Passion (delayed)

I found this entry in a forgotten text file on my hard drive, something I'd written on 6/11/04, and was glad to see I'd been consistent with my other posts of the past few months. The author of the linked article has a blog which I read regularly, as much for its links to other blogs about self-improvement, maximising potential and other buzzwords as anything else. Anyway, back to the past...

One of my continued focuses (focii?), making sure that I love my work as much as the rest of my life.

Here are some steps along the path.

I've spent a lot of time in the past 15 years working out what it is that I want to do with my life. Long before I worked, I had to avoid making a decision about what my education path would be. So a double degree meant I could hedge my bets for another couple of years. After a couple of years of that, I discovered that engineering wasn't for me, but building IT systems wasn't so bad. Then, in my final year of Uni, the course structure changed to emphasise team work, where I really flourished. I started work at the ABS not because I knew how awesome the environment would be, but because I was sick of looking for jobs, and they'd offered me one.

Almost 8 years further down the track, I've progressed from a full-time coder to a part-time team leader/coach/business analyst (and occasional coder). Being part-time allows me to devote my full energy to every hour I'm at work, instead of the watered down version which my health limited me to over 5 full days. I'm almost certain I get as much (or more) done in 80% of the time, and enjoy it even more.

Going up

Apparently complaining on my blog sometimes helps me as well (the opposite of the health collapses triggered by writing good news). Well, I'm going to risk the negative consequences, because my life has been going extremely well since I last wrote. The team member I was going to be losing will now be staying in my team for the foreseeable future and, instead of just sneaking through some productive work, my team is now full steam ahead to deliver all the whizz-bang stuff we can. Due to that, and increasingly improved health, I'm loving being at work and really inspired by all the things I'm involved in. Over the next few months, we'll be releasing systems which will make the lives of all ABS employees easier and hopefully improve their day-to-day work experience. That's the kind of thing I'm doing my job for.