Thinking is hard to do, doing makes it hard to think

-

If there is one principal criticism I would have of my job at the moment, it would be that I do very little thinking at all. Everything I do at work is basically and simply "doing". I feel that I have lost the art of concentration, of battling with difficult problems, of really thinking things through.
Photo by Karola Riegler photography Flickr

What doesn't help at all at work is that there are too many distractions for me to work effectively. In an attempt to remedy that, I have taken to leaving the phone on its charging station, set to silent, finding an empty meeting room, keeping my email client unopened focussing on a particular task for an hour or two. It seems to work quite nicely, so I'll keep that up as far as I can (or until I get my own office). But the basic problem remains that what I am doing involves very little analytical thinking at all.

I am positive that it a good thing to accept back some strain on the brain, something not felt since university, and that discipline. So, I when I am not just wandering about the site at work looking for meeting rooms (just wandering usually results in me thinking of a solution to a particular problem) I have taken to doing some coding.

The wonderful Code Academy is a great starting point. It teaches JavaScript via a series of little lessons and projects that get progressively more difficult. It is also a bit trendy with those "gamification"badges and points that you can send or tweet to the world.

I am still at the stage of learning the syntax, but already the challenges have got me thinking harder than any problem that I face at work. Clearly, the stakes are much lower than with my largely trivial but business-critical issues. But I am finding it rewarding to do, and in a way that is significantly beyond the scope of those badges.

It remains to be seen if I can maintain the mental loads of coding alongside work, my blogging, and my music and my family, but it's just about doable at the moment, so we will see. As for when I'll barrel on into Project Euler...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Brexit FMEA

-
Image
The Brexit pre-mortem: BFMEA Of all the engineering tools that I have encountered, the one that spans the widest spectrum of respect and scorn, hope and despair is the FMEA , the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis. Developed by the US military and NASA and gradually adopted by the automotive industry from the 1970s onwards, it is intended to highlight things that could go wrong before they do; it's also a way of collecting and tracking the evidence (models, test reports, etc) that shows that the nuts and bolts have been proven before putting them on a rocket - or, indeed, jettisoning a country out of the European Union. At its heart, the FMEA is a "what if?" analysis. Other methods are available, like the Potential Problem Analysis from Kepner-Tregoe. But I'm automotive, and the FMEA is a requirement in our field, so I've sketched up how a BFMEA (Brexit Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) might have been constructed and eventually look like. W
Read more

So nearly no longer Inbetween

-
Back in February I posted about the challenges of being between jobs . Now, following a sequence of online first and in-person second interviews and a remarkably tough choice between two very different offers from very different companies, I'm just a few days (including a bank-holiday weekend) from starting my new job at Pepperl+Fuchs . It's an exciting prospect, producing an intriguing mix of thoughts, feelings and excitement that I would like to just briefly reflect on here. On a purely practical level, the nerdy part of me is most interested in the commute. I'm genuine in wanting to continue to avoid using the car to get to work, having commuted by bike for much of my career. Cycling directly to work is alas no longer a regular option. I tried the ride the other day, and it took me an hour and a half to get there. The route along the river is actually quite pleasant, but while I'm sure I'll be able to improve the timing, it's still long. My main mode for the
Read more

Dropping drafts

-
I'm a pretty good sketcher of words and ideas, but a terrible completer of posts: making sure that the ideas make sense and connect properly, trying to get the wording and the feel right, trying to draw conclusions and lessons from whatever experiences or thoughts I am trying to describe; sometimes even deciding which service to post things on (a ridiculous situation, in all honesty) - that's all hard work, and sometimes I just don't feel that I have the energy to complete it. As a result, my pool of drafts begins to overflow and prevents me from really finishing. So, in the spirit of draining the pool and refreshing my perspectives, here's a dump of my most current drafts, cross-posted on Blogger and on my Micro.blog instance! Rethinking which services I should keep, and why, is something for another day. A review of Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before created 2023-09-06 This is a most typically Umberto Eco book, of an unknown, uncertain narrator reconstru
Read more