Just Open the Dang Laptop

So at the moment, I am overwhelmed by the number of things I need to learn.  In the past few months, I've switched into a DevOps role which is pretty much a new career for me.

As a developer, I'm used to needing to train up on things to stay current, but this is different.  This is training to get a foundation.  The work is rewarding, but the amount of study I feel I need is truly overwhelming.  I know if I did 2 hours of training tonight it would barely make a dent.  This has led to a bit of procrastination on my part.  I'm not sure if it is paralysis by analysis or what.  I just know I'm not moving forward as fast as I want.

Of course, I know that it's not any one of these hours that makes the difference, but the collection of all of them that will have an impact.  Just as I know that working on this one blog post won't make me a prolific writer.

I'm sick of having this fight with myself so I'm trying out something new to get in a habit of productivity.

So I can't remember where I heard this, but the idea is that if you want to start flossing your teeth you don't set the goal of flossing your teeth, but rather set the goal of flossing one tooth.  It's too small of a task for you to shirk it (unlike flossing all your teeth).  So on a similar note, I've set the goal to "Just Open the Dang Laptop" I don't have any goal of writing a blog post or taking a training course.  Just open the laptop.

I'm hoping this process of creating a habit by making the goal trivially small will pay off.  Check out this FastCompany article on a similar note.

As I start writing this post it is actually day two of having this goal.  On day one I didn't even open the laptop.  I chickened out.  Day two rolled around and I figured I had better crack it open.

I will most likely not be posting to this blog every day, but hopefully, I'll get more going since I'll at least have this screen in front of me more often.

Missing: Where did I go?

As many bloggers do, I started out fast, but then started to fade in my blogging.  If you happened to follow me, my apologies.

I have a list of excuses as long as my arm, but the bottom line is I had other things that were more important to me that I needed to work on.

So here's some of what's new.

• I have another child now for a total of three.
• I bought a new house and moved cities.
• I spent about a year as an iOS developer.
• I was a dev mentor to 2 very talented interns for about 9 months.
• I started being a Scrum Master.
• I am now back to being a .NET developer.
• I'm also looking to get much more involved with DevOps at my organization.

This is not an exhaustive list, but these are some of the big things that happened. It has been an interesting break, and I really do intend to get back to writing some posts.

In retrospect, I think I missed out on some good opportunities to share (and document for myself) a lot of the experiences and lessons that I learned.  With this new set of changes I plan on sharing the lumps I am taking and the things I am learning.  It might not fit the "Coach" style, but hey coaches learn too.

For instance, I am very new to DevOps and at this point, I don't even know where to start.  So, for now, my game plan is to be ambitious and take every assignment opportunity I can get and to read and take training as voraciously as I can.

I have a good number of post that I had drafted but didn't finish during my break so I look forward to finally wrapping some of them up.

If you are reading this, thank you for taking the time.