Tag: work-life balance

Catching Up

Today first time after Sunday, my eye does not hurt, and I am trying to catch up for the lost time. I am still not sure when and if I will be able to wear contacts, so my head still hurts, but at least the eye is (almost) fine. I still feel it, but it is so much better, and I am so eager to do everything I could not do in the past several days!

Unfortunately, this week was going to be busy even without the vision crisis, and also – I am leaving Sunday night, so I am still horrified by the amount of work I need to do before I leave. And at the same time, I am terribly sorry that I am missing the whole European Film Festival – there were so many movies I wanted to watch, and I watched zero!

I am very well aware of how a person’s brain works, so I know that if I got to see zero, the festival would be lower in my list of priorities than other things… but I am still sad.

On the positive side, I finally made it to ODS, and we had a “make your own pizza” dinner, and it was a lot of fun. Almost all of the youth participated, and we all laughed and joked. I talked to several newcomers, and one boy who had been there for a while was really happy that I remembered his name. Some pizzas turned out very well, some – not so much, but nobody went hungry!

On Wednesday, I hosted Chicago PUG and not only hosted but also presented. I rehearsed a talk which I will be giving in Paris in two weeks. There were very few RSVPs, and I worried that nobody would come, but that was one of these rare cases when pretty much everybody showed up! All the pizza was gone – it almost never happens!

My talk was very well received, and I got a lot of helpful comments, so I am going to make some changes to the presentation. Overall, both Tuesday and Wednesday were great. I was so miserable with my eye, and the fact that I was surrounded by people, and people liked what I was doing, made me feel tons better.

Finally, today I made a recording for Citus Con. I didn’t want to submit anything to this conference because I knew I won’t have time, but the organizers asked me and told me that they would place me on the on-demand trek and that they would record me when I have time. And then, out of three talks I submitted, they selected the one which was completely unprepared! So I had to work on that one, in addition to my talk for Paris (and my reserve talk!)

Still, I didn’t want to cancel, because I knew that this would be a great opportunity to promote my new talk and new ideas, so I made time :). The talk was recorded by the organizers, and they will do the edits and everything. It went really well (I rehearsed it three times because the timeslots were shorter than usual – 25 min – and I wanted to make sure everything would fit. There were lots of technical difficulties during the recording, but after everything was resolved I was able to present well enough so that there was no need for re-recording. I feel pretty good about this, as well as the fact that the organizers loved my talk so much. And about me comfortable presenting i glasses – I might need to do the same in Paris!

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 🙂

Life Is Going On

And again, there are too many things going on in my life, but I am happy about it. All these things are meaningful.

At work, I am working on two database courses at the same time. One is an online introductory course in databases and SQL. I wanted to do something like this for years, and I even tried to engage in a project with the publisher who published our Query Optimization book, but it didn’t work. After several attempts, they said that I just did not know how to produce educational videos.

I can’t say they are wrong, but I still wanted this to happen! And a couple of months ago, I had this conversation at work. I can’t even describe how awesome it felt! The conversation was: give us content, and we will do the rest! I work with a specialist in creating educational videos. She does not know much about databases, so she has to try really hard, but she knows all about producing educational videos, so I am genuinely admiring the resulting product.

Another course I am preparing is an advanced course for DBAs, primarily geared towards Oracle/MS SQL Server DBAs, who are switching to PostgreSQL. That’s another dreamy project which brings me the joy of feeling useful.

On top of it, just a day’s snapshot: convincing people at work to do the right thing, discussing the preparation for the career fair in the Night Ministry (that feels like the shelter and One Million Degrees combined :)), people asking me to write professional blog posts, and a premier of Hansel and Gretel in the Lyric Opera.

Looks like life is just starting at sixty 🙂

And One More Time About Breakfast At Work…

It is great, because:

  • you do not need to think about making breakfast in the morning and whether you will have time for it
  • it is ready when you come to the office
  • the window view from the cafeteria
  • you have these ten minutes to sit, enjoy the view, food and coffee and get ready for the great start of the day
  • you feel that your employer cares

No Work-Life Balance

I worked from home today because I needed to take mom to the doctor, and this time, it was a very inconvenient time, so it took almost three hours from the middle of my workday. And then, I could not switch to my non-work activities later in the evening because I wanted to finish the things I didn’t finish for work.

