A new understanding

I've felt quite a bit better this week. The main thing getting me down over the last couple of weeks seemed to be my job. I decided to take a fresh look at it, which seems to be helping so far. I was very good at my last job, and very passionate about it as well. It seems that I slowly convinced myself that I was lacking both of these qualities in my new job. I did a bit of thinking over what made me feel this way, and what could help the situation.

• It's been very frustrating to me that I have nothing to benchmark myself against in this job. There are no targets to strive for, and only a small amount of comparing results to previous time periods. I've decided that I'll make the best effort with the resources available to me to get the greatest results possible.
• I feel that I have personal skills that could be put to much greater use in another setting than they are with this job. Upon further thought this is very true, but there are quite a few skills that I can learn in this job that will help me get to where I want to go in the future.
• I also found out that there's at least one of my coworkers who seems to be putting in very little effort in his job. Initially this got me very angry, but I decided that I'll start using the extreme flexibility that this job offers to my advantage as well. Just not to the same extent.

So to sum it all up, I came to the understanding that while it felt like I was caring too much about my job, the reality was that I was caring too much about things that were beyond my control. From now on I'll keep a cooler head and instead of getting worked up over things that seem so simple, I'll just have a good laugh and get on with business.

A few other small steps this week. I crossed a couple more fairly large items off my to do list. I made up this list during my holiday break, hoping that clearing up a lot of these small things I should have done a long time ago would give me a sense of accomplishment. I also went for a light run on the treadmill today. My starter intervals are 5 minutes warmup, 5 minutes jogging, 3 minutes walking, 5 jogging, and 7 minutes cool down. My goal is to start with 25 minutes 3 times per week. I'll shoot for Monday, Wednesday, Saturday and do a regular number of situps and pushups on the off days. I'll do this until I feel comfortable and into a routine before upping the ante so to speak.

That's it for this long winded post. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.