College Grad Lessons

In college it was easier to find time to go to the gym. I often went in the middle of the afternoon or late at night. The gym wasn’t crowded at these times and I typically had plenty of energy. Since graduating college and starting a full-time job, I’ve had trouble motivating myself to workout. In the summer and early fall I enjoyed running outside in the evening after work, but it’s still too cold to do that. Plus, if I workout when I get home I feel like that’s the only thing I have time to do.

I’m going to the beach in exactly one month and summer is right around the corner, so I’d really like to get back into a workout routine. Does anyone have suggestions for how to fit a workout into a busy schedule and make it enjoyable? I’d love to heard ideas! I’ll post my workout plan later this week after I get your feedback.

When offices slow down around the holidays, new employees (that lack vacation days) often struggle to find something to pass the time with at work. This is the situation I’ve been in since about Wednesday last week. While a slow day at work gave me a chance to check some low priority tasks off my list, and a second slow day gave me time to research for some upcoming projects, by the third and fourth slow day I needed something to do.

I had originally planned to spend most of my day studying for the GRE at work since I knew most people that I work with wouldn’t be here. Of course, when I got to work at 8 a.m., the last thing I wanted to do was study for the GRE. So I started thinking about what I could do that would be both productive and fun. Despite working on a web design team, I know very little about Photoshop because I usually use Fireworks to layout site designs and create simple graphics. So I started searching for a good tutorial.

I found this one on PSDTUTS and decided to create an image to attach to one of my sister’s Christmas gift in place of a gift tag with her name on it. A few hours later (took me awhile to get started), I had created the image to the right of my sister and her best friend.

Using my free time at work to pick up a new skill helped me pass the time in a fun way, be productive and learn something that benefits both my job and personal projects. So if you have some down time at work, think of something you’ve wanted to learn for awhile and get started! Strive to work on learning something that is relevant to your job, as well as fits a personal interest.

Anyone have suggestions for other ways to pass time productively during a slow day at work?

The past few months of my life I have flown by, but none faster than the month of December. As the holiday season was approaching, I was quite excited to get to enjoy the month leading up to Christmas. Some how I was convinced that I’d have lots of time to enjoy baking, Christmas movies, holiday shopping, etc. now that I’m out of college. Usually December meant final papers and exams and then crashing for the week before Christmas because I was so exhausted from the semester. I seemed to miscalculate the amount of free time that I’d have as a college graduate. (more…)

This morning I realized that I had 757 e-mails in my inbox at work. Not okay.

So I set a goal for myself - never have more than 100 e-mails in my inbox. Eventually I’d like to get that number down more, but I’m going to take it one step at a time.

I went through all of my e-mails and deleted e-mails related to completed projects, as well as newsletters, LISTSERVs and college-wide e-mails. Then I combed through more recent e-mails and got read of anything that I had responded to already and did not contain important information. Finally I managed to get down to 75 e-mails. Not bad!

In order to better manage my e-mail inbox, I plan to:

1. Save documents I receive to the appropriate project folder on my desktop immediately.
2. Delete e-mails that I’ve already replied to, especially if I expect a response back. Their reply will contain the chain of e-mails that I have gone back and forth anyways.
3. Clean up every Friday morning. When my day is busy, I often leave e-mails untouched. I see them and respond if necessary, but leave the e-mail in place to remind me of any action items.

Hopefully next Friday my inbox will be down to 50 e-mails.

One of the challenges I had when transitioning from college life to working full-time was that everything on my personal to do list had to be completed in the evening or on weekends. Add in the 10:30 bed time that is required in order for me to get 8 hours of sleep and my evenings seemed too short to get anything done.

Over the past week I’ve decided that I want to take the GRE and start working out. I’ll post more about my study and workout plan later this week, but in this post I’m going to share how I plan to get more done each evening.

Over the past month or two, my evening schedule has included eating dinner, hanging out with my housemates, going out with friends for dinner or a drink, cleaning, running errands and watching TV.

I typically have 5 hours from the time I get home to the time I go to sleep. In order to make the most out of my evening time, I’m going to try to keep to the following schedule: (more…)