There are way too many things that interest me. As you might already know, recently I have been playing around with Windows Presentation Framework, prior to that I did this website with Ruby on Rails. I like to review products, play games, workout at least two hours every other day, learn new programming languages/frameworks, socialize, travel, troubleshoot, and all that on top of a full time job and an MBA. Lately I have had to stay up pretty late while having fun, or in other words, doing any of these activities, and by late I mean 3 or 4 in the morning. Afterwards, I am in at work at 8am, ready to continue work on another set of exciting projects.
This week I am in San Antonio (Texas) attending the HL7 Working Group Meeting. Every session that I go to has been quite exciting. Here you have tons of different private and public companies, and government organizations, all working together to standardize the interfacing protocols. Every group has experts that are familiar with the needs, and very knowledgeable about various tools and languages. Many of the groups are looking for volunteers. For instance, the tooling group is looking for developers to help with the Eclipse based tools that the group has written. All adding even more things that could potentially be on “must-do” list.
The best part is that so far I have been fairly successful in whatever I have done, and I have been able to provide significant value. Unfortunately, such a wide mix is starting to have a negative effect on the results because my projects are becoming more complex while I am unable to devote any more time.
So, now is the hard time, the time to, you know what they say, “choose my battles wisely.” One of my problems has been that I cannot say “No.” Considering all that, from now on my goals are to:
- Get better at estimating the time that a certain task might take
- Realize that, at least in the start, my estimates will be at least 50% off
- Learn to say no to things that don’t align with my goals, and get better at reprioritizing tasks if something does need to be acted on right away
Once I achieve the above goals then I believe I will graduate from my current phase of life! Let’s see how this goes.