I think the one thing I learned during my brief time in the military is the importance of structure. I don’t think I would have been able to complete a self-paced, 2-year MBA program without structure. I wouldn’t have been able to maintain a 40-hour work week and effectively study and pass the LSAT without structure. As I look for a new job, I’m thinking that one way I can be more effective is to add more structure.
Every week since being let go, I’ve put in at least ten applications a week. I’ve started working on a few side projects in the hopes that my portfolio will stop looking like a ghost town, and I put together this website after sitting on the domain for years. Still, though, I find myself with too much time on my hands to worry about the future, and not as much progress on my various projects as I’d like to see.
Old Habits
I had a hunch a week or so ago, and it really hit me to day that a lack of structure – a lack of routine – is likely a huge contributing factor to these feelings of anxiety. Thanks to being WGU alumni, I’ve got free access to LinkedIn learning. The plan over the next few weeks is to structure my day similarly to how I did when I was in school, dedicating blocks of time to applying for jobs, completing online courses, and building my projects.
High-Level Goals
I’m a big believer in the power of SMART goals, but also think it’s good to start with high-level goals when you’re first setting out. Broadly speaking, I’d like to accomplish the following with whatever schedule I land on:
Write more
One thing that’s kept me from blogging all these years, despite giving public and internal talks, writing piles of documentation, proposals, and specifications, etc. has been a concern about if what I put out into the ether is useful.
What I’ve come to realize is that you never really know what’s going to be useful to different people, so I should just write. I can eventually make judicious use of tags to help people find the content they’re most interested in.
Heck, maybe I’ll even get around to writing that book I keep saying I want to write…
Learn more
While I often found myself learning every day on the job, I was always learning something I needed to learn in order to solve a given problem at work, rather than something I was interested in learning. While learning on-the-job tickles an important part of the brain, I’m now finding that my bookshelf is stacked full of books covering topics of interest that I never made it to.
Thus, I want to make a more deliberate effort to balance learning things i need to know with things I’m interested to know. The short list of those things at the moment includes:
- compiler engineering
- user experience (UX)
- game development
- low-level programming
- career advancement
Do more
A lot of the work I’ve done over the last several years have been invisible; proprietary code that advanced the businesses I worked for, but can’t be shared elsewhere. The net result is that my GitHub looks like a graveyard. I’ve also development, low-level programming) AI scraping my content to either train on or be used to solicit.
I’ve got a lot of half-baked ideas sitting on my hard drive, so I’d like to commit to actually polishing those enough to present them to the world. If I’ve learned anything from working at several start-ups, it’s that no one expects polish at first. As the old saying goes:
Perfect is the enemy of good
The hope is that I learn more, I can do more, and then write about what I’ve done. I’ve already written briefly about Patina, the game engine that I’m working on. I’m also working on a static site generator, which I intend to write about soon, and just started a couple of courses, one on data science, and another on UX design.
Say less
Talk is cheap, as they say, so my plan for the next few series of blog posts is to talk less about what I’m going to do, and talk more about what I’m doing.
Until then, see you next time.