shhLIFE!

One of the other things I’m working on at the moment is time management.  It’s another common problem that supervisors tend to have when they first move up to a new role.   After all, if it previously took you 10 hours per day to animate just your own shot, how are you supposed to handle that and supervising a team of 5 to 7 people?

When I first made the move I tried to do everything.. animate, supervise, fix problems, etc.  It was driving me crazy, and the quality of my work and of my supervision suffered.

I had to learn to delegate.  As difficult as it is to let things go, in order to survive you really need to learn to delegate anything that you don’t need to handle.  There are a couple of reasons (as always).

1)  you don’t have time

stop deluding yourself.  Yes, you want to do everything, but there aren’t enough hours in the day and you can’t change that.

2) the more you take on, the more you have to take on.

You know the old adage, give a man a fish and he can eat today, teach a man to fish and he can eat forever?  It’s totally true.  I know that it feels like as a supervisor your job is to solve every problem that your animators have.  That’s not exactly true.  Your job is to remove roadblocks and things that inhibit them from getting things done.  If you can help them solve their own problems by providing the correct resources, then in the future they’ll be able to help themselves and others.  If you always solve it, you’ll always have to solve it.  Does that mean that you should always pass the buck?  No, sometimes you do need to step in and fix it yourself.  But you should use that as an opportunity to teach.

Anyway, back to time management.

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So ever since I had two kids and got this new gig I haven’t had much time for exercise.. and it’s definitely starting to catch up with me. After the thanksgiving weekend I checked out my weight.. ack! 199! Very scary. I’m not used to being this heavy, and I don’t want to be.. so my lovely wife and I both started working out this week to try and get back in shape.

I’ve tried gyms and weightloss programs in the past and always kind of give up on them.. the only time I ever really kept it up for an extended period of time was right before we had our first child Aurora. At that point I was giong to the gym every day for about 6 or 7 months and was in the best shape of my life. I felt & looked great (or so I was told , and had more energy than I can imagine.

Unfortunately, I left for a 4 day weekend and missed 2 days at the gym.. and after that, I just sort of gave up. It was like I would be ready to go, get a little busy and think “well.. I didn’t do it yesterday, so I can skip today and just go tomorrow..” and then the next day “okay, I’ve already skipped 3 days this week.. I’ll start clean on monday..” and so on and so on until I just didn’t go anymore.

And then 2 kids and 2 years later.. I’m at 199 pounds and nice and flabby.

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Captain Smartypants sings Dreidel

Happy Hannukah!

So Jazz sent me to this site.. kiva.org.  Basically it’s a  great site that allows average people like you and me to give small loans to people who are in need of money to create a business.  They go for the idea that a large number of people can give small amounts of money that will make a real difference.. and then earn a return on that money!

What a great concept!

This is going to be where the new shhLIFE website is located. At this point, I’m just working on the integration between the forum and the blog.

Right now, the templates are similar, but not the same.. that’ll change as I have time to work on the site more. I also haven’t copied over all the old content yet.. again, that’ll happen as we keep going.

In the meantime, I’d be really happy to hear any comments/suggestions/problems/etc that you face!

I’ve integrated this thing called “simple tagging”.. let’s see how it works!

okay, it didn’t work.

we’re back to using categories but changing the title to tags.

So I’ve finally bitten the bullet and started changing my site from jonhandhisdog.com over to jasonschleifer.com.

It’s about time, eh?

So I’m going to be re-organizing the site to handle things better.. jonhandhisdog will still exist, I’ll try and create an archive of the data from the original forum (w/out spam).  The new forum from jonhandhisdog.com will be copied over, and old passwords and usernames should hopefully work just dandy!