Daily 5 Minute Journal - March 5, 2016

Excel Diet (XD) - not doing well

My Excel Diet isn't going well. I'm still not doing the things I'm supposed to do. Last night I had pizza which is not allowed if I'm behind my goal and I'm behind my goal. I weighed 165 this morning but I have a new wrinkle that is weight lifting. I might not be losing weight but I might be losing fat.

Planet Fitness

Gym going good. I joined Feb. 10, 2016 and have consistently gone 3 days a week for almost a month. I made it my goal to just go without any pressure to workout and to not hurt myself.

One of the rules appears to be to wipe down the equipment after you work out, but the rule should be wipe down equipment before you work out.  This way if you don't mind laying in someone else's sweat you can but just not wiping down the equipment.

I hurt myself doing shrugs with 185 lbs. which is too much and now I have a pain in the neck.

I'm a little bored with the gym as they don't have a track, basketball court, classes or pool. Free weights are lacking and people are very unfriendly. I was thinking about a system where each equipment was a computer and you pass your bar code to it and it tracks and records the workout helping you to reach your goals. I'm sure they have this already. The machine would help prevent you from getting hurt and optimize your time.

Four Hour Body

I'm reading the Four Hour Body by +Tim Ferriss and liking it a lot. One problem is that it's such a big and heavy book I don't what to take it with me.  I've been trying his suggested take 30 gms of protein within 30 minutes of awakening since Feb. 8th and today is day 26. I'm down about 3 lbs. but I don't know if this technique has anything to do with it. It does contradict the intermittent fasting idea which is to fast for 16 - 18 hours per day that is eat from 12 pm - 6 pm.  This is hard. Eating 30 gms of protein isn't that easy either.  Today I had a bag of quest potato chips (25gms) and cheese (8 gms).

Economy

I'm a little worried about the economy as I noticed 59 empty stores in New York City one day and 77 the next day. This reminds me of the Great Recession when I also noticed this.

I'm a little concerned about my job as there are constantly changes, we don't seem to have a budget. A co-worker keeps sending me news stories about layoffs. Worry isn't an option but being prepared is. I need to spend time preparing by updating my resume, website, interviewing skills and knowledge.

Diabetes

I don't like my endocrinologist. She was supposed to refill my prescription but hasn't. I'm thinking about seeing Dr. Berstein that's 2 hours away by round trip and would have to take a day off unless he's available on weekends.

Dog Fight

I had a fight with my dog the other day because she growled at me when I went near her bone. I got very angry and took the bone from here. It seems she knows she made a mistake. She recently stopped coming into bed at night. 

My dog has us trained two ways. We put up a bell on the door so she could ring it to tell us she wants to go outside, but she changed it to mean give me a treat. She also tells me she wants to play outside by knocking on the door, and waiting until I open it, she runs away to her toy and wants me to play tug-of-war or chase. 

Recently I've been very annoyed with her constantly interrupting me to go in and out and in and out. So many interruptions.

Overdue books

I've been trying to not be late with paying bills and renewing books from the library but I've been unsuccessful at this. I even set up some Excel code that goes to the library's webpage and looks up how many days until next book is due. I need to improve the code to check everyday and send me an email or automatically renew the book before it's due.

Job

I'm liking my job a little better these days. I've been interviewing people which I like to do. I've been getting more responsibility in terms of running meetings and interviewing people. I spoke with 3 candidates on the phone for 30 minutes. I'd like to better work out the technical questions I ask. I've identified 2 questions that can tell how curious someone is. 

1. What is the number that comes after million, billion, trillion?
2. How does a car work?

I also like to have people self-rate themselves on a scale of 1 - 10 on a technology then see if they are the number they say to show honesty.

I judge resumes as attention to detail by looking for typos. Communication skills, and other things which I'll update in a future post. 

One of my goals has been to find one question which will allow you to determine if a person should be hired or not. I'd have to ask candidates a number of questions and find a correlation between the success of the people and the questions they answered. 

In terms of running meetings or interviewing people one key is to be prepared. My meeting is on Tuesday mornings so on Monday I made time to go to the conference room and set everything up. During this process I got the Blue Screen of Death. I'm glad this happened while preparing and not in the actual meeting.

We have meetings 3 times a week to say what we worked what we'll be working on and any obstacles. On Friday we give a demo on what we worked on and I need to prepare better for this.

I'm liking the new things at work that I'm learning:

• Tableau
• Hadoop
• Unix
• Avro format
• Parquet format
• Python coding
• Drill
• MapR

I'm not liking that my boss is taking a co-worker to meetings that I'm not invited to. Whenever we do our scrum she always says she has nothing to report. 

