Summary: month 1 and 2

http://www.flickr.com/photos/josenicolas/ 

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." —Cyril Northcote Parkinson

These word also known as The Parkinosn's Law is widely known in project management. The first time I have heard it was during studying, on lecture on production management. This law is the theme of  "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferris. It is also used in personal time management. In my opinion, two month long time  boxes to summarize the progress is optimal. Timeboxing is also known in Scrum, where it is called sprint. Recommended length of sprint is 2-4 weeks. My activity is less dynamic than software development. Of course the main rule of Scrum, but not the only one, is to be flexible. It is possible that I will adjust my sprint length in the future. In Scrum there are a few team meetings:

• A planning meeting (at the beginning).
• Short  'stand up' meeting (every day, optional, but recommended). 
• Sprint review, sprint is summarized  (review itself and retrospective which helps to optimize whole process). 

The idea of first and last meeting is brilliant. To take maximum profit from my Scrum experience I decided to reuse the same ideas. Every two months I will publish a brief summary containing my failures, successes (review), analyze them, wrote conclusions (retrospective). After all I will try to share my plans for next two months. I didn't document all my plans two months ago but they could be recycled from the review. Let's start:

Failures:   

• 
  Social aspects of life.
   PhD studies are more and more time consuming. I spend a lot time on gaining new skills, new knowledge about passive sources of income, job via Internet and so on. As a result my social life is neglected. Sometimes I do not have social life.
• Reducing time spent in the office
  My target is to work wiser, more efficient, to earn the same amount of money but also to have time to enjoy life. Now I can see that I am working harder than before starting this blog. What I was able to achieve spending only 8h in the office (lunch included). I also earned 1 free day by sacrificing 3 hours of Sunday (weekend work)
• Regular, physical activity
  I wanted to return to everyday running and trainings. Now after work and 'school' I am too tired to anything. Of course, an important thing is human laziness. I tried to overcome it, after two weeks of intensive trainings I noticed that my organism refused to cooperate (I was permanently sleepy, tired and not able to concentrate) 

Successes

• 
  Natural sleep rhythm
  I am not using alarm clock anymore. Now I feel much more fresh. Humans have natural phases of sleep, ordinary alarm clock wakes you up without checking in which phase you are. As a result you could be tired the whole day. There is a possibility to program yourself to wake up at defined hour. Repeating "I will wake up at hour x" a few times just before falling asleep is enough. At the beginning my accuracy was +/- 2h, now it is +/-1h, not perfect but good enough.  
• Traveling
  Since the beginning of this year I have been able to visit two countries: Germany (one day trip) and Finland (3 day business trip). No I am sure that traveling to different countries, even for a while is the most valuable experience of all. If you have ever been abroad, you probably know what I mean. 
• Remote access to corporate network
  It may look odd to you, but I requested for a token which gave me the possibility to connect to my company network remotely. I am planing to use it wisely to limit the time spent in the office. It is only the first part of my plan.
• 1/8 of PhD studies passed 

More of, less of, continued (classic retrospective)

• 
  More time on PhD studies
  It is a very important activity. There is a big chance that it will be profitable in near future, so I should concentrate on it. What is more, if I lost my job, PhD would be my only source of income.
• Less time on reading about passive income, traveling, independence
  I have Google AdSense on my blog, but my assumption is that my blog is non-profitable. If so, I should concentrate on profitable activities. It does not mean that it is not important, it just should have lower priority.
• Be active
  It was the greatest failure, but should not be abandoned. 
• Constant number posts per month
  3-4 posts per month will be enough for now. 
• Traveling
  I could see how much fun it is, and how valuable it is, this activity should be continued

 Plans

• 
  Swimming pool once a week
• Finnish the most important task for PhD studies
• Sleep 6.5 h plus one 15 min. power nap 
• 3-4 posts a month 
• Looking for some interesting, open project 
• Find informations about psychological mechanisms related to need of long term planing