What is useful to do on holidays?

Or how to make it painfully painful for wasted New Year holidays?
If, due to the depreciation of the ruble, you suddenly do not go anywhere for the New Year holidays, or are driving, but are sure that there will be a lot of time that you still don’t know what to do (for example, on the road), then I suggest you 7 pleasant and useful ways to spend time.

1. Watch video from conferences
Many are now delighted with TED. Yes, there are interesting and useful things there, but if development in the fields of management and IT is interesting, then I recommend the IT Talks site . There are collections from the most interesting thematic conferences in recent years.
There is also a very interesting selection of videos from seminars on CodeFreeze.
To watch videos offline (by plane, train, etc.) I can advise a couple of extensions for FireFox:
• addons.mozilla.org/ru/firefox/addon/download-flash-and-video - shakes almost everything except Vimeo
• addons.mozilla.org/ru/firefox/addon/video-downloadhelper - downloads almost everything, including Vimeo, but the names of the files generate anyhow.


2. Clean Friendly
When there is 5-10 minutes of free time, many of us are almost unconsciously crawling to check the friends in the social. networks. But the new year is a time when in social. networks almost complete calm. An excellent lesson for 5-10-30-60 minutes (depending on how much everything is running) to clean the friends on really useless information. Most of your friends have more than one hundred people, and at best, half of them you saw live. And very often we are not at all interested in what they eat for dinner and how great their dog jumps. Therefore, in almost all popular soc. Networks have the tools to unsubscribe from updates without removing people from friends. Therefore, if you are tired of the constant posting of one of your friends about politics or about work, just click "unsubscribe".
There is a true side effect, having unsubscribed from the majority of updates, you will often have nothing to take 5-10 minutes of free time in the future, but I hope today's selection will help you solve this problem :)
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3. Read a book
No matter how trite it may sound, but seriously! Surely there are many books that would allow you to grow professionally, which is very useful in our unstable time from an economic point of view. I understand that on weekends I want to relax and not think about work, there is a compromise solution for this purpose: entertaining and “educational” books. These are the so-called business novels and simply written with easy or humorous professional books. Examples of such books:
• Freeman E., Sierra K., “Design Patterns” - Without exaggeration, design patterns are chewed for blondes (tested on one fair-haired typesetter :-)).
• Litvak ME, Psychological Aikido is a surprisingly lively psychological tool for communicating in conflicting and not-so-difficult situations, both in life and at work.
• Slava Pankratov, “Black Book of the Manager” - more like a presentation than a book, but a very concentrated manual for managers, which helps to take a little look at ourselves.
• Michael Lewis, “MoneyBall. How mathematics changed the most popular sports league in the world ”- The book is not a lot about mathematics, how much about how to make a breakthrough, a discovery, both in business and in an established scientific environment. She is in the top 10 recommended business books in the United States. I admit that I did not read the book, but the film adaptation made an indelible impression on me.
• Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged” - The book, it seems, is fiction, but it is significant that after it the author moved from fiction to philosophical, therefore the book itself is somewhat in the middle. According to surveys in the United States, this book is in second place after the Bible in the ranking of the books that most influenced people.
• Eliyahu Goldratt, “Aim. The process of continuous improvement. ”Usually, if the book was recommended to me by at least 3 people, whose opinion I consider authoritative, this is an indication that the book is worth reading. In general, I myself am going to read this book on a vacation.
• Srivers Yoop, “How to be a rat. The art of intrigue and survival at work. ”For a long time did hesitate to add a book to the list. Personally, I didn’t take any advice from it, but I can say that if you work with gosuha or “natural” monopolies, then the book will help you to better understand at first glance some actions that seem to be logical and logical, and ordinary employees of such enterprises.

4. To conduct a retrospective of the year
In both the classical and Agile management methodologies, there are different procedures for looking back, to see what was done well and what was not. I used to do such "views" after each fakap or a major victory, but nevertheless, it is still worth periodically stopping and looking, whether everything I do helps me or change something. If you do this exercise to cover the past year, then you can just remember:
• Major failures and failures (if there were no major ones, then at least those that were remembered)
• Big wins, good luck and “Like A Boss” moments
• Those things, actions or people who constantly “got”, disturbed, interfered with concentrated work or fully rest
• The most memorable moments of rest
• Etc. The list can be expanded depending on your preferences and values ​​in life and at work.
Then try to analyze why these things happened. The process itself is called smart Root cause analysis (RCA). There are many techniques on this subject, including the Ishikawa diagram , “5 why” and others. Many of them are described in the 6th chapter of the book Esther Derby and Diana Larsen “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great”, if there are difficulties with English or like to watch videos more, then you can watch a video from Boris Wolfson's report “Effective Retrospectives” . The only thing you want to warn against: to lay the blame for the failures on others and external circumstances. Yes, this is the easiest to do and our brain has learned to do it on the machine, but the goal of the retrospective is to find what we can change. And if we blame external causes for everything, then we simply cannot improve something.
When the true reasons are clear, you need to understand whether you can change something from these reasons, and, if so, what you need to do. Here you need to take the SMART method , which has long been known, but has not lost its relevance, so that your plans for the year would not sound “starting January 12, I will start going to the gym. It is necessary to set a specific goal, an achievement that will be easy to check (measure), as well as a clear term. For example, in the bench press to lift 90 kg by May 1, 2015. In addition, you should always know your next step, for example, “get training shoes from the mezzanine”, “buy a gym membership to the NNN gymnasium”, etc.

5. Do your body
Since we started talking about sports, then if you don’t eat at a ski resort on New Year’s holidays, then obviously you won’t interfere with restoring your health after long hours in the office, eating donuts, pizzas and other products familiar to an office worker. You can do this without buying a gym membership. There are many other inexpensive and interesting ways:
• ski slopes in the city or suburb,
• cross-country skiing in the near park,
• skating,
• climbing wall
• horse rides,
• construction of a snow fort with children (or without;)),
• panda parks,
• pool,
• workouts in the yard or in the park,
• squats and pushups right at home for the laziest :).
In general, there was a desire.

6. Train your brain
Brain training is as important as muscle. A lot of brain training exercises have been described on the web, but I liked the advice of the American financier James Altucher most of all: “Write 10-20 bad ideas a day every day. Or good ideas, it doesn't matter. After you have been training your “thinking muscle” for 6 months, you will feel like a “machine for ideas”. It's like a super force that has no end. ”

7. Spend time with children
This item is not the last because it is not the most important, but because not everyone still has children. Why is it important to devote a significant part of free time, and sometimes to find time specifically, to communicate with your children? Because it is you, as parents, who can teach them the things that will be most useful to them. And no matter how old your child is: 16 days or 16 years old - at every age there is something to teach the child or just talk heart to heart. By the way, with 16-year-olds it is quite possible to conduct retrospectives about the conflicts between you. To this I can only add references to the book by Masaru Ibuki “After three is already late” and the note “Agile in raising children”