Thursday, September 09, 2010

Day 136 - Transition – Life by a thousand pats on the back

The top of the Space Needle in Seattle, Washington

Image via Wikipedia

 

Have been looking at my productivity or value in a number of different ways over the past few weeks. 

As the time grinds on, it is hard to maintain a positive perspective on the process of finding a job in this economy.  Maintaining a positive perspective has many different aspects and through this journey a change that has taken place in when I feel valued.  When I feel more valued, my perspective is more positive. 

When working, each two weeks Boeing would send a fat check to confirm that value that I was bringing to the corporation.  Now with severance and unemployment, I’m getting paid for past value and not for present value creation and at times I have wondered if I am bringing any value. 

I have at least three areas of value creation or service that I am still working.  The first being a stay at home Dad and taking care of the house and meals.  And the second being my house remodel.  The third is in improving my health.

Looking for a job is a necessary activity, and I receive positive psychological rewards when a great job requisition is found, the call comes in to interview, or just going through an interview process.  But there is also stress related to the not hearing, my lack of patience, and then the death by a thousand paper cuts from the little rejections received on a daily basis.  This seems like a different  than providing value.

See more on keeping positive…

Each of these area that I now works includes many small jobs that in them selves provide a little satisfaction and I am learning to take these small accomplishments and enjoy them, this is a message of this main message of this blog post.

Remember the MilkIn previous posts, I have talked about computer programs I am using to organize and support my job search.  Remember the Milk (RTM) is the program that I am using for tasks. It is internet based and has a simplistic using interface with the powerful functions that I like.  I have used the task recurrence function to slowly fine tune how often I repeat tasks.  This has been invaluable and is a great way to capture and reflect my learning as I go forward.

I have a high level set of repeating tasks that represent what I need to do for Job Hunting and maintaining the home.  I haven’t been good about putting in remodel tasks, though this is an area I’m looking at improving on.

These high level task, don’t fully reflect the complexiThe human liver, the site of hepatitis C infec...ty of what I am doing.  And there are many tasks that I do that are not recorded at all.  An excellent case in point involves my oldest brother.  Several months ago he signed up to be a caregiver for a person that was going to undergo a liver transplant here in Seattle.  Last week a suitable donor was found and they boarded a jet for Seattle.  We receive a call via satellite phone that they were on the way and would need a ride to the hospital.  I’m proud of my brother for signing up for this task.  It involves being a caregiver (24/7) for about 3 months.  He has set up residence here and will be in Seattle, away from home, until near Thanksgiving.  So the last week involved tasks I would have had a hard time foreseeing and even harder time trying to plan.
Great quote for these times:

Flow with whatever is happening and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.
-Chang Tzu

My brother coming into town is an extreme example, but I would say the 80% of the tasks I do is either not covered by my recurring tasks or are spawned by recurring tasks.  An example of this is I have a recurring task to search for jobs each day.  I generally search and identify possible job requisitions.  Not covered, is the task to read through this list of requisitions and determine whether to apply.  This then spawns other tasks for writing cover letters and submitting the applications.  These are variable and I schedule them depending on what is happening in the particular day.   Today, I completed the search, and I am now reading through 75 job requisitions that have accumulated since last Saturday.
Case in point.  I just had to stop writing this blog entry and run to the tile store to get some grout.  The installers ran out mid job, taking over an hour out of my carefully planned day.  Go with the flow, let my mind be free.

I get a small bit of satisfaction each and every time I press the “complete” button and send the task to the completed list.  I get satisfaction from seeing the tasks disappear off the list, but just deleting the tasks is not as fulfilling as completing a task.

Now I'm trying to leverage this satisfaction.  I’ve started putting in  many of these tasks in that I haven’t thought about weeks in advance and the ones I haven’t thought about at all—the ones that just happened.  Through out the day I have been trying to record the tasks that I need to do in the next few hours.  I try to think about everything that I plan on doing so that I can prioritize what I think is most important and get those done first.  And I have started to add the tasks that just come up even though they are already done; I record them and then check them off.

This does two things.  First, it gives that little bit of satisfaction, the reward of a job recorded as complete, a small pat on the back.  This also creates a record of my accomplishments through the day.  I have had days when nothing comes off my list of high level actions because something came up that was important or a huge task takes longer than the day to complete like taking down the sheetrock in the basement.   If instead I put “spent 2 hours on Basement sheetrock teardown”,  I can then see this as an accomplishment for the day.  In RTM, completed task go to a list that I can look on to see what has been taking up my time.  This more complete list is a much better reflection of my time and what I have been accomplishing.

I don’t know if this will work for everyone or if my simple mind is just open to this trickery, but since I have started doing this I have been happier about what I am accomplishing.  I see the little and the mundane task in a better light now.  I see this as of a part of a bigger whole and I can see in detail what I have done.  I don’t know if there is an official opposite to the saying  death by a thousand cuts, but maybe it could be:  Life by a million pants on my own back.   

If you are having trouble seeing what all you are getting done, try recording it at a deeper level and see if it helps.  It has helped for me and it may work for you, especially if you have a simple tool like RTM to make it easy.  

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Posted by Chris M Abbey at 3:58 PM
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