Author: grahamchastney

Manefesto

Sand Sculptur in FranceMy manifesto for this blog is to talk about the things that I feel personally. I run another blog http://oak-grove.typepad.com/oakgrove/ where I talk to my work things but I wanted somewhere different where i relayed family things and my personal feelings on things. Although I don’t talk about my work directly on the other site it could be linked to my work. This is all personal stuff.

Feeling Brighter

I’m feeling a lot brighter today and definitely more focussed. Decided last night to try a few days without any caffeine. I have noticed in the past that my body can only take so many days drinking coffee without a bit of detox.

I have also made a decision on my work and to get some of the jobs that are currently annoying me out of the way. Clean the decks a bit.

Aspirations

One of the things that I regularly do is to sit and ask myself – what are my aspirations. 

From a work perspective the aspirations seems to fall into two camps:

  • Achieve more, do more interesting things.
  • Do something completely different.
I’m not going to get into what those thoughts actually lead to in this post, but I am asking myself ‘how do I get here?’ What is it that makes me want to re-evaluate my current status. So every time I’ve found myself in this position recently I have tried to assess what are the factors that got me here.
  • Monday mornings – it’s generally a Monday morning thing. I have found this amazing, because I wouldn’t have ever said that my mood is different on different days. I tend to be a fairly level headed person but clearly Monday’s make a difference. So if you are wanting to get me to do something new Monday may be a good day.
  • Frustration – that is another personal study ‘what makes me frustrated?’ The answer is strongly related to my level of ‘trappedness’ at work. I rarely feel trapped at home because I have a great family. I regularly feel dumped on/used/abused at work. I am clearly in a position where my current skills are too valuable to let me leave a particular project or task, but I do not regard projects that use my current skills as interesting. I am definitely not someone who enjoys redoing the same thing over and over.
What is clear is that I rarely feel this way because I feel I am slipping behind, or at the other end of the spectrum because I see something that would be great to do. Sometimes these things do happen, but rarely.