Tag: time management

After The Conference

It has been four days since the conference. After a complete relaxation on Saturday, I started to return back to reality, which included going through three hundred non-work emails and dozens of work requests.

A huge portion of my non-work emails was Postgres-related, conferences-related, or otherwise not-really-personal. I am still not through all of them, although I hope that I didn’t miss anything really urgent. Here is what I’ve done so far:

  • Posted the questions for PG Day Chicago feedback
  • Discussed “lessons learned” from the conference day with other organizers
  • Collected feedback from room hosts
  • Emailed several people with whom I talked at the conference and promised to email
  • Scheduled May meetup
  • Published a blog about PG Day Chicago
  • Checked all bills that have accumulated during the past two weeks
  • Paid everything that was due đŸ™‚
  • Emailed the dates when I can volunteer at the Night Ministry
  • Decided on the dates when I can do several shows I want to attend in May and June
  • Figured out most of my May-June schedule
  • Ordered a new dishwasher

The things I still didn’t do and need to do in the next couple of days:

  • Schedule the rest of the conversations I’ve promised to schedule
  • Record a sample video for an online conference where I will present in June
  • Prepare the actual presentation for this conference
  • Submit proposals to three conferences which will be happening this fall and which I want to attend
  • Write two professional blog posts
  • Write a LinkedIn recommendation I’ve promised
  • Find time to meet with three more people with whom I want to meet

Plus, lots of biking (the sunrise is finally early enough!), lots of shows to see, and the full Chicago summer ahead!

Flying Back And How Did This Week Go

Flying back from Brussels was equally interesting. Since I had three separate reservations, I still had to fly back through Helsinki, but I also could not have a short connection in London because the next flight wouldn’t wait for me, and I didn’t want to lose one more day in transit. We took the last Sunday flight from Brussels, which arrived in Helsinki at 10:30 PM, which meant going to bed at midnight and getting up at 4 AM to get to the first flight to London.

It turned out that the border control in the Helsinki airport didn’t open till 6 AM, so I had to wait for about 20 min, which I could spend sleeping :). Also, British Airways didn’t issue me a boarding pass online, which meant I had to get it in Terminal 5 at Heathrow, just before the security checkpoint, and then I had to wait for my flight to Chicago for six hours.

Fortunately, the lounges in Heathrow are great, so that was not a problem. That was the first time I took a shower in the airport., and I found out that they had absolutely everything; there was no need to unpack. I will know for the next time!

That’s a picture from the Brussels Finnair lounge – they had a real mushroom soup!

Now, a short review of what was going on during the last four days. My flight landed ahead of time, but then we couldn’t get to the gate for 40 minutes, and the line for passport control was very long, so I ended up coming home at 9-30 PM, and I had to get my mail from my neighbor, unpack, and on Tuesday at 7-30 AM I was already in the office. On Tuesday evening, I was at the Opera (I will write about this performance separately), and my neighbor and I had dinner before the opera to celebrate her birthday. So once again, at home at 10-45 PM.

On Wednesday, I attended a meetup after work (good, productive, great networking, but once again … late night). On Thursday, I finally went to see my mom after work, attended an online yoga class, and made a couple of phone calls. And on Friday – a Valentine’s Day musical, “Twisted Love,” at Above the Law Theater.

Don’t take me wrong, it’s all great; just trying to catch up with life! Oh, and also, I am about to leave to another opera!

Mid-Week

Somehow, it is difficult to plan for anything after my return from Prague. Logically, I understand that there should not be any life-threatening with Anna, and if I can plan my trip to Prague, I can plan things after. But I am stuck on uncertainty. Also, there will be not even a day of vacation between now and the end of the year (excluding the state holidays), still I feel that I am going to be out of the office to such an extent that I can’t take any time of fin January.

***

On Tuesday, I was at the Beetlejuice show with my neighbor. No, I did not see a movie. Yes, I knew what it was going to be about. And I was willing to give it a try. And I didn’t like it:). And that’s fine, but … there were three young women behind us (no, not teens!). And they were screaming so loud!!!! All the time! My Apple Watch started panicking and showed me dangerous decibel levels,l so each time they started to scream, I had to cover my ears! My neighbor said that the woman behind her was kicking her chair from the back all the time!

***

I was barely home this week, and it’s already late and I didn’t write three important emails I was supposed to write last weekend.

Weekend Plans

The long weekend has started, and I have a lot of plans for it! I am finally not three weeks behind on everything, and I want to make the most out of it.

In some sense, it feels like the beginning of the new year: one more time, I want to make an effort and be more assertive about which things are really important to me and make sure I have time for them. And not to let things drop.

My Updates

We are leaving for Finland – finally for an actual vacation, which means, I am working like crazy to complete a couple of important projects before I leave. Otherwise, these projects won’t materialize at all. This leaves zero room for anything else during work hours, including book writing, professional blogs and other educational materials, PUG activities, and PG Day Chicago ongoing things, and I am not even mentioning my own conference submissions and life in general.

Nothing is packed for the trip; my emails remain unanswered for days and weeks, but I go for bike rides every morning and go to the beach at least three times a week. I guess, my priorities are clear!

Updates And How Is Life

By the end of the week, I went into another spiral of “everything goes wrong, and I am behind on everything!”

On Thursday, I decided to call my doctor and ask whether I should see her for my broken nail situation It turned out she just went on a long vacation, but her medical assistant suggested I see another doctor, just to make sure. I made an appointment for Friday afternoon since I was going to work from home because of another appointment.

