This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Jess Pomfret. Jess’s theme is ‘Life Hacks to make your day easier’. She talks of some things we do to make life simpler/easier. Two of mine are as below.
1 Before I accepted the current gig I am at – I worked several years in telecommuting positions. I found myself struggling in two ways with this – one, not getting enough walking/exercise, and two, not being around real people. I liked the benefits of telecommute though – which is, no commute and the ability to eat warm home cooked meals for lunch. I wanted to combine benefits of both – so for the next gig, I rented an apartment that is walking distance from work. It was not cheap – but got me all the benefits I needed. Fast forward – two years and this has been a wise call. I am loving the combined benefits I get and feel healthier, physically and emotionally. This might not work as a solution for all jobs but it does for this one and am grateful.
2 We all struggle with finding time to learn. About two years ago I discovered the joy of podcasts. I made it a point to listen to a tech podcast during my evening walk and was able to get both exercise as well as learning done. But I started to run out of material there – not that there is any shortage of podcasts in general but my focus was data specific tech podcasts and there were not that many to feed my needs on a daily basis. This year I decided to go one step further – I put a laptop on the dining table right in the middle of my living room. I have a long hallway that i can walk up and down on, and watch a pluralsight course, or a pass summit recording as I walk. This does not work for very demo-heavy recordings, but it does for a lot of lectures and am getting a lot of learning done this way.

I think we all need ‘hacks’ to make our lives easier and maximise value and pleasure we get out of doing what we do. Thank you Jess, for hosting.