Well, I’m back from this weekend’s retreat. Although it’s hard to say that it was a retreat because I came back very tired and exhausted that it hardly felt like a “retreat” from anything at all. I didn’t even get to study last night. After I bathed my son around 8:30 PM, I fell right to sleep. I was supposed to be reading him his bed time books but instead, he read me to sleep. I don’t even remember how I managed to get back to my own bed.
On Thursday night I completed my challenge and clocked in 1:43:04 of study time. I know it’s not exactly 2 hours that I set out to do. But I gave myself some leeway because I never clocked the time I setup lab and some missed time on the clock as well. Also I was under pressure to get the studying done because I had to learn a few songs that night before leaving on Friday night for the weekend retreat.
I just want to jot down a few thoughts about the weekend. It definitely was something that I probably needed in this moment of my life right now. Although I was busy switching roles from being the music guy to a dish-washer , I had the opportunity to listen in to some very good talks. Since it is a spiritual retreat, a lot of it was centered on religious topics. I think what I enjoyed the most, though, were the talks that centered on the family and the issues that affect family life. As a father and a husband, I constantly need a reminder what I’m doing all this for. All this studying and pursuit to becoming a better engineer is inspired by my desire to be a better provider for my family. And I guess sometimes I lose track of that especially when I am too deep into my studies. There are even occasions where I ignored my son while studying when I was supposed to be watching him.
During the retreat, I was particularly inspired by a gentleman, about my age, who was invited to speak to our guests about importance of family in the context of Christian living. The cool thing about it is that I knew this guy from a while back from playing in a basketball league together. I only knew him from seeing him on the courts, but I never had a deeper insight into his life until he had spoken to us. After he spoke I took some time to congratulate him and talk to him a little bit more about his ideas on family living. I was pleased to learn that his goals for his family is in line with my goals for our family. His wife is a stay at home mother, raising their two beautiful kids to be stewards of greatness. And no matter how poor they get, he says, he makes sure that they remain that way. And I believe him. Because no mater how successful he has become as a banker, I see them driving a very modest vehicle, and living in a modest home.
How is this all related to Cisco. Well, probably not much. At least not directly. But thinking about it more allowed me to correlate a lot of my pursuit in my studies to my life’s calling. I believe that to be a good father, a good husband and a good provider, I need to be good at what I do in my profession. I can’t have an orderly family life if everything else in my life is in disarray. If I have a lackluster career because of lackluster skills, then my ability to provide for my family will also be lacking. If I cannot perform at a high level of proficiency and expertise at work, how can I expect myself to do the same at home. And this is where my calling as a husband/father ties in with my pursuit to become an excellent engineer. Sure many are able to and do separate their day jobs from their family life. But for me, fulfillment is partly defined by how I am able to manage my profession to better serve my family as well as others. This hasn’t happened yet, but one day, I’ll get closer to getting it right.
I completed the first part of my two day challenge, Project 2 x 2, last night. I clocked in a very solid 02:02:12 hh:mm:ss of hard work. Indeed it was hard.
After dinner with the family my two-year old wanted to play nascar racing around the house while pushing his little fire truck and baby walker. By 8pm I had bathed him and his mom took over to read him his books.
By 8:30 I’m situated in my home office ready to hack away at some labs. I completed lab section 3-2 of the BSCI Lab Porfolio hacking away multiple-area OSPF configurations with stub areas and authentication. But getting there was not easy. By the time I logged in my two hours, it was already past 12am. It took me over 3.5 hours to complete a 2 hour project.
So what are my excuses for taking so long to complete the task? Well a few really. Some good excuses and some I really need to work on minimizing. My son kept coming in the room asking to play with me. He also likes to turn on the little piano keyboard I have in the room and bang on the keys. Now although I’m proud that he has the same love for music like his papa, discordant notes are not really music to my ears; they’re actually quite annoying after a while . Then he followed up by asking me to play him his songs. Then I remembered that I had to learn a song that I’m supposed to play for the retreat that my wife and I will be staffing this weekend. So off to youtube I go to learn the song.
One thing I was (gladly) able to control, though, was surfing the net. With all the things in my mind that I knew I had to do, there was no time nor any interest for me to surf on. Even when I was searching for the song that I had to learn on youtube (and some of you folks know how youtube in itself can be such a distraction) I was focused enough to know that I only needed to listen to a couple of songs I needed to learn and move on to my primary task of completing my two hour challenge. Even though I was already tired by 10pm, my mind was still focused on the labs I was configuring. And I was having fun too. I completed the lab and tonight it looks like I will be able to complete the lab following that one with 30 minutes to go.
