{"id":500,"date":"2009-12-18T17:36:44","date_gmt":"2009-12-18T15:36:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/?p=500"},"modified":"2015-08-03T20:14:49","modified_gmt":"2015-08-03T18:14:49","slug":"greatest-weakness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/2009\/12\/18\/greatest-weakness\/","title":{"rendered":"Greatest weakness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Someone<\/a> went off and started asking people what their greatest weaknesses are, then someone else<\/a> decided to pass the question my way. Perhaps those someones\u2019 weaknesses are curiosity… Still, since everyone else is revealing their darkest secrets, I\u2019ll give it a go as well.<\/p>\n

Mine would have to be two very closely related things. Procrastination and short attention span. (why do you think this post is 4 days late?)<\/p>\n

I tend to put stuff off until the absolute last minute (and sometimes beyond then) and then work frantically to get it finished. And because I\u2019m also a bit of a perfectionist, I\u2019m not satisfied with half-done work or a hack job so I’ll be working late into the night (or over a weekend) to get it done properly.<\/p>\n

To add to that, unless I\u2019m doing something I really enjoy, my attention span tends not to be very long. 15-20 minutes is good, it\u2019s usually less. After that it\u2019s either fight to stay focused or take a short break. In and of itself, that\u2019s not so bad, the problem is that the breaks are often not so short, if I get caught up in whatever else I\u2019m doing, or distracted by something else (and something else and something else).<\/p>\n

So what am I doing about this?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Well, firstly, I have no solutions. There are things that I\u2019m doing that are helping, but I won\u2019t say they are general solutions.<\/p>\n

Procrastination<\/h2>\n

I\u2019m splitting big tasks up into small (very small) chunks and setting deadlines for those chunks. Sometimes more than one a day. That way, everything should be done at the last minute, so I can\u2019t put things off, much.<\/p>\n

This works fairly well if I have a lot of things to do. It doesn\u2019t tend to work well for me when I\u2019ve got relatively few things that need doing and lots of time to do them in. Still, it is helping, as long as I take the time to break work down and list small tasks. I do need to apply a bit more discipline here to make sure that I do break work down and I do adhere to the tasks deadlines.<\/p>\n

Attention span<\/h2>\n

This one\u2019s harder. While I can push through when I start losing focus, it\u2019s difficult and gets more difficult as time goes on.<\/p>\n

Because I know that I can\u2019t focus on one thing straight through for hours, I\u2019ll usually have two thing that I\u2019m busy with that I can switch between. For example I\u2019ll have an SSIS package that I\u2019m developing and a profile trace that I\u2019m analysing and I can switch between them.<\/p>\n

What I have to be careful about is time-consuming non-work related distractions. Which, seeing as I work from home with a big shelf of books behind me and an xbox in the lounge can be difficult. But that comes down to discipline. No games during the day. No more than an hour of gaming over supper when there\u2019s work that needs doing.<\/p>\n

This is also why, even though I\u2019ve joined the Twitter madness, the Twitter client is closed for most of the day. It\u2019s also why I\u2019ve started closing Outlook for most of the day. If the clients want me urgently, they\u2019ll phone. Mail can always wait a couple of hours.<\/p>\n

Well, I think that\u2019s enough about me. I\u2019m curious to see what Steve Jones<\/a> and Paul Randal<\/a> have to say (if anything)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Someone went off and started asking people what their greatest weaknesses are, then someone else decided to pass the question my way. Perhaps those someones\u2019 weaknesses are curiosity… Still, since everyone else is revealing their darkest secrets, I\u2019ll give it… (Read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7h6n-84","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1572,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500\/revisions\/1572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}