[Day 114] If at first you succeed...

... lower your expectations.

In my previous blog (http://lifeaftereshen.blogspot.com/2016/08/day-65-time-keeps-on-slipping-conclusion.html) I wrote about making a daily plan and working through the plan during the day.  Well during the last couple of months, the daily plan kinda turned into a weekly plan and then really no plan.   It's not as if I'm getting up later and later each day or I am binge watching Paper Route Wars or Real Beehives of Toledo.  It's just that I don't seem to accomplish all that much.

Once a month, I meet with Intel folks who "retired" at the same time as I did for coffee to get caught up on things.  One of the guys says that it is reasonable just to accomplish one thing in the morning and one thing in the afternoon.  So that's encouraging.  But I wonder what is taking up the rest of my time?

One possibility is knowing things can now be pushed out.  When I was working, I only had evenings and weekends to get things done.   I had a limited amount of time to accomplish things on my to-do list, so I did them when I had the chance.  I'd rush through what needed to be done.  Now that everyday has become a weekend, there isn't that pressure.  There's always tomorrow. 

However when I looked back at what I did during my past couple of weeks to see what I did, I realized that there wasn't a lot of down time but rather more focused time.  I did do things but was spending more time on them.   Just last week I worked on a programming assignment for class.  It was an Android application in Java to manage grocery lists.  I would get up in the morning, meet with my team - we had daily Scrum type meetings on Google hangout - and proceed to code.  I found myself diving into the program, looking up examples online (I'm now pretty familiar with SQLite) , and writing test cases for my code.  I would look up and realize that it was almost noon and I was still in my bathrobe.  I even stayed up late to work on my code, knowing that I had the flexibility of napping the next day.

The same with cooking.  In the past, cooking was stressful.  I would rush home and throw stuff together for dinner.  Now I can start earlier (no jokes about being older and eating dinner at 4), look up interesting recipes online, watch videos on how to cook certain foods and take time browsing the grocery store for ingredients.

As a result of taking more time on the things I do, I find myself enjoying what I do more and do it better -  I cleaned up all the LINT (code style) errors in my program and even learned how to chop up an onion without tearing up (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1FfZiiK-I4)

This reminds me of using Flow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)) at work - instead of jumping between things, one would focus on working on something specific for a period of time.    I used to tell my team that it was okay to block out chunks of time in their schedule to get a particular task done.  I think by doing so would allow the task to be finished with better quality and the person to feel better about having done the task.
  
So the takeaway is to plan to only accomplish two things a day.  This blog is one of them.  Now to see how those bees are doing....