I really loved winter breaks during college.
I would stay on campus because I was a resident assistant. I basically had the place to myself because the only people on campus were stray visitors, a handful of international students, and a skeletal support staff.
As an adult, I enjoy a similar winter break between Christmas and New Years. Traffic is light and the office becomes remarkably empty as coworkers spend the last of their PTO.
This is an excellent time to get work done (as long as you don’t need to work with someone on vacation.) This is also a much-needed pause between the hectic spurts of work that happen in early December and January.
In addition to day-to-day work, this time of year is when I do “mental housecleaning” which consists of four things:
- Eliminating low-value work tasks.
- Officially recommitting to (or abandoning) half-assed projects.
- Deciding to ignore time-intensive people who do not provide benefits in return.
- Resolving not to be bothered by things that I cannot control.
The last item on that list is why I can’t get energized about the state of my apartment building anymore.
The problems in the building are obvious and easy to fix – dirty hallway carpets, broken security doors and gates, filthy dog parks, unleashed dogs.
Some of my neighbors are still attempting to work with the new management company to resolve basic maintenance issues, but I’ve determined that this is a Sisyphean task and isn’t worth bringing into 2017.
The management company either doesn’t have the resources or desire to make things better for the tenants, and I don’t think any amount of complaining (including blogging) is going to change that. So why waste the time?
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