c3-thinking-style

As the title of this blog post states, I am a Concrete Sequential Thinker. I like things to be in order and I like to follow a sequence of tasks. I like to know the facts about what I am doing, know what my end goal is and work to get there step by step. I strive with structure and predictability and generally avoid group work. These are all things that I have felt over the long years of education but I have never really thought about them or known that there's a definable group of people who think like me. I thought we were all just introverts that liked to work on our own and not really belong to any group.

Recently having entered the program at Dev Bootcamp I have been learning more about how to learn than I ever have before. The idea that my habits fall into a category of similar thinkers is filling my head with ideas of how I can now use that information to make the most out of my experience out of DBC. The first thing I plan to do is keep up on my what challenges I have ahead of me, make a plan of how I am going to attack it and then get to work. What has occurred to me is that I am going to feel a lot better about the week's work if, as the first thing I do, I sit down and read through all the README files for all of the challenges in addition to the week's README. Knowing exactly what the tasks are that I am supposed to complete is going to help me plan immensely. I can take the sequence of challenges that have been put forth and manage to put them into a sequence for what is best for me. I am also thinking that I need to develop a routine of sorts for how I am going to work. The routine could involve things ranging from checking my Twitter account for DBC related posts to taking the time to complete the long list of updates and changes I want to make to my website. I do believe that having a structure such as that is going to help keep me on track as well as alleviating the fear that I am falling behind and not digesting the material well enough. I am going to have to schedule some time in or throughout the day shut out the outside world for a minute and to check back in with myself. Whether that means using the mid-day break to take a long walk and clear my head, or putting on headphones to shut out the distractions of the world as large. It may be just a minute to shut down the fast pace of our curriculum and find out where I stand in my plan, but the more comforatble I feel with my plans, the less stressed I will be, and I will be able to put forth much better work.

The biggest challenge so far dealing with the avalanche of this material is distraction management. My email dings like the seconds tick on a clock and I get sidetracked looking up some tangential concept that I come across while working. My daughter is asking me what I am doing nearly as much as my email is dinging, the phone is ringing, delivery people are ringing my doorbell, and the dogs aroung my house have all been barking at each other for the past two hours. Non f@#&$^g stop, no joke. I am having to learn to shut things out, whether it is with headphones or taking time to meditate before trying to work. On the other hand, I know that I am capable of extreme amounts of focus, and I have no know where to draw the line between focusing on what I have to do and being a part of my family as well as society. I still need to be a father, I still need to do the dishes, and I'm glad no one's here as I write, because I surely need a shower.

After reading up on all my Gregorc Thinking style as well as my VARK Learning Style, I do believe that my struggle with distraction management is connected in some degree to the way I think and learn. From here on I plan on setting a daily schedule and sticking to it. I am going to turn off email notifiers, phone ringers, and I am going to wear headphone while I work. But I am going to make sure that they go back on when I am done. I am going to set a work environment, see how it works and change it again if it doesn't. The next few weeks are going to be trial and error, test and adapt, get frustrated and mellow out again. Whoever thought learning to code was going to be an emotional and temperamental roller coaster. Guess I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue!!!

As I stated in my second blog post, I have been in what I consider to be the rut of the restaurant mindest. Sure I excelled in school with that mindset, but the point is that I never pushed the envelope. I never made myself work harder than I was really asked to. I drank the cup that they served me without asking what it was or if I could have more when I liked it. Well as much as I know that structure will help me in many ways I have to test out what a non-structured setting can do for me. There have to be points where I set aside the schedule and the routine to step out of my comfort zone, if for nothing more than to see where it might lead me. I will start embracing the group work that I normally avoid, I will stop looking for the sole "right" answer that earned me praise in the past (and chastising myself for not attaining it), and I will stop shunning disarray. Shit, it may turn out that these changes may make no difference, they may make my ability to learn, grow and develop worse, but I just might stumble across cold fusion. Either way I will never know without trying. The worse that's going to happen is that I'm going to fall on my ass, but what's another scrape? I guess the point in the end is that an open mind allows a whole lot more to enter it than a closed one.