Random thoughts I’ve had over the past 5 minutes that weren’t enough to fill a whole blog post on their own, but were too much to shove into a tweet:

I wish I didn’t have to sleep. Things happen overnight that would be useful to be present for. My coworkers being awake and international Habari support, for two. Also, I’d be able to get all of those things done that I don’t have an extra couple hours every day for. It would be useful not to sleep. Being sick has put me into the routine of sleeping more, which is good for sanity, but bad for productivity.

I have a new recruiter policy. If you call and offer an opportunity that doesn’t meet the criteria that I’ve outlined clearly in my published resume, I simply tell you not to ever call me again. This is brought on by today’s recruiter call from Sandeep in “Columbus OH” (according to the caller ID - yeah, right), confirming that I am in Chester Springs, and wondering if a daily commute to Erie would be acceptable to me. I informed Sandeep that Pennsylvania is roughly 300 miles across, and that Chester Springs is in the far Southeast corner, while Erie is in the far Northeast corner, and that yes, I was actually serious about not relocating, and no, teleportation technology that would allow me to perform that 375-mile daily commute had not yet been invented. When he said, “If I have any other opportunities I will let you know,” I replied, “No, I don’t accept calls from recruiters that don’t know their own business.” Hopefully, that ends that.

I’ve long been looking for a way to keep focused on tasks and moreover come up with a comprehensive time-management system that works for me. I discovered the Pomodoro Technique, which uses one of those tomato timers to get you to focus on an individual task for 25 minutes between 5 minute breaks. Seems like it could be effective and would like to try it, but one of the more effective bits of the technique is how it suggests to record interruptions. I think this part would do very well for me, allowing me to continue work, and evaluate later whether I really need to check Twitter again or get back to that person I should have emailed days ago. But I want a digital tool to do it, and the ones I’ve found (including this otherwise really good one, Pomodairo) are lacking in certain ways that seem obviously essential to me, particularly in their ability to collect and then organize interruptions. I might just go back to paper.

It’s come up at least twice this week that I used to write desktop software, and should be able to produce small apps that I would like to use (like the Pomodoro app from above). I think it might be entertaining to get back into some minimal desktop development, maybe with some of the newer .net stuff that uses Expression for design.