A Typewritten Day

I don't know what it is about today, but I seem to be channeling some sort of typing teacher, or Isaac Asimov or something. I've been hammering out messages, comments posts, blog entries and such all day. Reading and writing various blogs and other ephemeral information sources. I'm lucky that I'm not asleep yet so I can keep the ole blog percentages up.

Anyway, it's one of those things that I've noticed - if I've taken on a lot of work, I get more work done. Sort of "working under pressure", but not quite. I dislike being pressured to a deadline, but I find that a seemingly unbearable workload helps. Guess that implies some sort of deadline or else how is the load defined? Been taking on some new duties within my group at work and I'm trying to figure out what exactly I need to do. I think it involves knowing everything which is good 'cause I like that. The hard part is keeping ahead of the curve because knowing things means talking to various people and attending meetings and such. Those things take time and limit the number of minutes of postings that are possible. This is why I've been in such a typing mood today - I needed to get things done between tasks so I compensated by typing faster instead of outputting less. Not a solution that's recommended for all things (like speaking to people or lunch) but it does seem to work for me.

I found this some of the larger projects I did whilst at school. Despite having to been in the lab for the better part of the day, I could still attend lectures and cram in assignments for other classes, even though 80% of my waking time was occupied by the project course. Also I was staying up later and getting up earlier. I'm hoping I can produce that kind of efficiency in my work without the insane pressure and hours. 'Cause I'm not gonna do that. Nah uh. That's not sustainable and I don't think the kids will appreciate it.

I guess I believe that I need a certain amount of work to keep me properly occupied. Not sure what that level is or what exactly the work should be, but I'm trying this on for size. I think that if I had an appropriately sized development project to work on, that'd be okay too, but I haven't done any real programming for quite some time. I think the closest I've come is some nice Perl scripting, but that's more straight-forward than a serious component. I'm trying to compensate with other things - what some call "soft skills". Developing those would be good and I'm looking for the right way of acquiring more skills. However, like most things, skills are developed with practice hence all the stuff I gotta do. Fun. Gotta revisit this post in a while to see what has happened. Maybe in a month or two.