Dr H made the suggestion that I become selective in my choice of activities, that I need to learn what I must do right now to make best use of my energy. With this post I am going to commence a series of weekly posts on goal setting. The objective is to establish priorities and ensure I am making productive use of my time.
In the coming week I want to complete the following:
Write and send five outreach letters that serve to advance the TBI Proposal. I have invested a huge amount of time in developing this initiative and I believe the concept is viable. There are 1,400,000 other reasons why this project is needed (see the Defending The Blog post for details). It seems worthwhile to continue to promote it until I obtain some final confirmation that it is unlikely to proceed.
Five communications in the course of a week represents one outreach communication per day. This appears to be a reasonable goal, one well within my capacities. I already have a number of failed drafts, and related outreach notes, so I am not starting completely from scratch.
This activity also represents an engagement with the community. Even if I am unable to make a go of the TBI Proposal the associated outreach will result in my making community contacts which may assist me in finding employment.
Example of blog business card
When I commenced the blog I had business cards printed which sought to communicate the purpose and intent of the blog. The blog has since followed its own uncertain trajectory. I am going to commit to putting the blog back on its original course so that its content reflects the trials and tribulations of a 61 year old job seeker, one suffering from an mTBI injury.
Back of blog business card
I also want to create a series of posts which look at jobs I have performed in the past and generate an estimate of my present capacity to perform in those positions. These include juvenile jobs: golf caddy, paper boy, snow removal, photographer. University jobs: taxi driver, paint crew, post office inside worker, supply depot worker (warehouse person?). Pre University jobs: architectural model builder. Post university jobs: prep cook, 2nd Chef (night chef), SAR crewman, Hovercraft crewman, Officer-In-Charge SAR unit, Training film entrepreneur, Offshore industry HR Recruiter, Offshore Industry Training manager, software developer (x86 Assembly), SMB consultant, PC content developer, RDMS developer (SQL), Corporate document management, desktop publishing entrepreneur, Web developer (HTML 1), Social Enterprise entrepreneur, Tour vessel Captain, Consumer Technical Support Engineer, Enterprise Support Engineer, QA Auditor / Coach, “High Touch” Enterprise Support Engineer, PA Risc Support Engineer, SAN / NAS Support Engineer, Volunteer out-call phone agent.
That is a total of 33 distinct paid employments. I suspect there are a few I may have missed. I have never been fired for cause. Most of my mature job losses were the result of being associated with companies that experienced market problems outside of their control. In the offshore industry my redundancy was part of a worldwide sector collapse. Lavalin ran into problems when multiple engineering contracts were cancelled, or deferred, due to a global economic slowdown. My computer industry position disappeared in part because of an overall decline in IT capital investment.
By reviewing jobs that I have performed I should be able to develop a sense of my current limitations. I am not going to be able to review all 33 jobs in one week. I will try and slot these reviews in with other posts.
I have a clinic appointment this week. These are typically extremely disruptive as I must devote a significant amount of time to planning, route finding, double checking that I have all required materials and allowing lots of slack in my schedule so that I do not run into problems.
I also want to take at least one and preferably two long walks. I have been prevented from getting outside due to the bad weather. This week appears to offer both sun and reasonable temperatures and I want to take advantage of these benign conditions if at all possible.
Goal Setting Summary — January 17th to 21st
- 5 Outreach communications
- 2 Job Review Posts
- 2 Extended walks (at least two hour duration)