Last week while commuting home I spent about seven minutes outlining how I want to spend my days, and the aforementioned paddle re-affirmed the importance of vacations. I want to write down and publish these daily goal averages. I am also interested in putting together a web-app, perhaps for the sidebar of this site, for tracking my progress in accomplishing these goals.

The Daily Grind & Goals

• π. The dog deserves two hours every day of my time. This includes walks, grooming, trips to dog parks, and feeding. This is part of the approximately 12 hours of every day that he is able to enjoy my company.
• Reading. I want four hours a day.
• Writing. One hour a day would keep me happy. I may look to increase this.
• Roller-hockey. One hour a day. I currently do two hours per week. Two more two hour sessions and I will be there.
• Coding/programming. I need to do about two hours a day between this blog and other projects and interests.
• Snowboarding. I want to get the average to about one hour a day, so 365 hours a year, or about 40 days on the slopes. Good luck.
• Surfing. Same as above, one hour per day average.
• Fly-fishing. Also one hour per day average.
• Dinning. Until I can get everything IV, I read that we take about two hours every day to eat.
• Bathroom/HABA/etc. Sources say two hours, I think I am down to one.
• Kayaking. Lets add an hour per day.
• Sleep. Sadly, eight or so hours per day.
• Teaching. Last, but certainly not least, I love to teach. Especially technology, where I have the most knowledge and experience. One hour a day would work. (I need tenure somewhere, clearly!)

Some of these things have potential overlap. I can fly-fish from a kayak. I do a lot of skateboarding as part of workout time with π. Lets add up the numbers, though, and see if this is in any way realistic. I count 25 hours in my goals. Not great, but getting there. Any chance on lengthenging the day? Probably not.

None of the above are things which will pay my bills unless I do them so regularly that they become jobs. So how do I reconcile these goals with the reality of existence here and now? I can get paid for kayaking. Programming gets me paid. I could teach snowboarding, and surfing in short order. With some training, I could work as a fly-fishing guide.

This serves as a starting point. ToDo: build a tool that lets me check off the hours I spend doing these things so I can track how close I am getting to these goals.

Why am I writing this? I have conducted nearly 100 interviews in the last four years with college students seeking on-campus student employment and engaged in a dozen interviews myself in the last ten years. I am not a job counselor and have no qualifications other than the aforementioned experiences.

Interviewing is basically a timed oral essay. The nice thing is that you can prepare for it. You are intimately familiar with the subject matter: you, and are better qualified to speak to your strengths, skills, knowledge, and goals than any other living thing. Identify your goals. Know what you want. Understand that you are marketing yourself. Keep your marketing message in mind.

We all learn how to write essays in high school. Here are the three steps to creating your interview essay:

1. Have a thesis. Your thesis is, “I am the best person for this job”.
2. Support your thesis. A week before you start interviewing, write down the three strongest reasons that you are the best person for the job. Use positive examples of contributions you would make.
3. Present a strong conclusion. Just like that high school essay, a concluding sentence or two that summarizes your thesis and supporting points is crucial. These should be the last words out of your mouth, and it should end with something along the lines of, “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to interview with you.”

Other key things to remember are:

• Take notes. My mind races during an interview. I will often say things that I want to emphasize again later on, or think of something unrelated to the interview that I absolutely need to follow up on. By jotting it down, you appear to be ready for the professional world, and you can address the topic later.
• Neatness counts. Clip your fingernails, tie your shoelaces, etc.
• Dress for the job you ultimately want. Interviewing to clean stables but want to be a jockey? Dress like a jockey. Interviewing to work in the mail room but want to be the CEO? Dress like a CEO.
• Interviewing is like sex, voting, and retiring. Do it early and do it often. Very few people care about your motives. You don’t have to accept every job offer, but do accept every interview offer. (I do not suggest that you accept every offer of sex! Use discretion. Protect yourself. Do accept every offer to vote or retire.)
• Practice, practice, practice. Try out new approaches in interviews you don’t need. Have a great joke about nervous interviewees? Don’t try it when up for your dream job! Do unleash it when interviewing for the burger-flipping position.
• Be nervous. Its okay, really, to be nervous. If you can channel that nervousness into positive energy, do it. Remember to breathe evenly, and visualize something that makes you happy, whether its a coral reef or an image of the first pay-check.

