500 Words — Day Ten: The Daily Grind
There’s no better feeling than overcommitting to the amount of stuff you want to get accomplished in a day, or a week, or a month. Actually, it kind of sucks and is completely unsustainable unless the activities you are engaging in are fun and re-energizing. I’m not really the type of person that enjoys fun and re-energizing things so I have decided to assign myself work that fills up the cracks in any free time I hoped of having. Although, typically, I work the usual 9–5 rhythm, I have decided to fill my time up with reading, writing, coding, interviews and chats so I can instead grind away with the hopes of improving my career and becoming a better human being. So far, it sucks.
I can’t say I have really grinded out work like this since my collegiate days. Although those grinds had more to do with poor time management rather than a lack of hours in the day. Mediocre time management is one reason I’m a little tight on the schedule this week, but there’s so much I “want” to do and other things I “should” do, and of course, you can’t forget about the things you “must” do.
Let’s start with the things I’m stuck doing. There’s that 40 hours allocated to my day job. While I could multitask and try other non-related work tasks in that slot, I have too much honor and integrity to do that. Of course, honor and integrity are pretty easy things to sacrifice, so timesheet cheating would save a bunch of time and I could get all the other stuff I want to get done quicker. The other alternative is to quit my job. While I do have the money saved up, cutting off my only reliable stream of income comes at a greater cost than the other things I want to do. Besides, there’s always the opportunity to dose off in a meeting that is a waste of time anyways to multitask working and get those precious minutes of sleep in.
Since I’m currently in pursuit of a new job, all the work that goes into that is probably properly allocated. Note that take home interviews are significantly more work and take more time than in-person interviews. While you don’t have the pressure of coming up with the solutions on the spot, you do have the pressure of needing to complete the work in a reasonable amount of time that you seem like you are competent and willing to put in the effort for your potential future employer. In addition, to the take home interviews, you have all recruiting calls, messages, and phone interviews to deal with. And because I’m honorable, anytime I take with those, I append that time taken to extend my workday because I guess I’m allergic to cutting corners or something.
Then, I have writing these little posts everyday. I do have a history of not posting on some days, but if I quit writing now, then I won’t grow as a writer. Not that writing is all that important nowadays when you can post videos of yourself doing something stupid, but the inner artist has to art sometimes. Of course, I also have to read every night, because if I don’t I might run out of ideas to write about. Although to this point, I don’t think I have really written a lot about stuff I have read. But reading is good, because one day, you never know when a completely useless thing that you read can be used to completely kill a conversation on an interesting topic. The last thing is running, but that is a sacred part of my morning and crucial to extracting the maximal amount of productivity each and everyday.
So, looking over the list of things, it is clear that I should either:
- Replace one of the tasks above with something more fun
- Remove one of the tasks above altogether
- Conquer the world and then make weeks eight days long instead of seven
Grand Emperor of Earth has a nice ring to it, so I’ll keep on grinding and one day I’ll get there.
