I was listening to a snippet of The Donald this morning. His pearl of wisdom for today was that in order to not be overwhelmed by the insane amount of information available in the world, to only focus on the part that deals with the top 20% of your priorities. I found that interesting in two ways. First, in my current position as a coordinator. My team is responsible for over 40 different applications running on various platforms, many of them critical. Obviously, I can’t have one or even two persons responsible for the entire list and thus have the team broken down by expertise and categories with a lot of backup support and x-training to keep everyone fresh. That makes sense and allows you to spread your support factor risk over the entire team. By that same token, and the part which sometimes bothers me, I can’t be able to intimately know each of those applications on top of my other administrative tasks/ duties. That’s nigh-impossible unless I were to put in 80+ hour weeks! And thus, I have to concentrate my knowledge/efforts on understanding the overviews of the apps plus how they interact and the platforms they affect. And to be on the safe side, I also keep abreast of which servers the critical apps are on. It sometimes bothers me to not know enough about all the apps but I also know it’s not do-able.
On the second interesting part, I think about the time spent on hobbies and such. Perhaps that 20% rule also applies to focusing on the top 20% of what’s important in your life. Right now, to me, that’s been and continues to be my family. I tend to focus on my wife and kids to the utmost of my time. After that comes the upkeep of my home, staying in touch with my family, reading, and writing. That, more than anything, explains why as much as I need to write, I’m not making a full-time career out of it. As much as I’m obsessed with writing and creating, I’m much more obsessed with my wife and kids. I can live without writing, I can’t live without them. But, and this is where it gets tricky, am I giving so much of my time to them that I’m letting that other creative part of me wither? Ah, sometimes I do believe I am. Other times I’m convinced I’m not and that I don’t have the urge, the muse, egging me on. However, I am making a more concentrated effort into addressing all that and making time to keep that flame going. Since summer seems the best time to do this in, we’ll have to see how it continues to develop…