Personal Archives - John McCormack DBA

Balancing work and life – The COVID years – tsql2sday

10th August 2021 By John McCormack Leave a Comment

For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, Tjay Belt (b|t) asks about balancing work and life. He lists some options and I decided to write about What rules have you implemented that made it easier to balance?

Balancing work and life

The initial shift to working from home didn’t phase me. I thought it was just a short term measure to keep people safe. I found that my team became more productive and there were high spirits initially. I was happy to work overtime and spend time on community work. (Looking back, I spent far too long at my desk)

The period up to July/August I was very productive with blogging and creating content for online presentations and YouTube videos. I then felt a little flat and my productivity dropped off a cliff. Similarly I had a small boost in February when I felt motivated. So I had to come up with some rules.

Striking the balance – The rules

I have adopted a few rules and try to stick to them but I don’t stress out about it. If I need to work on, or I don’t want to go outdoors, it’s not a big deal.

Try to finish work at 5:30
Spend 30 minutes outdoors every day
Have some fun

Try to finish work at 5:30

Honestly: finish at finishing time. Don’t work for free. It’s my number one tip for balancing work and life. The work will always wait for you. Now I’m not saying this is possible 100% of the time but it should be your aim. For example, I’ve had to deal with production issues that can’t wait but on the whole, I’m referring to the ticket queue and requests from end users. I’ll also take time back if I’ve had to work on at a time that suits me and my company.

My employer also introduced a new perk called Summer Hours where all employees get every Friday afternoon off during July and August. It’s such a fantastic employee benefit which is worth 4 extra paid days off per year.

Spend 30 minutes outdoors

I attended an online seminar at my work (Monster.com) talking about mental health. I was inspired by one of the speakers who had set up a podcast and blog called humansoutside. She described that simply spending 30 minutes outdoors every day had had a profound effect on her’s and her husband’s mental health. You should give the podcast a listen.

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A post shared by Humans Outside® (@humansoutside)

So now I try to spend some time outside each day. Whether is working in the garden, going a walk or just taking refuge from the rain under my Gazebo to drink a coffee, it is a refreshing habit.

Have some fun

I mentioned on a previous post that I had got a pool table at home. I’m lucky to have the space and I really use it all the time. I aim to clear the balls once a day. If I can play more and get my kids involved, even better.

John playing pool to avoid burnout in IT — John playing pool

I’m also a bit of a telly addict. During lockdown, I re-watched the series Curb you enthusiasm. It’s cringe comedy but I love the pedantry. I also re-watched Mad Men which is one of the all time greatest box sets (imho).

I try to have a box set on the go with my wife as well that we only watch at the pace where we can both manage it. (No sneaking ahead, even although sometimes it is tempting)

I hope this helps. Do whatever works for you but do try to do something actively to ensure you strike a work/life balance that works for you.

Take a look at my Sessionize speaker’s profile

25th January 2021 By John McCormack

Take a look at my Sessionize speaker’s profile. I talk about data and cloud topics, and have done at some major SQL conferences and local user groups. Please get in touch if you’d like me to speak at your event. My live sessions are listed.

https://sessionize.com/john-mccormack/

Contact me

Sometimes, WordPress mail can be a little flaky. If I don’t reply to you, please send me a DM on twitter.

Pool breaks to avoid burnout in IT – tsql2sday

12th January 2021 By John McCormack 2 Comments

Avoid burnout in IT

This month’s t-sql Tuesday is hosted by James McGillivray (b|t) and he says:

Breaks are critical for our mental health. Write a post about relaxation techniques, dream destinations, vacation plans or anything else relating to taking a break for your own mental health.

Covid-19 WFH burnout

When we were first locked down in our homes in 2020, due to the first wave of Coronavirus, I felt like there was not much to do other than work. Football was cancelled, my kids activities were cancelled, we couldn’t go to the pubs or restaurants. So I worked. Extra hours were available to me and I just did them, often at my desk from 8-8. I had a small spare bedroom office which suited me fine when I worked from home 1 day a week, but it wasn’t ideal for spending so much time in.

I don’t know if I reached burnout but I know I was a bit fatigued. Other than to work as it was paying the bills, I had no appetite to do much else online. Friends and family were meeting by zoom and I didn’t feel like I wanted to join in. My own blogging productivity mostly stopped. I had been wanting to create some training content and I just couldn’t face it. I had an expensive mountain bike gathering dust because I just didn’t want to go outside.

