Productivity follow-up

so i've been working desk jobs for a while now. i'm sure alan and stephanie can back me up when i say that sometimes you just gotta accept that you can't be productive every minute of the day, unless you're running your own business. the larger your company is, the larger your teams will be, and the longer you could potentially be waiting to start the next step of your project. to pass the time and not feel guilty about my lack of productivity, i read articles about my company. this makes me feel like i'm still contributing to my company by understanding it better. or i'll chat with the older engineers to get to know them better and learn tidbits from their experiences. i try to avoid chatting online. we've also got sametime at ibm, and i personally think its function is abused. i see people with more sametime windows open in their taskbar than work related applications, and it kinda bothers me. but oh well. anyways, enough about productivity. =O

minnesota has turned out to be cooler than i expected. tonight, i'm going to the first night of a taste of minnesota in st. paul to watch sugar ray. other artists that are going to be there this weekend include bo diddley, the supremes, boyz ii men, and smokey robinson! yesterday, a bunch of new hires and i went to a waterski show. pictures soon to come. i also thought that batman begins was good, and so was war of the worlds. some people didn't like it because they didn't understand what happened. don't be like them. anyways, back to productivity. =P

there were two things that my parents told me when i started working that stuck out among the rest of their typical parental advice about going into the working world. my dad told me not to chat online. if you need to reach someone, keep it concise in an e-mail, send them a quick e-note if you're on a unix machine, or just stop by their office to tell them personally. my mom told me to try to look busy even when you're not. i thought about this one and disagreed at first, but she convinced me that it's better to look productive than to look unproductive to anyone who may be judging you. and you can always tell your manager if you feel unproductive. especially if you've got a cool manager like mine who gave us a four day weekend. =)