Monthly Goal

March is here and I don't have a goal for the month. I'm not sure what my February goal was either. But some possibilities are:

• Work 60 or more hours per week
• Develop Excel class
• Figure what I like or don't like to do from a list of tasks and trying to write on it

Excel Class

I've been working on an Excel class or training and am finding this very difficult to complete. I think a method to help create training would be a fun but difficult project to complete. One technique that appears to be helping is 7+/-2. This means that the class or training should be broken into 5 - 9 chapters, lessons, etc.  So my first top level is:

1. How to learn
2. Problem solving
3. Excel beginner
4. Excel intermediate
5. Excel advanced
6. VBA
7. Advanced VBA
8. VBA by project
9. Reference

Time Tracking

One long time goal of mine has been time tracking without effort. I have x ways to track time:

1. Logger
2. Time-creator.com
3. hourly track what you worked on (timers.xlsm)
4. Caption monitoring
5. Idle time monitoring

Listi

My Listi.net website has some limitations when it comes to included data from Microsoft Word. There are special characters that don't show well:

• single quote
• double quote
• dash
• bullets
• bullets within bullets

Extracting knowledge from sheets

I've been spending time extracting ideas, notes and other concepts from projects I previously worked on. There is knowledge in the books I've bought, read, didn't read. I'd like a prioritized list of topics to write about to help prioritize my likes and dislikes.

Marcus Lemonis on James Altucher's podcast

This is an interesting interview with Marcus Lemonis who is star of the TV show The Profit on CNBC. James interrupts his guest too much and his wife Claudia is pretty annoying at the beginning of the show. I like +Marcus Lemonis, he should write a book of his wisdom. Some of the take-aways I got are:

• People
• Passion for business not $
• People are the most important thing as they control the process and product.
• Process
• Buy productive equipment
• Make little changes
• High overhead is bad
• Product
• Change name so it's scalable
• One dimensional products are bad
• If you don't want cupcakes you can't go to Crumbs
• If you want a spin class you can't go to Pro-fit
• 
  

Questions to ask

•  Product
• Can I use better/fresher/healthier ingredients?
• Use fresh instead of factory made
• Is the product too focused?
• Do I get hi frequency of visits?
• Do I get repetitive business?
• What new products can I sell?
• Is product authentic to the business?
• Did I get feedback?
• How does the customer see the product?
• Is the product of high quality?
• Can we think outside the box?
• What does consumer think?
• When they walk in the store?
• When they taste the product?
• Process
• Do I know my numbers?
• Costs to make
• Profit margins
• Is space being used efficiently
• Can I increase the profit margins?
• People
• Do I want to work with these people?
• Can they be trusted?
• Will there egos get in the way of making changes?
• Is person scared to take a risk?
• Do I love the story?

What to look for in a business

• Are these people I want to work with?
• Do they have a great story?
• Can this business enhance an existing business I have?
• Crumbs and Mr. Green Tea
• Eco Me and Camping World
• Does this business scale?

Negative rules

I keep a list of Key Principles that I believe can contribute to success. Recently a friend of mine helped me come up with negative rules. These are things to avoid doing or doing the opposite of something you don't like. For example if you look at bad customer service, doing the opposite can result in great customer service. 

1. Build people up
2. Don't tell people "they can't succeed" after they tell you something
3. Don’t call people old
4. Don't say "you" when you mean "people"

Build People Up

I recently started going to the gym and asked a friend if he could see a difference because I could and he said "No.". I think a white lie here would be more appropriate than honesty. I would have felt better for free. If someone asks me about themselves I will always agree with them if it helps them and doesn't hinder them.

You Can't

I also told this friend that I'm going 3x per week to the gym and it's already a habit after only going a few times. My friend challenged me and said it's too short to call it a habit. He could have said "Wow, congratulations on that success," instead of telling me "You can't."  My wife did the same recently. I don't remember the exact situation but it was very similar. I proposed some future positive state and she crushed it.

You're Old

I'm not sure why someone would say this. I do feel old and not happy with the way I'm aging. Then this same friend sames that I'm old. This made me feel bad. Basically don't put down people, build them up.

You

I use the term "you" when I mean "people", "others" or "someone." I could see how you, I mean people or someone might be offended by this.

Excel Class creation method

I'm in the process of trying to create an Excel class but I'm finding it very difficult. This could be a very valuable tool to help take someone's knowledge and convert it to a:

• Class
• Book
• PowerPoint presentation
• One page guide
• Computer based training
• Webpage

and being to easily modify, add, version, sell the content.

Chest pain

Last night I had some chest pains and not sure what it was. I did have spicy buffalo chicken pizza and it could have been from that or from something much worse.