Then the day went not as planned (and I already had a backlog of things, as it always happens by Friday.) My other appointment got canceled last minute, and when I went to the doctor, my appointment was delayed, and when the doctor finally came, she said she wanted to make sure there was no fracture (I still can’t bend the thumb). So she sent me for the x-rays, and it took me a long time to find where I needed to check in and where to get the xrays (people were sending me back and forth multiple times). Not worth going into the details, but I got increasingly frustrated that it took so long, and even though I took Uber both ways, I was at home only at 4-35, three hours after I left!

There is a high chance that I indeed have a fracture. In the beginning, I was focused on the nail and the pain around it and attributed all the discomfort to that problem. But now, when the wound is stabilized, I understand that the pain comes from the thumb itself and my attempt to use it.

Since the x-rays were taken at the very end of the day, I do not expect the result until the end of the day on Monday. I know that regardless, there is no specific treatment for the broken thumb if it’s indeed the case I am just extremely annoyed that everything takes twice longer than it should take.

No excuse for not finishing the next Red Gate article and not replying to a couple of emails asking for my professional advice.

The day is gorgeous; it should be a day at the beach, especially because Sunday will be cold and rainy. Oh, well…. Back to the tasks of the day!

Still Catching Up

Several things took way longer than they should have, including waiting for the eye doctor for 45 minutes (!) (and she didn’t even apologize). Also, on Friday, I was pulled into a couple of meetings where my presence was not needed, and lastly, I spent over an hour in attempts to check in only to figure out I couldn’t and will have to do it in the airport.

Packing took longer than I planned (and I am not done yet, and I am afraid to look at the clock, especially having that we are switching to Daylight saving time)!

The good part is that my eye is pretty much healed, and I will resume wearing contacts in a week, maybe even earlier.

Going to have four hours of sleep now and will go back to packing!

Writing

My life is pretty dull these days: most of the weekends are spent on writing and getting ready for multiple talks. Today, except for some physical activity, checking on mom, and talking to Boris, it was all writing. I finished the presentation for my weekly Advanced Postgres series at work, rehearsed the talk I will present at Chicago PUG on Wednesday (and made some edits), sent the pdf of my presentation for CitusCon, and rehearsed it twice – they will be recording me on Thursday. I worked on the article which I am writing for yet another professional website – I received a lot of questions/comments/editing suggestions from the editor, and it took me almost two hours to go over all of them.

And now it’s bedtime, which I religiously try to observe because neglecting it negatively affects my productivity.

Tomorrow, there will be several things that I need to do during business hours, including the PC committee meeting, finally, ordering conference T-shirts, finalizing the speaker’s dinner, and calling about three different appointments for mom. All mom-related things take forever: call to schedule an appointment to get a referral, make this appointment, call to see why there is no provider specified on the referral, call and leave a message to a provider; after they don’t return your call, call one more time, to find out that the home visits are not covered by Medicaid, and NY referral is not good for the office visits… and we need to start everything over again!

Then, I do not have time for everything work-related during work hours, and I am doing work after work, and I do not have time to do the edits over the weekend, and the cycle repeats. Sometimes I think that if I could do mom’s calls over the weekend, it would help, but most likely, it won’t work that way. After all, it’s not like I have any free time any day of the week đŸ™‚

Time Is Still A Non-Renewable Resource

Time-time-time… You can never get the wasted time back. And you never have enough time t do everything you want to do. Ok, I am not sure about you, but I definitely don’t!

One of the newest things I am trying to fit in my life is this: I have the option to write about pretty much anything I want. And not only to write but to be published. And not only published but also paid for it.

And I have so many ideas! In fact, I, like many others, write these imaginary articles in my mind when I walk around. I feel like I already wrote something, just to realized that it is still all in my mind đŸ™‚

Today, work came on it’s way. I had to start something at 6 AM, hoping that I would be done by 10 AM, and ended up being barely done by 4-30 PM with still some cleanup having to be done later.

I still hope to find some time during the weekend to write at least one article. I swear, it is almost written! I just need to type it up đŸ™‚

Pre-Holiday Traffic

As I already said, Friday went completely wrong. Skipping all that was wrong in the morning, I will start at 3 PM.
When I had the exterminator on August 21, he said that he would check the situation with the trap on September 2 (initially, he said – in two weeks, but I told him that I would be unavailable then, so we agreed on September 2).
On August 31, I decided to call and check whether my inspection is scheduled, and it turned out that it was not and that there were no more openings. By then, I knew a mouse was in the trap, and it started to disintegrate.
Finally, after checking all the possible options and redirecting me three times, they told me they could schedule an inspector to come between 3 and 5. I told them that I would need to leave at four at the latest, so could they please make sure that the inspector would come before that?
When nobody showed up by 3-40, I called the company, and they said that the inspector was stuck in pre-holiday traffic and won’t be there till five!
I was desperate – there was no way I could find somebody to wait for an inspector, and I had no time left before the train. Frantically, I called Igor, and he agreed to come to my house after five, although I had already tasked him with three things that had to be accomplished on the same day.
Then I called Uber and was shocked to find out that the usual 30-35 min trip to Union Station is projected to be an hour long, and the wait was about 10-12 min. When the app finally responded that the driver would be there in 4 minutes, I rushed downstairs with such a speed that my Apple watch asked – did you fall?
The train departure time was 5-08, and all along the ride, the projected arrival time was something like 5-04 to 5-06. I called Anna saying I am missing the train; there was one more train three hours later, and Anna suggested I exchange the ticket until it was not too late, but I decided I would give it a chance. The driver was awesome; he used each opportunity to advance in the traffic, at the same time not doing anything risky. We arrived at an unbelievable 5-02, which allowed me not only to make the train but also not to be the last person who jumped in!

And the exterminator came to my apartment at about 5-20, just when Igor arrived. Because I didn’t instruct Igor properly, he didn’t ask about the hole, so the question of what hole to patch remains open.