Brief Thoughts on Technology

It is so much more difficult to work and research on the PC I use at work than on one of my own machines, and the reason is entirely due to customization.  Last week I began researching a pretty intensive project and it struck me how much time it took to organize my research without the assistance of Onenote and my particular set of Firefox extensions.  Amusingly enough, the one thing I miss the most is ‘Copy as plain text.’

I’ve come to appreciate having my own desktop and laptop.  Through the wonder of synchronization the setups are quite similar, though the widescreen laptop is cozy for watching movies and when I actually need to be busy I gravitate towards my desktop.  It is ironic considering I really didn’t care for laptops before purchasing this one, which I wanted primarily for school, but which only goes with me to classes two days a week.  It is interesting watching technological habits change.

RSS Tricks

I wonder if many other people are as obsessive about the organization of their RSS feeds and subscriptions.  I’ve worked my list over to a science, effectively managing about 200 subscriptions and about 250 posts a day into handy categories for maximum focus.  When you’re reading on a variety of topics, it is most helpful to sort them so that you’re not bouncing around too terribly from topic to topic, lest you lose focus or miss important details.  Once you get in a specific zone, changing up the topic causes you to lose focus.  To keep on track, I use these categories:

-Awesome
-Amusing
-Frugal
-Inspire
-Friends
-Productivity
-Local
-iPhone
-Work (Medical-Health)
-Work (Development)
-Maybe
-Added August
-Added September

The ‘Added’ categories are fairly recent and I use them to file new subscriptions until I’m completely certain that I want to add them to my daily repertoire.  If they don’t make the cut, they are moved to ‘Maybe’ which is checked only about every week or so.  The ‘Work’ categories are separated into medical-specific blogs and career development resources, which is also a fairly new change for me but has been completely helpful when I want to review medical development only or articles more based on HR or corporate development.

I’ve found GReader to be most optimal for me since I’m reading my feeds in a few different places; I use the star function to mark posts for reading later if I’m not in a place where I can really read and absorb something, or if I want to read it in a different place.  Every few weeks I go through and make sure these are read and unstarred.  This system works well for me and I can’t imagine not using it, with the sheer amount of information that I’d like to be connected to on a daily basis.

My brain is cartoon-colored?

Per the Primary Color Assessment, the color which most represents me is Picachu Yellow.

…

Really?

Picachu yellow?

A brightly colored Pokemon character summarizes my work style and how happy and/or comfortable I am with certain tasks?

The website goes on to list this about my work personality, based on an interesting set of twenty-seven questions:

Your primary color is characterized by a balance between curiosity and execution. You can be an ingenious innovator capable of seeing new ways of doing things and new possibilities for old problems. You are likely to exhibit a great deal of imagination and initiative for starting new projects, and for challenging the status quo. However, you may become quickly bored with the mundane, repetitive tasks associated with implementation and are likely to be drawn to the next new or more interesting possibility. You are not likely to stay long in any occupation or job that does not provide many new challenges and intellectual stimulation.

Assuming you have the requisite talent, you could find success and satisfaction as a consultant, journalist, inventor, troubleshooter, computer analyst or any occupation that provides variety and flexibility. People in this color family tend to be change agents who act as catalysts between ideas, systems and people.

An interesting premise though somewhat off-base, and none of the recommended career paths hold any merit for me.  The questions I found more interesting than the answers and I’ll rate it worth taking on that reason–plus who knows what wacky color you’ll get?

Schedule sense

The tide has turned.  No longer do I feel so terrible about the scope of my classes I’ve been dealt for this virgin semester.  What started out as an awful, pointless, just-taking-units-to-stay-full-time semester has turned fruitful with health science classes.  Whee!

My schedule is a little hectic and requires lots of driving back and forth between work and school.  I’m settled down with these five classes:

• Public Health Administration – favorite class so far
• Community Health – have not attended as of yet
• Health Law & Legal
• Project Management
• Calculus – have not attended as of yet

It looks like at least this aspect has sorted itself out in the end.  Although the list of classes that I have attended that I am no longer enrolled in is quite a bit longer than that list right up there.  If anything, it was interesting to see the first-day teaching styles of so many different instructors.  My most common bright outlook is coming back to me; now I’m off to drown myself in health textbooks and mind-map notes.  I’ve never tried mind-mapping before so we will see how it goes.

Seventeen more weeks to go.

The primary term I can use to explain my first week as a university student is disappointment.  I wish it weren’t so.  My hopes upon entering CSUF this August were that I would find it an institution worthy of the giagantic fee increases recently implemented, that my instructors would be interesting, insightful, task-oriented, and that my fellow students would be serious about their pursuit of higher education.

What high hopes.  I’ve had junior college classes that required more attention and brainpower than most of my classes this semester.

Personal ruminations on attraction to organizational culture.

Any transitory movement is comprised of both fulfilled and unfulfilled emotions.  It is in this limbo that one sheds old habits in favor of the tentative, new formation of habits that hope to support the actions and behaviors that will be required in the next stage.  Until one is able to finalize their feelings about where they are coming from, and is able to take from that time meaning and understanding as it relates to the larger picture, there is little hope of allowing for a successful transition.

It is here in this interim time that I feel as if I actually have the time to stop a moment, look around, and reflect.  With the first two years of higher learning down, and a mess of paperwork and regulations to navigate through in order to start the next two years, I fully and consciously understand that I am a lucky, blessed human being.  It isn’t often that I look back at my life and allow myself to feel truly proud and pleased with what I’ve done; usually I’m too busy trying to improve, to advance, or in the case of the last six weeks, simply maintain while my daily tasks and requirements far exceeded the amount of hours in one day.

Needless to say, after speeding through this summer semester of 7am-2am between work & school, I appreciate the opportunity to be comfortably conscious and deliberate in my daily actions, to step back quietly and think about what I am really doing with my life.

It is in this space after being on maintenance mode for so long, that I’ve decided to pursue a more formalized version of task management in order to increase personal exposure to goals and to attempt to become more aware of the passage of time as it relates to the ultimate ends that I want to accomplish.  Every single weekend this summer I’ve thought about how I’ve had the same penpal letters in my inbox for months, quietly requesting a return reply but generally being sighed over and shuffled to the back of the pile while everything else gets in the way.

I see the forms for the CPC exam that I was supposed to take in July but never quite got around to submitting, the inch-thick stack of recipes that I’ve been meaning to try if only I would remember to purchase the ingredients, the daunting creative projects that sadly collect dust on my bookshelf, the intangible amounts of time that I have spent not in active pursuit of the larger goals because I simply do not have a unified structure in place to actively record, revise, and review

Cue the productivity system.  I understand the concept of starting small, of the first step.  I spread out boxes of pens and markers and pretty much anything one could use to make marks on any other object and I organized them so that I could have my favorite writing utensils handy and spread out throughout my home desk, my backpack and laptop bag, in my car, and at work, because not having the correct pen for a task can be demotivating, annoying, or just plain not good.  I then dumped all of my paperwork and miscellaneous odds and ends into milk crates, spent four hours researching GTD, filing systems, and other productivity/workaround systems, all while rocking an awesome Journey-based Pandora station.  Within a short time I’d created the bones of a filing system, had the milkcrates all cleared out, and had a stack of various other organizing tools that didn’t seem to quite work piled up in the garage .  Granted, the folders weren’t labeled, and I still had one small plastic organizer filled with random objects that seemingly had no place to go, but hey, it was a good start.