Zero to Awesome in 15 Minutes a Day

I never seem to have enough time to accomplish everything, so I never attempt anything.  After all, what can be accomplished in 15 minutes?  I may as well surf Youtube for old Saturday Night Live clips or cool Stevie Ray Vaughan songs I wish I knew how to play.  Maybe watching them would make me play better...

...and it struck me...

...I'm wasting what little time I have.  Not only am I wasting the little time I have, I'm wasting time I don't have because the things I spend my time on seem to run over the little free time I have.  Then I'm late for the things I must make time to do.  What a downward spiral to feeling like a "zero."

So I've recently started looking at time as if 15 minutes was a large chunk of time.  After all, in 15 minutes I can be out of bed, showered, shaved, dressed and in my car running to work when I oversleep.  In 15 minutes I can read 20-30 email messages, or look over hundreds of RSS feeds.  Fifteen minutes is a relatively significant amount of time in a day when you come to think about it.

The key is in focus and direction.  I always wish I had more time to play guitar, but when I get 15 minutes and don't have a plan, I sit there and wank out on things I already know.  I don't do anything new, or try anything outside my ability, or learn anything at all.  I leave the 15 minutes wishing I had more time and wishing I had accomplished something.  Well no more!

I decided that I would simply begin by planning 15 minutes a day to play guitar, and when I sit down I'm going to have something to actually work on to expand my capabilities.  I grabbed a copy of Sonic Visualizer which is an amazing free tool for learning guitar parts, ripped a copy of Stevie Ray Vaughan's "Love Struck Baby" which is a new song to be performed by Green Light Night in June, and looped through the solo section.  In 15 minutes, I had figured out the first 12 bars of the 36-bar solo!  I have always admired SRV's playing and always wished I knew more of his stuff but never got around to playing any, and here I was 15 minutes and some concentrated focus and I was 1/3 through a new solo.

I felt AWESOME!

And that is why I decided to call this post "Zero to Awesome."  It's not that I am suddenly an awesome guitar player, or that I think I'll ever be a master like Stevie Ray by playing 15 minutes a day.  I will, however, feel much better about how I spend my time.  I will also know more SRV licks than I have before. Since that day, I have completed the "Love Struck Baby" solo, as well as the Brian Setzer solo in Marshall Crenshaw's version of "Crying, Waiting, Hoping."  That's more note-for-note solo transcription in a couple weeks than I've done in 20 years.  Playing is becoming fun again!

So now I'm trying to apply this method to all sorts of things.  I have an upgrade to my CCNA certification due in June.  It's taking more than 15 minutes a day, but on those days where life gets in the way of my geekosity I still get a little in.  The continued return and focus cements what I learned yesterday and the day before and I'm retaining more.  It also helps me keep a head of steam going.

The things I am working on that are difficult to find time to accomplish:

1)  Renew my CCNA Certification by passing the CCNA/Voice test.  This needs to be done by June 24th.
2)  I have a gig to prepare for with Green Light Night on June 16th.
3)  I have a gig to prepare for with Malcolm Cloud's Urban Legend on July 27th.
4)  I have an entertainment center to finish building in the family room
5)  We hope to have some special guests coming to stay with us, and we have work to do on the house

I'll update more as these things take shape.  Either way, I'm actually doing something instead of sitting around, wasting time wishing I was doing something.  I feel good about it, and I hope to keep this momentum going.

Hope to see you at one of the shows this summer.  More on those as they arrive, but for now please hold the date!

Sour grapes

...produce "whine."

I think it's time

We'll be getting a new dog in a couple weeks or less.  I'm looking forward to it.

More as it happens...

Good bye, my good friend

I said goodbye to my buddy Jebediah tonight. He's been suffering from a deep infection in his snout, and stopped eating about a week ago. Try as we might, there was nothing we could do. Tonight after work, he passed away peacefully in my arms.

He used to miss me when I'd go to work. He'd wait for me in the morning by my briefcase like this. I miss him already.

Deciding to get busy

I'm having a difficult time sticking to the task of studying and furthering my career, even though I'm highly incented to do so. Here's my thought and plan from my network blog:

It's incredibly difficult for me to focus on geekstuff when the weather finally starts getting nice, and I think we may be in the one week per year of decent weather Minnesotans get. My study routine is faltering and I'm behind schedule terribly.

I'm having trouble waking up early to study, which has historically been my most productive time. My schedule is to wake up at 4:00 AM sot hat I can get an hour of studying in before I get ready and go to work. Maybe I'm getting old, or maybe I'm not as motivated as I once was. I'm just having much more trouble getting out of bed and into the groove and many times I sleep right through the alarm. It's time to change the routine or fail.

When I consider the reasons I'm struggling, I think lack of sleep is a major issue along with distractions in my study area. For instance, all my guitars are sitting here, begging to be played every time I sit down to do some Routing. Here's what I've done and am doing to combat these:

1. Agreed with my wife that this is of utmost importance and I've reinforced our collective decision to move forward with this career path
2. Decided to got to bed earlier - with the time set as 9:30 PM to be in bed. The way things work out now, I get to bed by 10:30 and we sit up and talk or watch TV until 11:00, then by 4:00 AM I'm shot and unable to get up
3. Take down my drumset and put up a "work-workstation" where I won't have anything other than work to distract me. On this "workbench" will be my laptop, some paper and pens, my study materials and various routers and switches. There will be NO GUITAR or MUSIC RELATED ITEMS HERE.

Focus is the key, once again.

Slept in today

And loved it. The birds were singing like crazy all morning, the windows were open and I just decided that life is too short to rush around today.

I'm glad I did.

Tuesday is "Guitar Night"

Because man does not thrive on EIGRP alone, I'm trying to designate a couple nights a week as "Guitar Nights." I'm cutting my study short tonight, doing some reading and blogging at "Greg and the Network" on what I'm learning to keep it all in my mind and engage a few different senses, and then playing some guitar and forgetting all about it for a while.

I'm dying to play my SRV strat tonight, so I'm keeping this short. I'm currently reading "Soul to Soul" by Keri Leigh. It's amazing to read about the life of such a gifted guitarist and one of my favorites of all time, and at first I spend a lot of time listening to SRV's music, followed closely with never wanting to pick up a guitar again. After that, I feel the excitement I felt in 1983 when I read about this Texan who played on David Bowie's "Let's Dance" album and released his first solo album after performing at Montreaux as an unsigned act. I didn't know what I was in for, but I knew it was something I needed to know more about.

Almost 30 years later, I still want to know more. I still want to play more. Every time I hear SRV play a note, I think "Yeah...that's what I mean."

Goodnight. I need to play.