Look at your last 5 phone calls.
Look at your last 5 text conversations.
Look at the last 5 books you read.
Look at the last 5 events on your calendar.
Look at the last 5 podcasts you listened to.Are you putting in the work to become the person you want to be?
Given yesterday’s bleak post I figured this might be a good exercise for me.
Last 5 phone calls: I don’t even have the phone app on my homescreen, I use it so infrequently. Last 5 calls were all incoming:
- Pingdom. Our application server at work went down yesterday.
- Car dealer. Reminding me about my appointment this morning.
- Therapist. Calling to schedule.
- Carissa.
- Therapist. Ditto except the available times didn’t work for me.
Last 5 texts:
- Friend to schedule bike ride.
- Boss to discuss website outage.
- Pingdom. They text and call.
- Brother-in-law’s brother sending me a video of my sister operating a Bobcat.
- Friend to discuss nothing in particular.
Last 5 books: this hasn’t changed much since my last post about the books I was reading, unfortunately.
- Saga
- How to Talk About Videogames
- Little Brother
- Y the Last Man
- Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread
I’m concurrently reading quite a few books at the moment: _why’s poignant guide to ruby, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, The No Asshole Rule, Finite and Infinite Games. And there are quite a few in the queue.
Last 5 events on your calendar:
- Call with one of the cofounders of Plato. As an early adopter, they schedule a call with me every so often to learn about my experience and show me potential new features.
- My car appointment this morning.
- Bike ride yesterday.
- Therapy appointment yesterday.
- Plato call with a mentor Wednesday.
I took Wednesday through Friday off this week, so besides the site outage yesterday it’s been a quiet few days.
Last 5 podcasts you listened to:
I don’t know what all this says about me. I don’t regret any of the time spent on any of the above, so I guess maybe that’s good? (The site outage was unpleasant but since it was unexpected I don’t really think about it with regret, just part of life.)
Picard management tip: Remember what you liked to play with as a child. Identify the larger, grown-up versions of those toys at work.
I most remember Car Wars, G.I. Joe and a video game where you programmed the AI of an autonomous tank. So I’m pretty close on that last one. (Insert disclaimer here about the fact all three involve violence of some kind.)
G.I. Joe comic image from Compulsive Collector.
And speaking of G.I. Joe, because it’s still awesome years later (NSFW)…