Especially because I took an extra day off while Boris was here, I felt like I almost forgot what I was doing before that, and I desperately wanted to catch up.

That’s the common theme for everything I am doing at work these days – I do not have enough time to do everything I want! And when I work from home, it’s an extra challenge because I can’t put a hard stop to work…

A Week In Review

In addition to all the things I am doing at work:

  • My next live meetup is next week, and I have guest speakers, and I can’t believe things are getting back to normal.
  • PG Day Chicago website is coming up next week as well, and we have the dates and the talks selection committee,
  • While doing actual work, I fixed a bug in my DIFF open source project and figured out how to create partitioned bitemporal tables (this means nothing for 99% of the readers, but what is important is that my work allows me to contribute to the open source projects)
  • And I hope to write a couple of professional blog posts during the weekend
  • And I am not behind on holiday planning!

The First Work Week After

Since I barely blogged this week, it should be obvious that the first week after the conference was very intense. There are several projects which I both need and want to do, and each of them could easily take all the work time I have. I would be happy to have sixteen extra hours a day, because I really-really want to do it all.

On top of that: the program committee of PG Day Chicago started regular meetings, and I feel terrible that it’s not that much I can do at the moment. November PUG is less than two weeks away. Mom is having multiple health issues, mostly related to arthritis. When she feels better, she does not want any help, and when she feels worse, she does not ask, which does not help me to address the situation.

Also, I am still seeing too many shows (and I know it’s too many, but I can’t resist the post-pandemic luxury of ‘all is open.” Last night, I was at CSO with my neighbor, and we listened to the Bartok Second violin concerto with Christian Tetzlaff, and it was so amazing, I still can’t get over it! There are lots of his videos online, and if you watch just one, you’ll see what I am talking about!

So – today is Friday, and I want to do so many things during the weekend, that I am sure at least 30% of them will be not done!

Delegating

Last Saturday was the first time that I asked my cleaning lady to come to do some additional work in my house, and I could not even imagine what a difference in my life it would make!

When I started my new job, I realized I should delegate more things to others – pretty much everything possible. I am a person who does not feel comfortable when my house is not in order by my standards. I have already noticed that I do not have time to finish important things during the weekend because I can’t leave my clothes not ironed.

This delegation was one of the best decisions I recently made! I felt so good being able to focus on my presentation since the early morning and then going to the OHC. Yes, I had to fight the discomfort of letting another person into my fridge and linen closet, but the result was the most rewarding.

Life Gets On The Way

I can’t catch up with life. I returned a ticket for today’s Baroque concert so that I could catch up on my emails, personal obligations, and to finally finish the example for my bitemporal presentation (there was a bug which I could not figure out).

And life kept getting on my way! Yes, I found a bug, and I found a couple of emails which I forgot to answer, but it’s so little in comparison with what I need to do! And in the middle of me doing all this work, I heard a bang on my door, and my neighbor stormed in with a whole bunch of technical problems (her phone is not working, her facebook is hacked, and more). I do not think I fixed any of that, but at least she walked out being less upset and with some Austrian chocolates.

Oh, and guess what – I found my Bavarian witch, and she’s hanging out on my balcony!

Accomplishments

I am very tired at the moment, but I am overjoyed because in the past two days, I have had two big accomplishments..

First, I finally finished the build of a new bitemporal example for my October presentations. This is going to be my new bitemporal talk, and it’s for the first time that I built a full-size example (the data is forked from postgres_air and not published yet.

Boris helped me a lot with data cleansing, but I also invested many-many hours in this process. And when it was finally built, everything else was easy to add. I still need to work on the actual presentation, but now I have all material!

Second, I made a major improvement in my first project at the new job. I was able to optimize it to the maximum, and now I am confident that the performance will be stable for future growth. Friends, I know that all of this does not make any sense to most of you, but trust me, I have a reason to be happy!