Thursday 25 June 2009

Finding the time


Read an interesing blog post about 50% time - 40 hours of work and 20 hours of self-improvement.
Very topical to me at the moment as I've just had a change of assigment and it made me wonder about how many hours a week I spend on self-improvement

Currently joining in with the rat race commuter crowd and spending 2 hours on trains each day plus two 25 minute walks. This means I am losing two things - weight and surfing time.

I'm making up for this by catching up on my big pile of books to be read - fairly easy on the morning ride in, can be a struggle on the way home. Podcasts are a possibility that I should investigate

I've cut down on the blogs I read and find that I'm only scanning the mailing lists I subscribe to. Haven't started a discussion for a while on the Software Testing Club site nor really joined in with the ongoing discussions
( still find the time to deal with spammy users though )

To counter this, the latest assigment is a challenging one and one I'm learning a lot from - you have to put the theory into practice at some point ! And the walks are a good time for reflection - except when you find your path blocked by tourists and free newspaper sellers

That work-life-improve yourself balance thing can be really tricky

2 comments:

Markus Gärtner said...

For myself jogging in the early morning hours for half an hour had some success two years ago. Once you get bored, you start to reflect about work and probably can see ways to put things differently together. And of course you'll also loose some weight. :)

Tony Bruce said...

I can't stand the train and so get the coach in and out of London. It's comfortable, I always have two seats to myself and gives me roughly 3hrs of uninterrupted time to myself a day. 15hrs a week I can spend reading or catching up on some zzzzzzzzzzzzs.
I've just picked up a netbook to work on my scripting and skillset in general. As you say, got to put the theory to practice. Most definitely not loosing any weight though. Doh