What is useful to do during the holidays?

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

1. Watch video from conferences.
Many are now enthusiastic about TED. Yes, there are interesting and useful things there, but if you are interested in development in the management and IT industries, I recommend the IT Talks website . There are selections from the most interesting thematic conferences in recent years.
There is also a very interesting selection of videos from CodeFreeze workshops
To watch videos offline (by plane, train, etc.) I can recommend a couple of extensions for FireFox:
• addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/download-flash-and-video - downloads almost everything except Vimeo
• addons .mozilla.org / ru / firefox / addon / video-downloadhelper - downloads almost everything, including Vimeo, but the file names are generated anyhow.


2. Clean friend
When there is 5-10 minutes of free time, many of us almost unconsciously climb to check out friends in social networks. networks. But the new year is a time when in the social. networks almost completely calm. An excellent lesson for 5-10-30-60 minutes (depending on how much everything is running) to clean friends from really useless information. Most of the 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 lunch and how great their dog is jumping. Therefore, in almost all popular social. Networks have 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 really a side effect, by unsubscribing from most updates, you often will 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 :)

3. Read a book
No matter how corny it sounds, but seriously! Surely there are many books that would allow you to grow professionally, which is very handy in our time, unstable from an economic point of view. I understand that at the weekend I want to relax and not think about work, especially for this there is a compromise solution: entertaining "educational" books. These are so-called business novels and professional books simply written easily or with humor. Examples of such books:
• Freeman E., Sierra K., “Design Patterns” - Without exaggeration, design patterns are chewed for blondes (tested on one fair-haired layout designer :-)).
• Litvak M.E., Psychological Aikido - a surprisingly lively psychological aid for communication in conflict and not so situations, both in life and at work.
• Glory to Pankratov, “The Black Book of the Manager” - more like a presentation than a book, but a very concentrated manual for managers, which helps to look a little from the side.
• Michael Lewis, MoneyBall. How mathematics has changed the most popular sports league in the world ”- The book is not so much about mathematics, but about how you can make a breakthrough, a discovery, both in business and in the established scientific community. She is in the top 10 recommended business books in the USA. 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 seems to be fiction, but it is significant that after it the author moved from fiction to philosophical, so the book itself is somewhat in the middle. According to polls in the USA, this book is in second place after the Bible in the ranking of books that have influenced people the most.
• Eliyahu Goldratt, “Target. The process of continuous improvement ”- Usually, if a book was recommended to me by at least 3 people whose opinion I consider authoritative, this is an indicator that the book is worth reading. In general, I’m going to read this book myself on vacation.
• Freshwater Yoop, “How to Be a Rat. The art of intrigue and survival at work ”- For a long time hesitated to add the book to the list. Personally, I didn’t take any advice from it, but I can say that if you work with the government or “natural” monopolies, the book will help you better understand at first glance some actions of managers and ordinary employees of such enterprises that seem not logical.

4. Conduct a retrospective of the year
In both classical and Agile management methodologies, there are different procedures for looking back to see what has been done well and what is not. I’m used to doing such “views” after each fakap or major victory, but nevertheless, it’s worth stopping periodically and looking to see if everything I do helps me or is it worth changing something. If you do this exercise with the coverage of the past year, you can just remember:
• Major failures and failures (if there were no major failures, then at least those that were remembered)
• Major victories, good luck and “Like A Boss” moments
• Those things, actions or people who constantly "got", disturbed, interfered with concentrated work or a full rest
• The most memorable moments of rest
• Etc. the list can be expanded depending on your preferences and values ​​in life and at work.
Next, 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 chapter 6 of the book by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great”, if you have difficulties with English or prefer to watch the video, you can watch the video from Boris Wolfson's report “Effective Retrospectives”. The only thing I want to caution against is: blame the failure for others and external circumstances. Yes, this is easiest to do, and our brain has learned to do it automatically, but the goal of retrospective is to find what we ourselves can change. And if external reasons are blamed for everything, then we simply will not be able to improve something.
When the true reasons are understood, you need to understand whether you can change something from these reasons, and if so, what you need to do to do this. Here you need to take the long-known, but not lost its relevance SMART techniqueso that your plans for the year do not sound "from January 12, I begin to go to the gym." It is necessary to set a specific goal, achievement, which will be easy to verify (measure), as well as a clear deadline. For example, in a bench press, lift 90 kg by May 1, 2015. In addition, you should always know your next step, for example, “get gym shoes from the mezzanine,” “buy a subscription to the NNN gym”, etc.

5. Take care of your body.
Since we’ve started talking about sports, if you don’t go to a ski resort on New Year’s holidays, then it’s obvious that it will not hurt you to restore your health after long hours at the office, eating donuts, pizzas and other products that are usual for 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 suburbs,
• cross-country skiing in the nearest park,
• ice skating,
• climbing wall
• horseback riding,
• building a snow fortress with children (or without;)),
• panda parks,
• swimming pool,
• workout- s in the yard or in the park,
• squats and push-ups right at home for the laziest :).
In general, there was a desire.

6. Train your brain
Brain training is just as important as muscle. There are a lot of brain training exercises 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, no matter. After you train your “thinking muscle” for 6 months, you will feel like a “machine for ideas”. It's like a superpower that has no end. ”

7. Spend time with the kids
This item is not the last because the most important is not, but because not everyone still has children. Why is it important to devote a significant part of free time, and sometimes to carve out time on purpose, to communicate with your children? Because it is you, as parents, who will be able to teach them the things that are most useful to them. And it doesn’t matter how much your child: 16 days or 16 years old - at each 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 conflicts between you. To this I can only add links to the book by Masaru Ibuki, “After three it’s too late” and the note “Agile in parenting”