It is time for a crash course in project management!
Objectives:
Understand and be able to apply major project management methodologies (PMP school, waterfall, agile project management)
Review other methodologies that I already know (design thinking, OKRs, SRE, DevOps, UI/UX)
Formulate resources and learning into distinct repositories of knowledge and simple shortcuts and worksheets that I can use as shorthand reminders and ways to kick off processes
Total time: 4 hours
PART ONE: Master project management (2 hrs)
Section one: Learn, research, and gather (1 hr)
Subsection one: Warm up via listening to videos and gathering resource lists (20 minutes)
Subsection two: Create own practice scenarios and find questions in them (20 minutes)
Subsection three: Consume and build resource repos off of resource lists and answer my own questions (20 minutes)
Section two: Create practice scenarios (30 min)
Section three: Question and answer (30 min)
PART TWO: Review other methodologies (1 hr)
Section one: write down everything from memory basic searching (20 minutes)
Section two: watch videos (20 minutes)
Section three: search for resources and worksheets (20 minutes)
PART THREE: Create and organize resources (1 hr)
Section one: create a structure for folders and docs (20 minutes)
Section two: create resources for project management (20 minutes)
Section three: create resources for other methodologies (20 minutes)
In my Valorant journey right now, I’m very interested in perfecting strafe shooting and proper clearing.
I heard that one of the elements of getting really good is about focusing on fewer things. What I’m really working on right now is getting something out of my warmups.
I usually play deathmatch until I feel like I’m hitting my shots and then jump into a match. But, now I’m thinking I need to let go of trying to push off from the confidence in a good deathmatch and instead working on making the mechanics more intuitive…meaning I need to deathmatch until I can hit shots even if I’m not match mvp, my clears, peeks and jiggles feel COMFORTABLE. Even if that means going into some deathmatches where it is really hard and everyone on taps me. The point of warmup should be when I feel like I’m not having trouble hitting shot anymore.
I realized something. It is the end of my bedtime challenge! I have only three days in which I actually violated the boundaries of the challenge:
First time was for work, when troubleshooting an issue took me until 11:30 PM, I went to bed at 12
Second time was for my girlfriend, helping her with a school project until 12
The third time was when the challenge officially ended already, on the 17th (challenge ended on the 12th) when I was feeling too overwhelmed to pack for my trip back to my parent’s house for the holidays.
Although the challenge is over, the work continues.
It is even more critical now because I have a lot of issues with keeping control of my life while at my parent’s house and the bedtime routine isn’t as nice as I would like to have it. I will keep this challenge going for a few more days to solidify some of the more important aspects of the challenge such as the morning routine, and nighttime routine, and fulfilling some of the things I need from the nighttime (alone time, creativity, productivity, fun, and space).
Instead, I am feeling pretty much that my space and time are particularly intruded on in recent times and I need to find ways to meet those needs.
Overall, I am extremely proud of myself and look forward to all the health benefits this will afford me.
I’m doing REALLY badly with Valorant. Some observations:
Good Things
Movement is actually REALLY good
Aim is not bad
Gamesense OK
What I Need To Work On
Stop having the bad habit of moving TOWARDS the enemy. Try to keep strafing. More so in game, but also in deathmatch.
Movement is good, but move in the way to isolate angles, don’t try to peek too hard.
When aiming, need to have a smoother crosshair, don’t let the movement throw off crosshair
Need to work more on “catching the kills” and timing
Catching kills is mostly trying to hold angles, need to feel the swing (either wide or close)
Need to feel the timing of how soon and quickly to peek back out after missing
Use movement to adjust aim
Spray through and feel out the preaim (feel out where they are)
Can improve movement by using the crouch/crouch peek more often
Overall, I think I’m not doing as badly as I think I am. Just need to slow down the frantic movement to have steadier crosshair movement. I need to hold angles more, and only peak when I feel like I can snap onto a head (catching the aim).
Like in my aiming exercise, I should only hold angles, until the aim comes alive for me.
The biggest downfall I see multiple times is using movement to get closer when I can just hold the angle from far away. My aim is actually really good, just don’t give it any room to shine.
I was thinking today about boundaries and needs, and how I’m starting to work on recognizing them. I’ll add a new one to the list:
Honesty – truth is important
Empathy – emotions are important
Respect – it is important to be valued and value others
Time – control over your time and space
Possibility – belief anything is possible
Health – lifestyle is important
Needs are interesting, because I think boundaries are used to protect needs. I’m not entirely sure whether or not these are needs or boundaries. I also don’t know if they are values. In doing a little more research it seems that some people would consider these values, not needs. Maybe I should switch up my terminology.
