Month of Experiments

This April had been experimental for me as I had invested my time towards improving productivity, efficient utilization of time and effort tracking, gaining considerable fitness along with fun and travel.

Conscious Investment

The best investment I have made this month is to spend conscious and dedicated effort towards reading technical and non-technical books and blogs. Towards this I had installed apps like +feedly, +Pocket (I will write a separate blog post in a week on the various apps that I have chosen to use and why I feel good about them) and subscribed for +infinithoughts magazine. I personally like this magazine because of the genres and variety of articles it provides. Also, I feel that the kind of questions that I run over when approaching anything is exactly reflected by the author in the book. I'm keeping myself conscious and cautious in taking this action and momentum forward.

I got an opportunity to attend a meetup (got to know through meetup.com) on BigData conducted by IBM @ Embassy Golf links. Primarily it ended up being a marketing session on IBM's BigData products than session on BigData which I was anticipating. However this meetup.com seems to open many opportunities to know various such technical and non-technical happening in Bangalore. Hope to explore few meetups that match my interest.

Productivity and Productivity Tracker

Towards Productivity and time utilization, I have tried to understand how people manage their time (at all fronts) and tried to understand what their approaches are. In search of that, I happened to watch an interesting video (http://goo.gl/5ls3j) by +Scott Hanselman. This gave me some ideas on the kind of tools that i can explore and look for. Also I have invested time in finding the right tools to gauge what I do with my system and how my time is spent. I found an efficient app (web/ desktop/ smartdevices) named +RescueTime (free version) which comes with a lot of application which it categorizes as productive, very productive, distracting etc.., and provides analysis on a hourly / weekly and monthly basis. You are allowed to even change the categorization. Interestingly at the start of every week it sends a report of how productive I was last week.  Apart from all these external tools towards managing time, I have started to track down what are the various tasks in hand, prioritize them and gauge how much of time is spent towards each of them. This gives me a feeling of how am doing on a daily basis and where I go wrong towards estimating the time needed.

Fitness

I believe the long hours that I had spent during android month (Yes!! Now am not in the android team and a new dedicated resource has taken over) has taken a toll on my body. I had started feeling painful when holding spoons and plates. There was a dire need for good rest which I did and for the sake of cautiousness I visited doctor and got advised to keep a watch on the timings. This has given a chance for me to resume back my workout stint which I left 2 years back and resumed it with jogging as a start. I am pretty sure not to overdo this as well to end-up in a different issue altogether.

Slippages

For the first time this year, I slipped off my deadlines in my Coursera course on "Introduction to Public speaking" due to pure procrastination. There are few more pending weeks where I can cash-in and take it forward.

Fun and Travel

There were a lot of long weekend opportunities that had come this month and used one of them where I had my experience in casting my Vote and travelling to few trekking cum pilgrimage places like Palani and AlagarKovil.

Overall it has been a month long experimentation whose outcome is to be used in the subsequent months. There is an item on SpeedReading been planned for experimentation next month.

Sounds like I had only been experimenting and not doing any work at all. But, actually most of this has been done outside my work schedule. Its a great deal of effort to give it a try and manage the schedule which I could do it and cherish the experience.

An engaging March

This march had been very engaging in terms of the responsibilities handled with personal and professional front. For a change in this blog wanted to experience the flow of thoughts when it comes to blogging. So, I'm not editing anything to fit the sequence and just going about what comes to mind in terms of March.

I had got my Nexus 5 at the start of this month and since then I have not had my chance to explore it much. Believe it or not, I have not installed even 10 apps since my receipt of it. I used to liaison between my team and the mobility (Mobile UI) team and because of my rapport and expressed aspiration, I was given an opportunity to contribute for my Android UI when one of their resource was on unplanned leave for 3 weeks. Though I din't handle the critical pieces, it was an experience for me to use my android knowledge (whatsoever earned) during my 2 +Coursera courses. To my realization whatever I had learned was not to the fullest and had to struggle to get things working in a proper way. More learning was when it was reviewed and commented which gave me a better understanding on mobile application development. The hardest part of the whole exercise was the timeline. To meet the timeline, I had to stretch which sometimes had called up for sleepless nights. The quite challenging to explore the basic stuffs. It was  activities have been piling and haven't been completed yet which is dragging the efforts and the learning. Hope to bring back the items in shape.

Except for one weekend every other weekend was with family only. The Ugadi weekend was used to the fullest with trips to Mysore and Bangalore local site seeing with family and brother-in-law. Organizing the trip and keeping them on track with followups was challenging and getting everyone to cope up with us is not easy either. Keeping my mom busy with finding a perfect match for me is a challenging task for her either.

March is a month where we end up having a huge share in terms of Income Tax and opportunities for hike and role/grade changes. To my surprise, I was promoted to "Sr. Technical Specialist". I had mentioned my self analysis about my last year performance in the earlier blog for the New Year. The promotion doesn't match my analysis on me but I feel my analysis was with more introspection and true than external perception on my performance. There had been times when I felt very bad that I'm not able to code proper (without much complexity) but considered them as realizations on how it can be done.

The most challenging thing over the month of March along with tight deadlines at office was my availability for the "Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems" course on Android with +Coursera and +Adam Porter. I used to do my assignments during my train travel. The final exams I felt was the easiest but I ended up goofing up with the testing and fixing some of the known bugs due to lack of dedicated time. To my surprise, I could still make it with all assignments and final exams before deadline.

Over this month I had thought of blogging about my experience with Android and +Coursera but dint do it due to my procrastinating behavior I guess. Hope to do it in this month of April. The overall takeaway is that there is still greater scope of improvement with programming and work on it when the opportunity is available.