Tag Archives for GTD

“being tired” is overused

On Sunday, I woke up after about 5 hours of sleep on a conference room floor. I started playing (continued from the night before, technically) some eye-popping video games for 6 hours before driving 3 hours home, where I watched 2 hours of TV. It’s 8 o’clock Sunday night after an exhausting weekend when I did the unspeakable: I logged in and did a little work. Whatever happened to the weekend being sacred?

“After hours” is precious time and I decided to take advantage of it.

Too often I see tweets of facebook statuses about being tired, being exhausted, or being busy. But the last few months have gotten me excited about being busy. It’s really tempting me to try to be busier. Getting things done is satisfying. I’m starting to believe that the weekend is sacred for more than one reason. Yes it’s the best time to rest and relax, but it’s also “after hours” and a great time to get things done.

The Amazing Shrinking SQL Transaction Logs

There’s nothing glamorous about “Low Disk Space” errors.

For some reason the maintenance plan for one of the test db servers wasn’t current. Test servers don’t get monitoring like the production servers, so I’m glad I was checking in. I got to spend about an hour reading up on logs, logical and actual sizes, shrinking, and got in some “wax on, wax off” style practice going through all of our QA and Training dbs.

I also got a release candidate from a vendor that needs to be tested. There’s a limited number of test servers I have access to, but I got it to install and successfully work on a test server also running a previous version. It took a little imagineering, but I installed it, restored a QA database for RC testing [now with lots of space for more transaction logs], upgraded the db to the RC version, and successfully logged in with the new client. All on the first try.

What I’m most satisfied with is that I was able to keep momentum on this task [6 hours thus far] over the course of a Friday & Monday. Friday was also the first workday of 2009. We had a couple of sites close, a few change Third Party plans, some more converted platforms, and one got re-branded entirely. And there are always those pesky bugs that tend to appear at the first of the year. It was enough to fill my day, but I kept plugging along on this release candidate install and if I had let the incidents on Friday utterly consume my day, I couldn’t have made so much progress today. This GTD methodology has something to it.

Let the testing begin.

Working Sick

For about 10 days I’ve been fighting off a cold bug. It’s that headache, nagging cough, and “overall sense of lethargy.” I’m not contagious and only a little miserable, but after work today I don’t feel the least amount of self-pity. Laryngitis, bronchitis, sinus infection, & apparently even chicken pox are floating around amongst the coworkers.

I’m just thankful it’s not floating around in the office. Stay home, get better, and get the new guy to take on your deliverables. Luckily I spent a couple hours on Friday properly archiving my email and creating subfolders in my inbox for my action items, someday items, and urgent-unimportant issues. I feel that I’ve always been natually good at staying on task and following up on issues, but getting into a GTD mindset helps reinforce good habits. Because you never know when you might come down with a sinus infection and have to tell your manager what you’re working on. Or when you need to tell the new guy exactly what he has to cover while you’re out of the office unexpectedly. With chicken pox. Get well soon.