.  My lowest credit card payment is $15 a month.  There are 52 weeks in a year.  I'm on call every 5th week.  4/5 or 80% of 52 is about 41 weekends.  So 41 weekends times $15 equals $615 in a year.  Let's say I mess up and only make it 35 times in the next year, that's $525.  The max on that credit card is only $300, so either way I pay off the credit card this year.  And my goal is accomplished.  Plus, I can run my recordings through my headset while donating plasma and study while making a buck.  It's win-win.