Lose the baggage

It has been 36 hours since I submitted my first CMU assignment, a software business characterization paper on Compuware Corporation. I must say even though I wrote it, it doesn't look like my writing. Not that it's great, but in fact it doesn't look anything like what I can usually manage to put together in my spare time in a week.

Although I don't consider the experience nearly as intense as serial all-nighters in University of Waterloo to crank out a new compiler or an OS, one thing is surely different: Before the assignment I barely had any time, even for my other responsibilities. Once I undertook it, my performance in other areas somehow improved.

I work 40 hours a week, spend 20 hours on the Software Management masters program and about 20 hours with my girlfriend Abby. I take all of those three commitments seriously. Figure in some sleep and commute times, and you're left with a negative balance of hours. In the one week since the orientation and leading up to the assignment, I was very stressed out. I've been watching my productivity fly in the low altitudes at work, and I've been feeling less energetic. When I met with my assignment team in the middle of the week, I was very anxious not to let them down. I was the proverbial cardio patient on a stress test treadmill, watching my own abnormal vitals.

Then I had a dream, right after sending out my paper for peer review and crashing on my bed at 3:30am on Thursday night. I dreamt in code: something that only happens to me after a whole day of prototyping, not a whole day of investigating the business model of a company. Almost in a state of trance, the best solution of a complex design problem at work was standing before my eyes so clearly that I thought I could take notes in my sleep. The anxious thoughts of "I'm not doing anything worthwhile with my spare time" had washed away. Because I was spending my spare time performing in other roles to the best of my ability, my subconscious was no longer competing for my attention on personal growth - I could focus on actual work.

Today I got more done than I have in one day in a long time.

According to First things First by Steven Covey, When you feel stressed out under a lot of responsibilities, most of the time a big part of the problem is that (1) you are not balancing your roles, and (2) you are focusing on the urgent and not the important. In the context of my career, the urgent has been to keep up with today's newest technologies, something that drains a lot of attention and energy. Additionally, I've often neglected my commitments as a friend, a partner, a focused employee and a person, to instead focus on the one role I have felt most passionate about: "entrepreneur". The image that comes to mind when I think about an entrepreneur is the Wright brothers' first functional flying airplane. And one thing stands out about the plane: It sure was flying light.

You can't fly to new heights with a lot of baggage. The roles you have not fulfilled are the baggage hanging from your shoulders. If you feel you need to be somewhere else, go there now. You will come back and do what you're doing a lot better, a lot faster and with a lot more satisfaction.

In my case, I have my 7pm-10pm planned out for me, everyday for the next two years. I'm lucky I'm going through it with 40 other people.