Again the trend continues with my dismal performance in regards to my studying. Last night I only logged 41min:24sec of study time. That’s disappointing especially when I purposedly blocked two hours just for reviewing more OSPF concepts. In the end my wife found me at 1am asleep on my chair. She keeps telling me it’s because I bought that darn extra puffy executive chair. I couldn’t resist. It swivels, it rocks and it goes up & down and round & round .
Anyway, I know I can do better than that. Today I’m ending my baselining project and shoot for a new goal. So today I’ll start the first of a series of mini goals that I will impose on myself on a semi regular basis in an effort to keep my feet moving and get closer and closer to the bigger price. The bigger price being passing the BSCI exam.
For my first challenge, I call it “project 2 by 2″. It’s simple really. For the next two days I will study 2 hours each day. That’s it. I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure I log in two hours of cumulative studying each day. I may take 30 minute increments each study sessions. Or I may do smaller 15 minute sessions spread throughout. Or… I can just do two straight hours. However, judging by my performance the last few days, the latter option seems unlikely. It doesn’t matter. The goal is to get two hours of solid studying.
That should keep me feeling good and accomplished before the weekend start. I won’t have the opportunity to study again until next week because I will be leaving for a two and half days of spiritual retreat with my wife. I wish it was the kind of retreat that I can take advantage to decompress but I won’t actually be a “participant” in the retreat. I volunteered to staff for the weekend, taking care of the music for all their activities. And my wife volunteered to cook. I’m getting hungry already . It should be fun but I know it will be very tiring.
For the past few days, I have been on a little fact-finding mission to discover trends on my study strategy. This is in line with the experiment I wanted to do to challenge myself to re-invigorate my study mojo . What I’ve been doing is timing myself every day to determine the number of hours I can comfortably sit down to study (per day) and subtract from that the amount of time I “actually” do productive work. This is my way of baselining my performance.
The most effective way I found to measure my productive vs unproductive activitiy is by using a simple stopwatch. For this, I’ve been using the stopwatch function on my iTouch. This little application is very simple but I find it pretty effective. There is no scientific and formal method that I use. I simply start the timer whenever I’m reading, jotting down notes or working on labs (I usually don’t count setting the lab up in the amount of time studied).
Here’s an example: I had a few minutes of spare time at work and I took advantage by researching OSPF network types online. I had the clock running from the time I clicked the first link I found on google until I got interrupted by a support call or got distracted by an incoming email – at which point I would stopped the clock. When I resumed, the clock started running again. Any distraction away from studying or labbing stops the clock. The results were pretty dismal.
On Thursday I logged my most productive effort: 2hours and 6 minutes. That is maybe about 3 hours of sit down time. On Friday I logged 27 minutes and Saturday 25 minutes. Sunday was 48 minutes. And each day I average about 2 hours of sit down time. Based on these numbers you can see how much time I’m wasting on doing things other than studying (chatting online, checking email, and the big one: surfing the internet).
It wasn’t always like this. When I was more motivated, I can study a lot longer with more productive output. I know what I need to do in order to increase my productive time. I just now need to figure out how to boost my motivation again in order to implement that.
Why has no one told me about this before? This is nifty service is just the coolest!
Ok, so maybe I might be one of the few remaining clueless souls that don’t know about this Google 411 thing. But still someone out there, such as myself, can really benefit from a free service such as this. I can’t tell you how many times my wife and I had to contemplate whether or not to use 411 to find the nearest starbucks or order Costco pizza while on the road. Yeah, we’re kinda cheap frugal like that – especially in this economy .
By the way, it works too. I played around with it for a little bit and it’s pretty spot on. Good job Google!
Getting through the BSCI is quite a challenge for me. A part of me tells me that I’m ready for the exam. But a bigger part tells me that I’m not even close.
On my way to work this morning (I always seem to get good moments of reflection while driving), I thought about a way that I can possibly get myself on a roll again. I’m thinking, “what if I reverse the effects of the challenges I’m facing and challenge the challenge?”
Here’s my idea: I’ll create a mini challenge for myself that I have to accomplish in short periods of time. For example, I’ll create a 10-day challenge wherein in 10 days I have to complete a whole series of labs. Or maybe for 5 straight days, I’ll watch no TV at all and do as little house chores as possible (pending wife’s approval ) and just focus on finishing a certain technology like IS-IS or IPv6. Then I would give myself rewards like a whole day of doing nothing but watch football. LOL… Like I don’t already do that! After I accomplish the mini challenge I start over again with something completely different.