In any case, health is a value that I recently added to incorporate my dedication to sleep, digestion, and exercise all in the service of feeling happy, strong, and energetic (for the long run).
I also recently thought about possibility. The most often neglected of all my values/needs but I feel equally important. I realized recently that possibility is what drives solutions. Boundaries are important, but communicating them, enforcing them, often requires compromise and communication. And what helps with that is the feeling of possibility.
Recently, I was feeling resentful of my parents not wanting me to go to a social gathering with friends. I felt it was violating my boundary around health (mental health), empathy (where they would value my emotions) and honesty (I did not feel like I could be honest about any of this).
However, I didn’t know what to do because I respect their boundaries around health might be a bit different from mine. Being older and frailer, they were more worried about my health and their own. I know that I cannot protect them from getting sick, but I felt increasingly stressed.
The possibility value came into play when I thought about how anything is possible. I started to think about how I could meet my need for emotional health in different ways, for example, talking more to my friends and meeting more of them (in a more one on one setting) that would potentially reduce and control the risk to my parents. At the same time I still see possibilities in meeting up with my friends working out as possibility is always there.
As I look at my jiujitsu challenge, I realize that knee rehabilitation must be an essential component to my strategy because strengthening my knee, healing it, and making it less prone to injury will probably be the most important factor for how successful the challenge is.
In looking into it further, I also realized that I completely forgot about my last post about my knee in which I outlined three goals:
1 month goal – be able to sleep, walk, stand and light exercise with zero discomfort. I will call this goal little freedom.
1 year goal – to get back to preinjury levels
2 year goal – the ability to practice martial arts, parkour gymnastics and skiing. My goal isn’t to go too hard in any of these areas, just to be able to do them safely.
It’s funny because it’s been 5 months since that last post and I pretty much immediately dived into the 2 year goal because I lost motivation for the 1 month goal.
I also realized that my first post with two exercises for massaging the knee are extremely effective, especially the one that lifts and relaxes the knee joint.
I also rediscovered this video about tendon strength:
With these key takeaways:
do concentric-focused movements, a lot of volume with lower weight, do them explosively, fast eccentric
reversing the direction very fast (eccentric to concentric), challenges the tendon
if you lower the weight slowly you will favour the muscle, if you jerk it you will favour the tendon
larger range of motion challenges the tendon, but you can train them with short range and high weight and high speed
progress all of these slowly: weight, range of motion, speed
Bottom line though, I don’t really know what to do next.
My main blocker is just this feeling that in order to achieve the level of strength in my knee that I want. I will have to literally work out every day for a significant period of time and I don’t have the strength and the interest in doing that. It also seems really hard to get that done while also juggling work, jiujitsu and sleep.
However, now that I write that out, maybe I’m thinking about it all wrong. Maybe I don’t need to work out every day at all. Maybe I just need to work out once a week intensely. I know that even that low frequency over a long period of time will be at least enough to sustain strength in my knee. I might even be able to get away with once every other week!
I also really want my workouts to help with one very important thing for me, stress relief. I have so many mentally rigorous tasks from doing work at my job, thinking about youtube, and playing Valorant that I need an outlet for my stress. I guess I haven’t quite figured out how to do that yet, how to integrate it into my day that doesn’t feel like it is going to take a huge amount of time.
Perhaps it isn’t about taking a huge amount of time. Maybe it is like my posture challenge. Since I had some very simple exercises for that, maybe I need to simplify my workouts to be much more simple. I tried my warmup playlists, but they feel a little too slow and stagnant. This playlist seems really good to stop and start at any time:
I think what will be most effective is to slowly work through the video, only doing it for as long as I want to, for short periods of time. So always pick up where I left off, but never feel the need to go for a certain period of time. Hell, I could do 10 second intervals throughout the day. I can handle 10 seconds no?
Also, in the meantime, I think I need to find a way to do more of the knee over toes workout every single day, except the weekends.
The months I am not doing jiujitsu, I will need to organize my own conditioning and physical therapy workouts.
I think overall, I work too hard when I’m already exercising and too little when I’m not. For instance, right now I’m doing jiujitsu at least 3 times per week so I don’t need so many conditioning exercises, probably just more soothing massage, warmth, meditation etc.
When I take time off of jiujitsu though, I would like to go a bit harder.
Finally, I want to remind myself of a couple of truths when it comes to my knee:
Allowing tissues to slide and glide will remove pain, its not the scar that is the issue, it is when it sticks
Building up strength in muscles help protect against injury even with weak tendons and ligaments by absorbing shock
Building up tendons and ligaments will protect cartilage and bones by absorbing shock
Increasing range of motion help make muscles and tendons more efficient
