1A. Assess your habits from week 2: how did you spend your time this past week? What was effective in your habits? What could be more effective? What steps will you take to make that happen?
This week, I have had a bit of trade off. With the project and mid mods coming up, I have definitely been taking less breaks for myself and have caught myself in multiple occassions working for hours at a time, even with a Toggl timer. However, the trade off has been that when I do take time off, it has been much more fulfilling. I have been pushing myself during workouts again, reading and exercising all hemispheres of my brain. I have felt much happier with the quality, now I just have to make sure that I am giving myself the proper amount off.
Effective
- I have been waking up earlier which leaves me more time to prepare for the day. Recently, I have noticed that the earlier I wake up and have time to relax and prepare for my day, the more efficient my work is in the day. After learning this, I have been working on staying up late less and giving my relaxing time in the morning rather than the evening time.
- Reading and applying the changes that I have learned about has been enlightening for me. It feels like I am much more willing to find my improvements through action as opposed to 'waiting for it to come to me' which has been a positive change. Naturally, there are some things that will take time for my subconscious and my brain to make the connections. The process can be sped up tremendously with the correct effort.
Things to work on
- Getting back to Qigong. During break times, I have started doing Yoga exercises and stretches consistently now which has been very nice. In the evening time, I have been doing my harder workouts and that still leaves my mornings open. With the new habit that I have discovered of being more efficient waking up earlier, it would be beneficial to learn how to balance 'time to mess around' with 'time to empower myself' before the day begins.
- Staying up too late. This is a really bad habit for me to stay up until around midnight. Usually, 5 - 7 hours of sleep is enough for me. With how much I am pushing my mental capacity in Turing, the usual 5 - 7 hours is not enough anymore. This is something that I need to compensate for, especially when paired with wanting to wake up earlier.
Steps to make it happen
- Setting a reminder on my phone for Qigong time just before meditation time. I think those 2 will pair very nicely together.
- Forcing myself to go to bed when the sleep time on my phone goes off rather than ignoring it.
Not much to reflect on with habits this week. Feel like most of it is going well and have been staying with a much more consistent schedule.
1B. Reflect on how you’ve spent your time so far at Turing to gauge your engagement and energy:
When have you been excited, focused, and enjoyed your work? When have you felt bored, restless, or unhappy? When do you feel energized in your work? When is your energy drained?
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When have you been excited, focused and enjoyed your work?
- I get the most excited when I am doing work that interacts between front end and back end. Since I have some programming experience, mostly revolving around the back end with c#, PHP and MySQL, it is really exciting to work with them after focusing on becoming specialized with JavaScript through Turing. The recent lessons doing fetch and promises has been really exciting for me!
- I am the most focused and enjoy my work when I am learning something new and being pushed to my limits. I think this has stemmed from when I disabled myself climbing without climbing gear. During that time, I had to re-learn how to walk and felt very static over the rehab period of 1.5 years. This has helped push me to new heights rather than settling for the mundane. It was a great experience in my life.
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When have you felt bored, restless or unhappy?
- When I am applying something that I know works, however don't completely understand. By nature, I am a perfectionist, however this is toned down very low when applying myself to programming because it is more of a hold back than an asset in most situations for me. During the course of work, if there is something that I feel like I haven't completely understood, I will go back to make sure that I can understand it completely and know how to apply it to other situations.
- Progress is something that is very important for me and when I feel static and ungrowing is when.
- I feel bored something when it feels like I'm doing the same thing over and over. HTML and CSS, as much as I love them and have worked with them for a long time, can get very repetitive and annoying for me sometimes. Especially, when things you make a change but it doesn't display right away (due to cookies) and you think the change made nothing. It can be a very tedious process to learn how to test it correctly.
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When do you feel energized in your work?
- I feel energized when I am making progress. Progress is something that is very important for me and when I feel static and ungrowing is when my nervousness kicks in.
- I feel really energized when I know that the work that I am dedicated myself to will affect a larger audience in a positive way. Whether it is teammates, employers or clients, it resonates very well with my pairin qualities and pushes me to perform above my normal dedication level when it is just myself.
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When is your energy drained?
- I feel drained when doing monotonous tasks over and over again. Mostly just working with HTML/CSS trying to get things on the screen 'perfect'. While there are monotonous tasks that I have run into with JS, this has never bothered me.
- When I stay up too late multiple nights in a row and have to push myself through the day that all of the accumulated lack of sleep hits me on.
2A. Setting up habits and routines to make time for the job search this module:
Block out time on your calendar this week to work on your job search. When will you make this happen? How will you hold yourself accountable to this? What activities will you focus on during this time this week? What outcomes do you hope to reach by the end of this week because of these activities?
I did my job finding activities on Friday this past week. Currently, since I am still collecting unemployment while attending Turing and doing small jobs on the side, I am working with an umemployment specialist. While the jobs they offer directly are not the best, I have access to many jobs inside the unemployment network that are related to programming and software engineering.
Another thing that I did this week was start to write recommendations to others in my cohort and build them up as well. While I have only written two of them so far, it has been a start and something I plan to build on. The last PD meeting had some great information on networking and becoming more prominent on LinkedIn. With my previous experience in software development and recommendations that I accumulated from that job, I plan to use that to my advantage much more.
Last thing that I plan to do is to develop a github pages that I can use for my portfolio. Right now, I do have a website that I have more for freelancing, however it tells more about my business than who I am as a person. Having the two link to each other and remaining separate will be more ideal. This way I can show case to potential employers who I am and what I do.
2B. Applying wayfinding to using job search resources
I have currently saved one job. It is a software developer for Ent Banking using their CRM software. While it looks promising, the pay is around 55k. My family banks with Ent and is a company that resonates with me, however I only saved it instead of applying right away for it because this week I did not put in too much effort into doing the job search. Between studying for early mid mods, finish the paired-project and getting ready for the group project, I simply didn't invest much time and energy into it. Now that this week has calmed down, I plan to do a lot more for it.
There are also 2 projects for freelance work that I am finishing up. The first one is for an alarm company here in Colorado Springs. Rebuilding their website to get them off of the Wix platform and start ranking more naturally and organically with search engines. The other project has been one that has been off and on since March building a shopping website for a local supplier that makes house decorations out of stained glass. Been really excited about this one for a long time and it is more challenging than your typical website and hoping to finally make some more progress on it.