Today’s blog post theme is brought to you by the words “overwhelming” and “goals”. Goals are important and without them, it’s hard to grow. However, there must be a balance between a rigidly constructed learning path and self care for your sanity. I feel like I’ve hit a wall today in my daily goals.
If Scrum’s taught me anything, though, it’s now that I know what a 24 hour period looks like with my new daily regiment, and I need to be mindful of the time. I’m working through a MySQL bootcamp and my goal was to put in 8 hours today, to see how I’d fare if I were approaching this goal like it was my job. This seems fair to me since I am taking time off to learn new skills, brush up on existing ones, and head down a brand new career path.
My problem today is that, when I was nearing my goal, rather than allowing myself to wrap up early I just kept moving on. First, around my 6 hour mark, I thought I could get through another section. Then, I decided to complete the section instead of stopping in the middle of it. That meant I was doing challenge exercises to wrap up the segment. Each one gets increasingly harder than the last, and being a stubborn person (yeah, I’ve been working on that), I wanted to try really hard to get the answer correct before looking at the solutions to the problems.
So, here I am, at the 9 hour and 20 minute mark for my “workday” and I still have a blog post to do in order to keep up with my commitments. I want to work on getting better content in here, more in depth and researched content, but today is not that day. I’ve already pushed myself past my limit and I could be enjoying a satisfying day of studying as work.
Even though the MySQL portion of my day took longer than I anticipated, I have some lessons learned for next time. First and foremost, I will be more mindful of my time. Secondly, if it’s a day that falls on a day that I have committed to writing a blog post, I should factor in the time it takes to write into my day, so I’m not scrambling to get it together after taking too long with my coursework.
Tuesday will be an interesting day, since I’ll also have to factor in a 25 minute drive to where I volunteer, the hour long meeting, and then the commute home. Luckily, I’ll be where I need to be before rush hour traffic is an issue, and then I’m heading home after rush hour.
In the end, while I want to keep a full schedule and stick to my commitments, I have to be fair to myself. This means that I will be okay when I go over, can’t do everything I wanted, or it’s a day where I need more time off from any sort of work.
Inspect and adapt, my friends.
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