Category: Productivity

Burnout

It’s a common story among professionals:

Guy gets a job. Guy is happy because the job is challenging yet fulfilling. To top it off, it pays well.

After a couple of years of hard work, the guy just stops and realizes that he doesn’t really feel fulfilled from working anymore.

By then it’s already too late. That guy has burned out.

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Contrary to what people who haven’t experienced it think, burnout is not merely a case of depression, a severe mood swing, or some other temporary stress related ailment. Nor does it usually culminate in a spectacular fashion, like a person going postal in his workplace.

It’s more like a car which has gone for hundreds of thousands of miles without periodic maintenance. The burned out worker just suddenly breaks down mentally, spiritually, or in some cases, physically. The latter are the lucky ones; sure they get sent to the hospital, but they’re more likely to be diagnosed and treated properly in this situation. Burnout is a condition that ends careers–a person whose will suddenly snaps at work will find it difficult to find someone who can properly asses and deal with their situation. More often than not, those who will come to the person’s aid won’t understand what the person is going through and might even make the condition worse.

Continue reading “Burnout”

Track PC usage with ManicTime

Manually logging stuff for future data analysis is annoying. I already mentioned in a previous post that calorie counting and logging expenses are tedious tasks, but one must do both if they are serious about reaching their fitness and financial goals.

Another case where manually logging data can be useful (but at the same time tedious) is tracking how much time you’re spending each day for various tasks. You can analyze this data at the end of the week and figure out where you can improve your efficiency. For example, you might realize that you’re spending too much time checking your mail or you might realize that you’re not putting enough effort on higher priority tasks.

Based on experience, however, manually logging effort data is a lot more tedious and error prone than calorie counting and logging expenses. Computerized effort logging, whether via stand alone app or web interface, doesn’t improve the experience much.

Fortunately, there are applications available that can help automate some of that data tracking. Applications like Slife, RescueTime, and Wakoopa automatically track your computer usage by taking advantage of the fact that it’s actually quite easy to determine the title of the active window in your workspace.

ManicTime - pr0n sites pixelated XD

I personally use ManicTime for tracking my computer usage. The main advantage it has over other similar applications is that the data is stored locally, meaning you don’t need an internet connection for it to work and you don’t have to worry about the odd chance that a hacker can see what pr0n series you’re watching.

There are downsides to ManicTime though. First off, it’s not a small app as it runs on top of .NET Framework 3.5. It may eat 30-60MB of memory, but it doesn’t slow down your machine until you view the daily or statistical data. Another downside is that it’s only for Windows. Mac users will have to make do with Slife for automated tracking.

On Religion

This blog will be up for a long time so I might as well get this “issue” out of the way this early.

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Between my habit of dropping F-bombs and PI-bombs and my ever-present “skull” pin, it’s not apparent that I consider myself a religious person. I’m a practicing Roman Catholic, and I just came home from a 6pm anticipated mass.

Don’t worry, I am not going to preach about my religion in this post. We’ll just look at one of the more pragmatic ways of looking at religion, namely, how it can apply to your personal growth.

Note that while this post can be applicable to atheists and agnostics, it may not be applicable to people from extremely strict religions. If your god dictates what you must do every second of your life without fail, I would suggest that you don’t go beyond the cut below.

Continue reading “On Religion”

On Procrastination

Procrastination is perhaps my most serious character flaw. When I see that something isn’t really important, I tend not to do it right away.

People who know me might say otherwise, though. What they are seeing is actually me doing workarounds for my flaw:

They see me finish something way ahead of time.

Usual scenario: I get office mail to do something as trivial as update an Excel file or send the total page count of your work in progress. Deadline is end of the week.

I finish the task 10 minutes later.

Reason why I didn’t procrastinate: It was a trivial task. As long as I am not “in the zone” coding, I probably have a couple of minutes to spare doing trivial tasks. Besides, the mere fact that I have my mail client open means that I’m not too occupied at the moment.

They see me finish something not trivial way ahead of time.

Usual scenario: same as above, but the task will take more than 2 hours to finish.

I’ll finish the task 3 hours after receiving the mail.

Reason why I didn’t procrastinate: It was probably a mechanical task and I want to procrastinate on my “thinking” tasks. Usually these tasks are similar to the stuff I mentioned in the previous example, but in a larger scale. I get to turn off my brain and I get paid to do it. Everybody wins! (err.. sort of)

They see me finish something that requires thinking way ahead of time.

Ok, so the task doesn’t fall under the two scenarios above. What’s my excuse now?

Actually there are a couple of possibilities:

  • I try to fool myself.

Remember the mantra in my first post? Putting things in different perspectives is an effective way of applying that mantra.

Don’t want to fail Calculus? Put your mind into aiming for an A+. If you win, you get an A+. If you don’t, you might get depression but I doubt you’ll get an F or even a C.

Same thing with tasks. Deadline is next week? I could either personally shorten the deadline to this week (this is a bad thing, I’ll explain in a later post) or I could fool myself that it’s a lot more important than my other tasks so I’ll prioritize it.

  • I’m a competitive guy.

Similar to fooling myself, but I decided that this deserves a bullet point of its own.

For some odd reason, I don’t like to lose to other people. So if there’s a task that requires thinking, nothing riles me up more than the thought of competing with my colleagues — even though there’s no really no competition involved in the task itself.

Actually there is something that riles me up more: the thought of competing with cute female colleagues who are a lot more skillful and smarter than me. Go ahead, call me chauvinist if you want, but this M.O. singlehandedly allowed a guy who graduated with no honors in HS to graduate with Latin honors in college (my HS was an all-boys school… you get the picture).

and lastly…

  • I’m bored.

Yup, you read that right. Sometimes I procrastinate on all my tasks and I end up doing nothing.

Doing nothing = boredom.

Bry + Boredom = unexpected results.

Finishing tasks way ahead of time ∈ unexpected stuff that happens when Bry is bored.