The past year has been a very agitated year in my career. Looking back at all the things that went or still going on, I want to take a stop and ask to myself, what am I doing? And most importantly, where am I going ? I made many mistakes, but the biggest one being that I have thought about everything but myself.
Looking back
Two years ago I started managing a team to work on complicated projects involving cross collaboration with other companies. As the business and projects grew, the team grew as well and I ended up managing quite a big team by the beginning of the last year. The projects grew in volume and size and the overall workload kept on going higher. I have set goals for the team members, the projects we were working on, and the company. Having clear goals helped me guide the team to deliver on all the projects we worked on, mostly. Motivating the members also being one of my concern, I spent many nights and weekends thinking about what opportunities I could give to my guys, not only for success of the projects but self improvement of each one of them, as well.
A lot of commitment to work, keeping the team focused and motivated, led to good resutls. The problem for me is that I haven’t done anything for myself; no action for self improvement. Although with the team I have achieved a lot, I feel like I haven’t achieved nothing over the last year. I mean, I gave a lot to my company, but what about myself? May be I have gained great experience in working under pressure, processing many things at the same time and in short deadlines. And what??? I still feel like I haven’t moved a step forward after a year. I decided that something needs to change and I am making the necessary adjustments to make this change happen.
What’s next
No matter what project I am working on, I decided to never forget about personal growth. What is required of you to do your job at a high level does not necessarily translate to personal growth. Time flies fast, and I should not allow myself to forget to think about the direction where I am heading to. I like to feel like I learn and grow everyday. This feeling makes me feel alive, confident and helps me be more productive in everything, no matter where I am or which project I work on. Time is limitted and I can’t do many things at the same time. How do I help myself to learn? This is how I intend to change things:
- Completely separate time for work and other activities: I had this bad and unhealthy habit of consuming my energy on work stuffs, no matter where I am. After leaving the office, during week-ends etc … This does not mean that I was always sitting on a desk and working, but my mind was always focused on work related matters. Nobody asked me to, it’s only because of the pressure that I put on myself that led me to this. Did this habit make me more productive? A little I guess, but to tell you the truth, I don’t think it was necessary. I’m changing things. There is a time to concentrate on work, and a time for other things I am interested in. Once I leave the office, I will completely focus on myself.
Find and dedicate myself to side projects: there are many things that I’d like to do. One step at a time, I will involve myself in other projects(not related to work of course). Some of the things I want to do include:
- Photography: I want to master my camera. I’m intersted in nature, and also memorizing the growth of my kids. I think I should go out more with my kids and my camera.
- Programming: I want to master python, golang and javascript. These are the three programming languages I like to work with. Although I know how to use them, I don’t feel like I am more than intermediate level in any of them. I need to invovle myself in challenging projects related to programming.
- Cloud computing: I want to deeply understand what is there now, and where it is heading. There are many cloud providers out there, but my research will focus on Aws, Azure and Alibaba Cloud. The cloud is becoming more and more complicated as many different products are being created by these providers. Can they really push different industries to move their workload to the cloud? I work in this field, it’s interesting and I think that other than what I am doing day to day, there is a lot to learn.
- A lot of reading: I think I am a logical thinker, but can’t produce much with logic only. I need more general knowledge on several topics; it might be management, history, philosophy and IT in general. I will try to read as much as I can. Not ruling out the Japanese mangas too. They help me relax…
It’s also important for me to not forget socializing in real life and meet with old friends from time to time. Anyways, I think the past year has been too much focus on work. I’m going to change that and MAKE MYSELF GREAT AGAIN aka M.M.G.A … That sounds weird!