Just A Little Patience...

-- Off Topic from IMS, Non-Tech Post--

I think I’ve come a long way in the virtue of patience. As a kid (like many I suspect) I was impatient in almost all things. I despised waiting for special days, waiting in line, and waiting for my turn to talk, (Funnily enough I actually wanted to speak up at a younger age….silly me.)

The week has been a test for me in how long I can sit on my hands and not try to do something, anything related to the current project. As we wait for our customer to fix their networking issues in two different spots, it means my work has grinded to a halt. And it feels very weird not having work to do. My greatest fear is that I turn into my father who had zero hobbies outside of work, and was floundering and withering upon retirement. Thankfully I have probably more hobbies than I actually can even financially support so that’s not an issue. (phew.) Still, it is troubling that I feel restless when I’m not edging closer to a work objective. There’s a reason why I decided to take on Grad school…filling those after work blues with something to dedicate hours to just went to further this need. So setting up Idle TCP connections is not something I do well with.

However, as I sit here uncomfortably between training modules it feels as though, I’m…wasting time? It’s bizarre that I feel anxious that I’m not working on my main task at hand. Which is a silly thing to feel objectively, since it’s out of my hands. But the feeling presides nonetheless.

Often I try to bounce around from different things as I work. So in a given hour I could be switching through 3 or 4 items. While on paper that sounds great, but I get into the habit of needing things to do. The mental stimulation of switching between tabs and spreadsheets needs to really slow down. Time management goes with this as well. Setting a block schedule for myself may be next. Having set times for certain tasks and having the patience to fulfill that time slot and then move my focus to another task seems like a good discipline.

Overall my biggest fear is not moving closer to, or improving whatever it is I’m centering as my main objective… The same reason why I have a hard time sitting and meditating, which is something I’ve been told over and over has it’s benefits. The feeling that I should be doing something that has a big clear endgame and not investing time in the longer game is probably the biggest flaw I’ve come to recognize. The patience to wait out the long game and do things to improve slowly, is where this seems to fall down for me. How I even got started in financial investing, where results are not immediate, I can not even tell you. I suppose that has gain that you can physically track and see the progress.

Getting to the point where I can be okay with putting one thing on pause and moving to other items that may not have big results and a big ‘pay off’ is the lesson this week. The book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear is one that I’ve read recently that absolutely supports this idea. (No this is not a cleverly disguised paid promotion.) So as I prep for next work week, hoping for work to get my idling hands back into the thick of it, I need to remember all roads lead to Rome, and not whipping the horse will still get me there.