Hmmm… Now that I think more about it. It might just work. That would be a good test of how motivated I still am and prove to myself that I can be desciplined enough to meet my self-imposed challenges. I just need to think of what and how I’m going to do them. Of course, I would have to avoid creating a challenge about something that I already do. Then I would just entrap myself to the same unproductive habit I’ve been undergoing. It’ll have to be something that completely goes away from what I’m already doing. The purpose of course is to re-stimulate my focus and motivation. Any ideas?
It’s been hard maintaining a laser-like focus lately. With all the increased responsibilities at work and other distractions, I’ve been falling more and more behind with my studies. I hardly get to spend any time at work to study. With the amount of work I have, I don’t even take my usual small breaks. And when I get home I’m just too tired to concentrate. Even the two hours I’m able to study, I probably only really take in 30 minutes of solid work.
This weekend wasn’t particularly productive either. I spent most of Saturday watching college football, hoping a majority of the top 6 ranked teams would fall – I’m a USC Trojan fan and right now they’re currently ranked 7th. Only one team lost. On Sunday, I had planned to redeem myself by spending the rest of the day hacking through all the OSPF labs. Well, right after we came back from an early morning Sunday Mass, I get a call from a friend inviting us to join him and his family on a nice day at the LA Zoo. His wife was able to get a hold of some free tickets and was gracious enough to invite us. I wanted to say no, but who could say no to free tickets. Besides, my wife thought it was a good idea to spend some quality time with friends and family. On our way to the park, I got pulled over for going 78 on a 65mph highway. When the cop asked for my license ID, I was a bit nervous that I pulled my credit card instead and handed it to him. To make things worse, we couldn’t find our registration, insurance card, and our license plate sticker was out of date. But in the end the police officer, maybe seeing that we had a sleeping toddler in the back, let us go with a warning. Boy, did we escape a potentially very expensive excursion! The rest of the day went splendid after that incidence. I think my son was appreciative as well because he was very cheerful that whole day – especially getting to hang out with his god-brother. Although the weekend was unproductive, I’m glad we went.
Now on my way to work this morning, I was thinking a lot about my studies. I’ve been feeling guilty about wasting so much of my study time by not using it effectively and efficiently. I’m trying to figure out a way to break out of this plateau. I’m sure that despite turbulent dynamics at work and its lingering effects at home there are still ways I can get around that and really get myself on the ball again. I just need to find a way to change things around a bit to stimulate my motivation motors.
President-elect Barack Obama promised change. And changes are happening closer to me even before he was elected president.
I’m talking about the company I work for. Just two weeks ago, I completed a project to install a new T1 PRI for our new phone DIDs. I worked with our telco vendor to turn up the new circuit and programmed the new phone extensions into the pbx.
But this week, more changes were made which I wasn’t particularly thrilled about. No, I’m not talking about the election. A new round of layoffs was just executed with my company and to cut to the point, 3 members of our team were let go. While I’m happy that I wasn’t one of the unlucky ones that were unsummarily executed, our team of six is now down to three. And you know what that means. That means more responsibility for me. I would have been more happy if I was given more technically-related duties. But no, most of the IT administrative duties were thrown at my desk (i.e. chasing billing paperwork, following up on invoices, and getting drilled by upper management why I approved such and such purchase when I didn’t – do you detect the indisposition? ). I mean, dude, at least give me something to fix.
Well at least I will be a lot more involved with the email migration we are currently in the middle of.
I’m already feeling the effects of this new change. I’ve found myself this last three days bringing some work home with me – figuratively speaking. I don’t actually bring the work home. I go home and remote in to my office and do the work there. I wonder if that constitute “bringing the work home”?
What does this mean for me? Well, less time to study.
I did a quick computation on my head yesterday and figured that I will be losing approximately 1.5 hrs of good study time with this new change. I don’t know how I got that number but it sounds like a pretty square estimation. This also means an almost sure probability that I will have to change my study patterns again. But to compensate for the last two days of minimal activity on the learning front, I studied for 4 hours yesterday. In fact I started with the lab guide this week and will work towards completing the whole section on OSPF. I’m supposed to be reviewing BGP this week but again, I’m behind.
, I had the opportunity to listen in to some very good talks. Since it is a spiritual retreat, a lot of it was centered on religious topics. I think what I enjoyed the most, though, were the talks that centered on the family and the issues that affect family life. As a father and a husband, I constantly need a reminder what I’m doing all this for. All this studying and pursuit to becoming a better engineer is inspired by my desire to be a better provider for my family. And I guess sometimes I lose track of that especially when I am too deep into my studies. There are even occasions where I ignored my son while studying when I was supposed to be watching him.
. Then he followed up by asking me to play him his songs. Then I remembered that I had to learn a song that I’m supposed to play for the retreat that my wife and I will be staffing this weekend. So off to youtube I go to learn the song.
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