Things I did today

I woke up at 6am after a restful 8 hours of sleep. Read for a bit, installed SQL Express on my laptop, ate a bowl of Raisin Bran, met up with a friend for coffee, called another friend, then came home to start the exercises in my Exam Reference book. The first exercise went well - it only used tempdb. The second exercise used a database called WideWorldImporters. I assumed it was a sample database that one can download through some Microsoft site. Found it! https://github.com/Microsoft/sql-server-samples/releases/tag/wide-world-importers-v1.0 Yep. Downloaded WideWorldImporters-Full.bak and set to work restoring the backup to my machine. I'd done that at work plenty of times. Heck, I can just use the GUI if I'm feeling lazy. GUI it is!!! The operating system returned the error '3(The system cannot find the path specified.)' while attempting 'CreateDirectoryW' on '\?\D:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL15.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\DATA\WideWorldImporters_2

I got the kitchen cleaned up, enjoyed reading, did all the laundry including bedding and towels, went to vote, bought some canned foods and water - slowly building up my Coronavirus stash, called my mother and caught up with a few of my friends. Busy! I managed to sleep well, though, so I felt good all throughout the day. I ate one of my favorite new desserts - I slice up an apple, get a whole wheat tortilla, spread peanut butter on it, layer the apple slices on the peanut butter, then sprinkle cinnamon on it. It's so delicious! 95 calories for the apple, 50 for the tortilla, and 300 for the 3 tablespoons of peanut butter. Not a light snack, but certainly gets rid of any sweet cravings! Tomorrow, I'll be visiting with some friends, and then installing SQL Express on my machine so I can do the exercises in the Exam Reference book. I'm looking forward to my newly clean bed!

Two nights ago, I got to sleep just well, but a neighbor's car alarm went off at 1:26am, and they didn't shut it off for 15 minutes. I was well awake by then, and managed to get to sleep around 3am. Last night, I went to bed at 9:30. but didn't fall asleep until 1:30am. Since I had to get to work early, there was no sleeping in today. I worked hard for the finalization of exam materials to go to the production server, and that pretty well wiped me out. I've just been sitting on the couch, reading, since I got home from work. I've not been doing well with my timeboxing and will need to try again to refine - maybe I need to read the rest of Indistractable! Tomorrow feels like a day full of promise, and sleeping in. And piano, and the gym. But tonight, I'm exhausted and going to turn in.

Chapter 13, Ask the Critical Question This chapter discusses the importance of deciding what external triggers are useful or not when considering work and interruption. It follows the morning of a freelance marketing consultant who had a great idea, but lost it when she was interrupted by a tweet notification and text, then once she had picked up the phone, she noticed more distracting notifications that pulled her further away from what she expected to get done during the morning. Eyal then shares some information from BJ Fogg of Tiny Habits. The Fogg Behavior Model shows that for a Behavior to begin, there must be Motivation, Ability and a Trigger. If a person with the motivation and ability to tackle a behavior doesn't get a trigger, the behavior never starts. External triggers can be helpful or not at all, depending on the habit you're intending to build or continue. My smartphone use has gotten out of hand, so much so that I will hallucinate that blinking LED light for

Chapter 12, Sync with Stakeholders at Work This chapter focuses on how to schedule tasks and create expectations of communication, boundaries and repeated deliverables. I found this chapter not terribly helpful, as I often get interrupted by others, not just through email, but by IM and in person and sometimes shouting across cubicles for tasks that they're thinking of. I would almost need to be a "mean" person to get them to change their behavior, and because of my department, I am in a position of helping others with actual immediate tasks as well as tasks that are just on top of their list. It is difficult to discern which is which until they show up to interrupt, which defeats the purpose anyway. Between being a people pleaser that always want to have the right answer at the right time for all things, I like solving immediate problems when my workload is light. It's only when my workload is heavy that when the problems that could have waited become irritating.

In the middle of the night on Saturday night, I reached for a pillow that I had moved at some point, and ended up pulling one of my abdominal muscles. Instant agony! It felt like someone was cutting through my stomach from my navel down with a hot knife. I stayed curled up for a long time, as moving just allowed for more pain. I ended up in that position for as long as I could stand it, then the pain (in my shoulder and knee) from not moving was great enough that rolling over would be less painful than staying in the same spot. I spent most of Sunday just reclining on the couch, as I couldn't sit up in a chair and couldn't stand up straight when I walked. I decided to work from home today just to make sure I don't reinjure anything, and just sat in my chair, since I'd gotten better enough to at least do that. By the afternoon, I was feeling mostly fine and was standing up straight. I'll be going back to work tomorrow, and hope that my abdomen won't do anything

Chapter 11, Schedule Important Relationships Eyal discusses making sure people are continually nurturing their relationships with others. It's important to have friends that make your life richer. He has a core group of friends that get together every so often, and has a topic to discuss so they don't just discuss work and the weather. They make it a point to always get together on a particular day, not require much money, and remove barriers that others could see as obstacles to making an appearance. I think that I do a good job making sure I am seeing some friends, but I just listed out the friends I regularly contact, how often, and for how long we get together. I then went through the list to decide if I need to increase or decrease the frequency, and then looked at how much time I need to allot over a month. After that, I sent up a reminder for myself to reach out to friends and set up a date and time to get together. This way, I'll be reminded that I must be mindf