Other good hits on this topic: “A glimpse and a hook“. This fellow has some good advice. I disagree with his thoughts on cover letters. Even if no one ever reads your cover letter, writing a clear, concise cover letter is one of the best ways to prepare for an interview. Write it, rewrite it. I suggest that you should spend twice as much time on your cover letter as you CV. Questions to ask yourself during the process are:

1. How well does my CV reflect what I am saying in my cover letter?
2. Can I excise verbage from the cover letter. (Translation: Write a draft, take a red pen and cross out any and all extra words!)
3. Keep it brief. In “A glimpse and a hook”, the writer emphasizes that his opinions are formed within 30 seconds. I don’t want to read the gory details. I want those later.
4. Provide just enough detail to allow me to formulate good questions. A cover letter is a balancing act. When I interview, I need something to get the conversation going. If your cover letter and CV answer every question, I might not even bring you in for an interview!
5. Conform to standards. Read and internalize Strunk & White. (This is advice I should follow.)

In a future post, I will discuss being the interviewer, and the techniques that I have found effective for identifying candidates I would be happy to work with and who would contribute substantially to core mission.

Last weekend, the crank pulley on my car fell off on a rural road in the cell-phone-service-free region of the southern Catskills late on a bitter-cold night. (Heroes) Jay, Jed, and Renee helped me out of a difficult and potentially dangerous situation. As I waited for the parts and repairs, I played around with GTDTiddlyWiki, a single-file javascript/xhtml/css non-linear hypertext authoring wiki system that incorporates David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” principles into TiddlyWiki. I organized my work projects, my home projects, and started to use it to store thoughts for this blog. Like Gmail before it, GTDTW has changed my relationship with the web browser.

Yesterday, I spent a little bit of time gathering the disparate chunks of information I have found useful in my (relatively) new job at Columbia. The motivation was, again, getting stuck in the mountains. I had limited landline service, a mobile phone with dying batteries, and a laptop. I was able to call out and let folks at CCNMTL know that I wasn’t going to be in, but I desperately wanted needed the contact information for everyone I could possibly need to reach out and touch.

Using the web-data on the CCNMTL site, I wrote the contact list up as a TiddlyWiki document, linked the email addresses, and formatted it so it is easier for me to read. Between Firefox’s “Find” and TiddlyWiki’s built-in search, I can find numbers as quickly as if I were using high-end CRM software.

I then grabbed the most difficult document to retrieve from Columbia’s web site: the Inter Campus Shuttle Bus Schedule. Trust me, it can take five minutes to find it, by which time you have missed your bus. I threw that data into a TiddlyWiki table. No more scrambling to find the data.

Another great feature talked about elsewhere is the embedded print stylesheet. One of my first tasks today will be to print out the contact list and the shuttle schedule at the smallest legible size to keep in my wallet for emergencies. GTDTiddlyWiki’s print stylesheet uses open bullets for lists, a useful feature for those who like to check off done items. Further information on the uses of GTDTiddlyWiki can be found here and here.

So now, how does this really impact me. My commute (a favorite topic here) takes advantage of a number of tools. Vienna, a great FLOSS RSS aggregator keeps me up to date on news, blogs, and mailing lists. Democracy gives me TV and video. SBAGEN, another FLOSS application, is a binaural beat generator that I leave running while I do other things. Mmmm, open chakras. GTDTiddlyWiki and TiddlyWiki linked together are my writing and organizing tools.

Dropping the WikiBar javascript into the TiddlyWiki html file enables some basic wysiwyg editing. I was able to drop that code into TiddlyWiki, but not GTDTiddlyWiki.

But what about the pedagogical value? If I were still supporting students and faculty in the humanities, I would suggest that it could be a great note taking tool on a memory stick.  I got into technology through hypertext fiction written in Storyspace. I know folks are using TiddlyWiki to write hypertext fiction, and MediaWiki to write massively-multi-author HTF. What about patient charts? These could then be encrypted to preserve confidentiality. How about learning objects? Oh, and the low-hanging fruit, how this post started as an email to a former colleague: you could author your entire site in a read/write single-file wiki and post it readonly to the web. There has to be some value in that for higher education. Gone would be the days of a six month wait to have your content updated.

Chime in, please. I am trying to sort through these ideas.