As I wrote at the beginning of the week, my productivity was dealt a blow. Not major, but a lot of minor annoyances have been heaped up.

I’m on crutches still for another 3 weeks and in a rigid brace. It’s very difficult to work and get around in life with a straight leg. Maybe difficult isn’t the best word. Annoying and frustrating are better descriptors.

I was really struggling to stay productive and was dealing with negative thoughts. I drafted up a list of ideas to try and I’m revisiting them now.

Two days before last Christmas, through no fault of my wife’s, I slipped and fell walking through the house. Seriously it wasn’t her fault, I just like to blame someone other than myself. I was just walking, but immediately something felt wrong.

I kept delaying looking into it and would try to run through the pain. It wasn’t working. I eventually gave up on running temporarily and started down the path of figuring it out. I thought I maybe just tore some cartilage and that was the problem. The doctor who referred me to the orthopedist thought this, too.

Once surgery was started, it was apparent that the damage was significantly more severe. There was cartilage damage through the entire knee and in one spot no cartilage at all. The treatment is really fascinating. It’s called microfracture surgery, where holes are drilled so bone marrow seeps out and some replacement cartilage grows in place. It was a surprise to wake up to, but hey, a full recovery? Excellent! Except…

I recently wrote about writing tasks for tomorrow so I have clarity. That has been really good, but I quickly ran into organizational problems. I was storing them in a Wiki and that just doesn’t scale.

For tracking work on TDP, I’ve been using JIRA. JIRA gets a pretty bad rap and I don’t really understand why. Sure, it isn’t free and the pricing scales up a bit strangely but it’s easy. JIRA OnDemand works very well and it’s worth $10 a month (until we get to the 11th account!)

However, JIRA doesn’t have any organization support for this concept of ticket stacks. It’s a short-coming that can be addressed through a few different ways. I most likely will end up writing a script to gather and organize these, but for now I came up with a simpler way.

While I’m writing about doing this in JIRA, it isn’t JIRA specific. Anything here could be adapted into any reasonable ticketing system. A reasonable ticketing system is one with custom fields and search.

This is entirely anecdotal. I am writing this from my own observations on how I feel, plus in discussing these matters over the last few years with my friends and peers. There is likely several studies that prove I’m foolish and wrong.

Brand identity is a big business. Large companies routinely spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in maintaining their brand. This is because of consumer trust. When I walk into a Starbucks I know exactly what to expect. Starbucks protects their identity and I trust Starbucks to deliver what Starbucks has delivered in the past.

Sometimes branding is larger than a single corporation. People buy American, German or Japanese cars just by the virtue of what country hosts the headquarters. Even when the cars may be made in Mexico, Kentucky or Canada.

I write software and part of that requires a lot of reading. Every day I try to read something about my craft and how to improve, but lately I’ve realized that I’m more focused on the finished product. Subsequently, the books I read are more about products and less about code. I don’t care so much about the code anymore. I really just care about the product.

I need to be cautious, though. Focusing on any single part without respecting the whole can lead to inferior products. Especially not understanding the history and heritage, understanding how I happen to be building this specific product right now.

My wife and I were having a discussion about the book Outliers. She was trying to explain a point and I wasn’t getting it. Her thoughts were disjointed, trying to draw together several parallels and I struggled to keep up. I ended up drawing my own lines, dancing around her ideas and forming my own. I didn’t understand what she wanted to convey.

Lyndon B. Johnson performed what was called “The Treatment”. He barraged the poor listener with a steady stream of high intensity words and ideas. He would convince the other person through fear and inundation. He was very successful using this technique.

Lyndon Johnson giving “The Treatment” to Richard Russel

But he didn’t educate anybody with it. A barrage of information that nobody can keep up with. You can quickly and easily overload someone by providing too much information at a time. Too many ideas. They don’t learn, they give up.

I have a hard time sleeping. When I lay down, my mind starts to race. I think of all the things I did. I think of all the things I need to do and want to do. I think of things I could have done better. I’m not unique in this, a lot of people have this problem.

Before my wife entered my life, I cycled through many inefficient strategies. I would watch the same movie every night to fall asleep. I would listen to various white noise generators. They all worked, sort of. And then one day my wife discovered that it’s pretty much impossible for me to stay awake when I get a foot massage. She’s a massage therapist. Talk about a match made in heaven.

However, that doesn’t help the overall sense of why I can’t sleep. It treats the symptom (and does so very, very well) but not the cause. Although to some degree it does because I have lucid dreams and think about specific problems. I still have to know what those problems are before hand, though. If I can clearly identify what I’m trying to accomplish, it helps. But now I have to know what I’m trying to do.

I haven’t written here for a few days. I have good reason for it, sort of. I was pretending I was a spoiled princess. I had some friends in town, so obviously it was hard to maintain my goals.

Foolish people let me do this!

No problem, I know how to handle this. I revised my expectations and it worked fine.

There’s the catch-up, though.

Yesterday I had a great yoga session. The teacher leads the class in a way that is very compatible for me. I really enjoy my time and leave the class feeling fantastic.

I leave feeling mentally alert, physically tired but amazingly energetic. It’s a really great experience and the feeling lasts the better part of the day. I know that my experience is very different than other people’s experiences there.

Today I noticed a woman in the class struggling right from the start. I watched her demeanor change for the worse. She started with eagerness but then the willingness to push herself faded away. She was not tenacious. I was very curious to see how my favorite yoga teacher would react.

She didn’t. She moved on.

My mom, like all other moms out there, taught me a very nice quote:

If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

This dovetails nicely with:

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.