Victory Stories

Near the beginning of this year I noticed that I have really poor work habits. There's a long history behind why I have them, but suffice it to say it's been a long road to get to here. I was thinking about it in January and I decided that since I've been at my current job for 5 years now, and since I'm 30 years old, I really should know better.

The first step was to identify my time sinks, or the things I do during the day other than working. The two biggest ones were spending time on Rooster Teeth, and playing flash games on Newgrounds. There were some others, but these were the two main problem sites for my work ethic. Indeed, I'd spend my days more focused on what's new on RT than working, and that during working hours.

I decided to take a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, I would not allow myself to spend time on those two sites until 7pm. On the other, any time I felt the urge to do so, I would instead do something else that's productive, like clean something, work on a website for myself, or write.

I kept detailed records of what I did instead of wasting time, so I could track how much I've been accomplishing. During the first week I set up some new technology, cleaned the floors (and many other things), wrote 16 Haiku for my Hiaku Twitter feed, wrote and published an article on How To Not Suck, and cleared off the driveway (which I wrote about here on the day it happened). In the second week I cleaned some more stuff, brought this site up to date, wrote some more Haiku, and assembled a pair of small metal bookcases to better sort the basement. On the third week... nothing.

I was surprised it happened so quickly, but within 2 weeks I was spending all of my time during the day working, which meant there wasn't any time between those hours in which to get anything else done. Basically, I changed my work habits in only 2 weeks. Now it's almost a month later, and while I do check in on those two websites during the day, it's only briefly, and only when I have downtime between tasks for work.

Maybe an old dog can learn new tricks.

For the last six years, I have had as my computer's amp an old 8-track player made by a company called Realistic. There were a number of reasons for this, but arguably the most important was convenience; it gave me an easily accessible knob to turn to control the volume of my computer's sound.

Recently, however, I'd been growing irritated by some quirks in how the device behaved. Specifically, there was a period of time shortly after turning the device on where adjusting the volume caused very loud static. I also suspected I was losing audio quality, and since one of the reasons I was using it was my belief at the time that having gold conducting wire inside instead of another alloy would increase the sound quality, that was a bad thing to have happening.

I had considered for a time that the problem might be in either the device or the speakers, but I lacked another pair of speakers with which to test. I went looking for some, but came up empty. However, yesterday I went to a second-hand warehouse looking for something else entirely, and I came upon something of interest.

What I'd found was an old radio by the same company, in what seemed to be excellent (albeit dirty) condition. I brought it home for $2.50 to see what would happen, because even if it turned out not to work at all it was only $2.50. When I tested it, I found that not only did it work, but the radio was highly functional, and the sound quality was better than what I'd had before.

The real benefit of having a radio as my amp instead of an 8-track player was that I hadn't used it to play an 8-track since installing it, but I did have a separate radio sitting above my computer monitor; replacing my amp with a radio let me also remove the other radio I had on my desk, freeing up that space for something else like documents.

Since I was already removing hardware from my desk, I decided it was as good a time as any to give the entire desk a thorough cleaning, as well as reorganizing it to get rid of all the clutter. It took about 3 hours from the start of testing until my desk was reassembled and everything was off the floor, but it's now done and I couldn't be happier with it.

So in one swift motion I was able to replace some faulty hardware, clear out some unnecessary hardware, clean the area where I spend most of my days, and reorganize that area to make it more functional. And all this for the cost of $2.50 and a bit of time. I think it was worth it.

Last night some more snow fell on my quiet little town, and then this morning before I was able to get out to shovel it the plow went by. As much as I enjoy shovelling snow, I have things to do today, and waiting around for it to warm up just isn't an option. So I tasked myself with getting through the snow as quickly as possible.

I'm not entirely sure why, but as I was making my initial path down one side of the driveway so I could shovel toward the other side a thought occurred to me: what if rather than going back and forth 40 times, I went up and down instead?

The way I did it was to start at the top of the driveway and shove the snow as far as I could without moving my feet. Then I moved down the driveway a little and shoved the next bit of snow the same distance. Basically, rather than take one row of snow all the way across the driveway, then walk all the way back across it to do the next row, I did every row a few feet going down the driveway, then every row a few feet going back up the driveway.

The end result? Doing the driveway the way I'd normally do it generally takes 20-30 minutes. Today I was done in 10. The only place I can think of for the inspiration to have come from was how I went down the driveway the first time to make my path. Wherever it came from, I'm glad it did, because now I have an extra 20 minutes on my hands.

Mid-December I drove up to my Dad's cottage to help him shovel snow. More accurately, I went there to help dig him out; that's it to the right over there. For a height reference, I'm 6'3, and that snow is dense enough that you could walk on top of it. After spending an afternoon cutting down giant chunks of snow and clearing paths to both doors, I was attempting to do the same for his truck, and brought the shovel down at an awkward angle and badly pulled one of my left Oblique muscles.

This was three weeks ago, and it's still sore. Thankfully, my general area has been bereft of any snow worth shovelling until now, but this morning I woke up and there was about 3 inches of it outside. I've been noticing marked improvement over the last week as I've been taking it easy as much as possible, so I decided to head outside and test myself, to see if I would be able to get rid of the snow myself.

What I found was that as long as I only worked in straight lines, and didn't try to toss the snow off to one side, my side didn't hurt. So I plugged away at it for a little more than an hour, and came back inside with a lot of sweat on me, a bit of a hunger, and a clean driveway. My side doesn't hurt any more now than it did before I started, but the day is young yet; we'll see how things are when it's time for bed. In the meantime, I seem to have proven to myself that I can safely exercise within constraints, without further hurting myself. And that is very good news.

Last Halloween I had a great idea: people always told me when I had long hair and a beard that I looked like Jesus, so why not be Jesus for Halloween the following year? With a plan like that, there was no way I could fail.

The first step was to grow my hair long again. That part's easy, all it takes is money for shampoo and some patience. Next I had to find a white robe. Fortunately, the local thrift store happened to have a white robe for all of $5 or so, so that part was settled before 2009 was even finished. Now it all came down to waiting.

Last weekend was Halloween, and the costume (such as it was) went off without a hitch. I even took fourth place in the costume contest at the party I was at. This is what it looks like when a plan comes together:

Then, with Halloween out of the way, it was time for me to decide what to do with the hair. Keeping it was one option, but I'd gotten used to a few conveniences that come with having short hair in the eight years in which I had it. Instead, I decided the right thing to do was to donate it to charity.

So, anyone have any favourite charities that make wigs for people who need them?