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  

Why did I create this blog? Few words about targets and time management.

Probably it should be the first post. Better late than never.

First of all, this blog is for me.

It would be an electronic diary on my way to half-independence. It is very easy to assume that we will do something but without any superior it is hard to achieve any of our goals. One of the subjects of this blog is 'how to avoid becoming a modern slave', so superior is not the best solution. I will omit the part about finding someone who will keep his eye on us 24/7, maybe our parents but it is a bit too late for that. How about becoming a superior of myself? This question came to my mind many times. The main problem with self-control is that we have never been reporting back about our progress to anyone. What is more, the Parkinson law is against us. Throughout my whole adult life I had a very long list of 'TODOs'. I assumed that if I accomplish even very small fraction of dozens of ideas it will be a spectacular success. The main drawback of this way of thinking was that I started a few things at once and in majority of cases I did not finish any. My way of thinking evolved after I came across agile development. It was during my second (and also current) job. I am working as a software developer. I joined my team in a very interesting time, exactly during 'scrum transformation'. Scrum is one of agile methodologies which help team members control the whole process of software development (from specification to sale). 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)

It is based on splitting whole work into small pieces, which could be finished in a fixed unit of time (for example two weeks). Now I have many valuable experiences with scrum process and impediments it faces. My intention is to port somehow the best ideas of scrum to my daily time management process. It is worth to mention, that scrum is mainly about: team work, how to make teams more efficient, what is the difference between the team and the group of people and so on. I am 'the lonely rider', but some ideas are very universal and it should not be hard to apply them. I am aware that I am still not perfect and I would never be. Now my list of things to do is a bit shorter, but it is still too long. I am also trying to do only continuous tasks (PhD studies, blog) and a few single ones during one week. The single tasks should be small enough to finish them during two or three days. When I finish a task I can pick up next one from the queue. Each task should have its priority, from engineering practice I know that it should be unique, so there would be now problems with choosing more important than the others. Of course, the most important task should be done first.

Now my tasks do not have documented priorities and I can see that sometimes, because of my laziness, I start from the easiest one. It is such a fantastic feeling to see a big list with majority of tasks marked as done :) . I think that this small digression grown enough. 

This blog should allow me to check how my vision of my life evolve.

George Santayana

It will be as a photo album. It is a lot of fun to sit in front of the fireplace with dozens of photos, recalling passed, often better and always different times. 

This blog will make my failures and successes visible.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." —George Santayana 

We are constructed in a way that we are allowed to remember only good things which happened to us. There is a rule saying: to allow people to learn you have to let them fail. By writing down my progress I will be able to check what happened long time ago, what were the problems, what were the conclusions and what I should do if similar situation happens again. Sounds handy,  I am curious to know if it really will be.  

Finally, I hope that after some time it will allow me to obtain many valuable comments form people with similar and different outlooks.

Adm. Painter: Russians don't take a dump, son, without a plan

www.filmweb.pl

Day first. The hardest part. How to plan soft switch from current lifestyle (8/10 day workweek) to 'new life' with less work, more free time, traveling, fun and all the staff called life?

Why to plan? Not because of title (I am not a Russian). Without plan transformation will be closer to a dream and far away from reality. By planning you can make some drawbacks visible. I am thinking about some agile-like planning. Main idea is not to delimit deadline. Everything changes. It could be, that I will be somehow forced to give up. This blog should help me to continue transformation. I hope that with new posts my plan will be more and more clear.

Why soft switch?  In my opinion it is the only way to achieve one of the goals – not decrease total income. If I resigned from work how could I earn same amount of money?  

Starting from now, I am sure about one thing: something has to be changed in my life. The first step will by looking for new, less time consuming source of income.  
I also started lecture of "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferris. I am curious to know if adaptation of American patents to polish reality is possible.