Personal Update 201702 | 11 February 2017 | Saturday
Greetings,
I hope you’re doing well. Thanks for taking a moment to read my latest update.
Work-Life: More Quality, Less Quantity
In my work-life over the past 30 years, what has always driven me is the desire to help as many people as possible. Not for the sake of greater earnings, but in seeking greater positive impact. In fact, when I get really busy, with so many support requests in a day, I often don’t have time to bill out all my time. There are just too many emails, text messages, phone calls, and other encounters to keep track of and not enough time in the day to generate invoices. So, typically only the more time consuming support calls are billed out.
I’ve rarely said ‘no’ to a support request. During times of peak demand, this means staying up late and cutting back on my personal life to keep up with the needs of others.
I’ve looked at time tracking apps that might help in this regard, and began using one of the best available. Yet, even the most efficient of these creates administrative overhead and a costly drain on time. I found that I’d rather just skip billing people, and move on to help the next person in need.
With this in mind, one of my goals this year is to help fewer people and spend more quality time with each one.
As a result, here’s what I hope to have time for in the year ahead:
- More time for training courses that are free and open to the public on topics such as photography, web design, mobile device best practices, and how to purchase a computer.
- More time for providing one-on-one proactive support, regular maintenance, and personalized training.
- More time on each service call going beyond quick solutions to offer an expanded multi-point check-up.
- More time to offer ‘courtesy’ services for customers such as picking up needed supplies rather than having them do it.
- More time to provide reminders of upcoming meetings, follow-up after service calls, and periodically check-in with customers to see how they are getting along.
- More time to write extensive tech support articles in responses to the questions I’m getting from people — especially when existing online resources are limited or unhelpful.
- More time to write how-to guides such as, how to setup a new Windows 10 computer or Apple computer.
- More time to research, resolve, and document problem solutions. In the past, such articles offer unique resolutions that aren’t found anywhere else, and as such, these articles end up having thousands of readers worldwide.
- More time to do research on a variety of products and write articles that serve as consumer buying guides.
In addition to the tech support related items listed above, I’m also interested in expanding on my consumer advocacy work, photography, music composition, public speaking, and pursuing my wellness goals.
As you can see, there’s a lot I want to bring back into my regular monthly schedule.
Wellness Goals and Strategy
This month I’m expanding my wellness goals. I’ve been committing to a daily workout that includes 20 minutes of strength training, a 20 minute elliptical cardio workout, and about 20 minutes of bike riding. This month, I want to add back into my daily routine a 20 minute morning yoga and meditation practice along with a 20 minute walk-hike each morning. I’m hopeful this additional activity will help me reach my overall wellness goals faster.
For the past few years I’ve been using an Internet-connected scale that measures body weight and body fat. The scale can upload the data to an online service where it can be displayed in table or chart format. However, these systems are becoming less reliable due to massive global hacking of Internet connected devices. There are now delays, sometimes of several days, before data shows up online. This could be due to security countermeasures in place. Whatever the cause, these expensive devices become less useful if the data no longer shows up online in realtime.
This month I’m switching back to using a more sophisticated full-body composition analysis system that measures body weight, percent body fat, percent of body weight that is water, percent body weight that is muscle, BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate), bone density (bone weight), and visceral fat rating. This data is used to calculate overall physical fitness (on a scale from 1-9) as well as Metabolic Age. By collecting this data daily, it’s possible to more precisely map and track progress.
Photography
Each week I post some of my favorite photos from the week in a series of weekly Featured Photos. In recent weeks, these photos have all been taken with my iPhone 7 Plus. In the future, I hope to get back to taking higher quality photos with some of my other cameras.
Thanks!
Many thanks to all of you who keep in touch and provide support for the work I do.
~ Greg
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Origins. For those of you who are new to these monthly personal updates, they began about 17 years ago out of a desire to share from my personal life about topics of lifeways (faith), health, career, finances, relationships, effective living, and activism. This is based on the life map presented on the Resources For Life website.