Accidentally in Code

Tag: scheduling

Changing Paces

Credit: flickr / Sang You

I’m a little… tired and uninspired lately. Not at work – but at not-work. Once home, I’m not driven to write, or code, or read that stack of papers. I’m actually reading novels. I’ve been beating myself up for procrastination. Wondering, how do you tell the difference between being a little burnt out and needing a break, and procrastination. My inner dialogue is arguing with itself about whether I’m genuinely tired and in need of a break, or in the throes of procrastination so deep that I’m developing involved reasons and stories for not-doing stuff, rather than constructive procrastination, or better, just getting shit done.

How could I spend a day curled up on my sofa with not one, but two novels? How could I read four novels in a week? A deadline is heading towards me and I’m just looking at it with interest, wondering, idly, when inspiration will hit – rather than going and seeking it out.

The pace of my life is different now than it used to be. In school, there were always periods of intense activity punctuated with crashes which I would spend consuming novels, or TV box-sets, or both. It was a series of sprints, and every few weeks or months I would crash, and regroup. Normally once at the end and once during each semester.

Now, my life is more like a marathon. And whilst over-achieving-productive-Cate yells at human-Cate “how could you just do nothing all weekend?!?!“, human-Cate responds – “because sometimes I need to do nothing!”

This week, I’ll give my 4th and 5th talks of the year. It will be my 5th trip this year. I’ll also host the first Girl Geeks KW. I’ve submitted a conference paper – twice. Since getting my Kindle in December, it tells me I’ve read 14 non-fiction books, plus a couple of physical ones (and 32 novels, most of them on planes). Maybe this is a normal amount of stuff to do on top of 40-50 hours a week at work, but I’m starting to feel like I’m planning sprints, but never allowing myself to crash – my baseline is now 40 hours at the office, whereas the baseline in grad school is nothing. I got sick twice this year, once with a week-long temperature, and once with a throat infection. During the first I spent one afternoon home sick.

For a while, I wondered if the problem was getting dressed every day – some of my most productive days used to be spent in my pj’s, but even if I didn’t work to draw lines around my day it seems insane to work from home when the office is one block away and so awesome, whilst my apartment is not set up for working, and also never contains any food (to be fair, I do see some people in the office in the pjs on occasion, but I don’t have the nerve). But perhaps the problem I’m having is adjusting to this new pace of life.

I’ve been thinking about sustainability, rather than balance. When I consider sustainability, apparently I don’t consider my need to sometimes do nothing. I’m going to have to figure out how to factor that in. At work, I tried blocking off a week that said “DNS – Cate is Anti-social“. It was a useful experiment that I’ll likely repeat. Can I do some equivalent for my personal life? Like a “No commitments, Cate is reading novels” weekend (or week!) a month?

Sustainability is a work in progress, and a constant balancing act. But – at least I’ve moved from novel-reading to structured procrastination. That’s progress, I guess.

May 25, 2011
Unreasonable Expectations for my Calendar
Credit: dane_au / http://www.elfwood.com/~dane_au/Evil-Calendar-Kid.2654934.html

At the moment I’m trying to work out where I’m going to be for the next two months. A trip to New York is fixed, but a trip to Europe is not. And then there’s the maybe on Utah… too many dependencies!

I find scheduling things stressful – the CompSci in me wants to find the optimal solution, but in reality it’s tough to do better than a greedy algorithm.

Some things are fixed – events, for example.

Some things are flexible – like the gym.

Some things have dependencies:
- Location – schedule things in similar places together.
- People – need to find a time that works for both people. And pick a location (who goes to who? Meet in the middle?)
When scheduling stuff with other people, location based services could be helpful to determine a good place for both people. I.e. mostly person A checks in at places in the West, and person B in the East, but on Tuesday afternoons they both tend to be North – so how about coffee at 6? We can determine that A likes Tim Hortons, and B likes Timothy’s, but at a push Starbucks will work for both.

Phones have GPS trackers, and I don’t want to call or text whilst driving. But what if my phone could ask me, “it seems you are moving at less than 5mph, would you like me to text <person I’m meeting> and say you are stuck in traffic and expect to be 5-10 minutes late?” and I could respond – “yes” or “no”. Going further, because with cellphones everyone always seems to be late, I want to ask the other person’s phone – based on their ETA and my ETA, do I have time to drop off my dry cleaning?

What about flexible appointments like the gym? (I wrote about this here) Can my phone notice that I’m leaving the office at 1730 and say “you can either go to body pump at 6:30, or kickboxing at 7?” – and even “based on how much cardio you’ve done this week you should think about adding 30 mins on the x-trainer to your workout if you opt for body pump”.

Flights – this is something that I think my calendar (Google calendar, of course) could really do a lot better with.
- I should be able to put in a flight number and a day to and from and it should adjust the time difference in between. I find myself calculating time differences when I schedule events in the UK before I leave. That is bonkers!
- Monitor delays. Recently I was sprinting through Toronto airport without shoes, or belt. My flight was delayed and I made it with 15 minutes to spare – this is the kind of thing I’d like my phone to tell me!
- Picking up. I’d like my phone to tell me where to leave, based on calculations including – traffic, immigration, baggage collection, and – of course – flight delays.
I realize that some people might find this creepy. But personally, I’d love it if some smart programmers could take this scheduling problem off my hands! I’m OK with a company I trust (i.e. not Facebook) having this kind of information about where I am and what I’m doing, if it makes my life easier.
November 3, 2010
Smart Calendars

Below is a picture of my schedule for this week:

Calendar for w/c January 18th

Bear in mind, that the scheduled times are typically those when I am not working – yes I am a little stressed, and incredibly unsympathetic to people who tell me they don’t have time to do things because they are “too busy”.

I’ve had to start scheduling gym time, because otherwise there’s a good chance that I won’t be able to make it. Which has set me thinking, because normally there are a couple of classes I could go to and I pick the one that works in my schedule. What would be good, though, is if I could put all the possible times in and my calendar could work out the ones that are possible, and then remind me an hour before.

In fact, you could suggest degrees of aggression for the reminder, i.e. I would like to set a goal, say for 5 workouts in a week, and it would harass me accordingly, i.e. if it’s Wednesday and I haven’t trained yet, it should start getting really pushy. But if it’s Thursday and I’ve already been 3 times, it could be a little nicer and say, you can have today off if you like – provided that I can make two more training times on Friday/Saturday/Sunday.

It’s not just workouts, either, I’ve blocked out four hours on Friday afternoon to do “inbox processing” (very GTD of me), but realistically that can happen any time of day. So I’d like my calendar to be a little flexible in appointment scheduling around that, provided there’s a four hour block between, say, 10am and 10pm for me to have that time.

I think there’s a lot that could be done with location awareness, too. What do you think?

January 21, 2010