New House

Fast forward to September and we moved house. I moved to a larger house with a dedicated garage/office. I know I’m incredibly lucky to be able to do this but it also allowed me one more thing, my own pool table. I’ve wanted one forever, actually I would have loved a snooker table but I couldn’t squeeze one into the space.

white two story garage — Outside the garage

My short term escape to avoid burnout in IT

When I’m taking a break, I like to knock a few balls around on the pool table. Having something to do in my own house has been a godsend with other facilities constantly being shut down to prevent the spread of covid-19. It’s great to have the option to do this at home.

Relaxation goals

I’ve made it one of my 2021 goals to take 28 days holiday in a warm climate this year. We have an extended family holiday booked for Florida at the end of June. I don’t know if this will happen but I hope it does. I’d also like to spend two other single weeks away somewhere like Tenerife. Having these planned will break up the year and motivate me to work hard the rest of the time.

My wife and son went to Tenerife last January with my sister-in-law and niece. I could have gone but we knew nothing of coronavirus at the time and I thought I would just work to bring in some money, since I was on a short term contract. I was going to take a break in March and also planned on going to London and Lingen for SQLBits and DataGrillen during the year. Missing that trip was my biggest regret of 2019 because I ended up going nowhere.

Even if you can’t go anywhere, it’s still worth taking time off work to help avoid burnout in IT. I just hope this year that I do get to enjoy some sunshine with my family and friends.

Protected: Consulting rates

23rd December 2020 By John McCormack Leave a Comment

2020 blog – a year in numbers

18th December 2020 By John McCormack Leave a Comment

Blog Performance

A few thoughts on my blog performance for 2020.

I have more than doubled my page views from 2019 to 2020 so I’m naturally delighted about that. At the time of writing and with 13 days of 2020 to go, I have had 16,773 page views. The average time on each page was 3 minutes and 53 seconds which tells me that real people are reading the content. I wasn’t really tracking this all year so these numbers were a bit of a surprise to me. In the full year of 2019, I only had 7018 page views with an average page viewing time of 3 minutes and 26 seconds.

Things are going quite well and I’ve decided to aim for 30,000 page views in 2021. Doubling the numbers again is not going to be easy, but I hope to achieve this with a steady flow of new content and updating some old material. Breaking it down, it is a modest target of 82 page views per day so is achievable if I continue to add good content.

Regular Content

I’ve been trying to put out regular content, although it is not all the same theme. I tend to find that when I solve an interesting problem, I tell myself that it would make an interesting blog post. So I’ve blogged on Azure, PowerShell, Performance tuning and whatever the #tsql2sday topic was that month. My aim for 2021 is to be a bit more specialised so you will see more posts on Azure SQL DB and Managed Instance, as well as performance tuning. These are areas I would like to work more on in 2021. Of course, I’m going to keep going with the #tsql2sday posts because they usually provide an interesting topic I wouldn’t otherwise think of.

Blog successes

One of my recent posts on database mail with managed instances has gained some traction. Although only published in October, it is already in my top 10 page views for the year. My feeling is that this is the sort of thing that people are googling for now, the MS documentation isn’t amazing either and its on trend.

One of my first ever blogs about sending html emails using database mail is at number 9. I find that hard to believe because when I see old dates on blog posts, I tend not to want to read them. I remember publishing this post and wondering if anyone would read it and even worse, if I would be ridiculed for it.

My number 1 post for the 2nd year running was EC2 SQL Server Backups to Amazon S3. I haven’t read it for a while and I think it might be in need of a major update, so I plan to do that in the next few weeks.

My 2nd most popular post, also for the 2nd year running was How to create a table in AWS Athena. I used Athena a lot in my old job and I found the documentation difficult to understand so I put together my own instructions. I can’t believe that it is still one of my most popular posts and in fact, it grew from 768 views in 2019 to 2741 views in 2020. It’s a sign to me that AWS Athena is gaining a lot of popularity. The post is 3 years old though so I think it needs to be refreshed too.

Blog disappointments

I wrote a full video series about SQL Server on AWS RDS. It wasn’t a hit. In fact, it only accounted for 246 page views. The videos are on YouTube as well and have only had 237 views. The videos were all subtitled to help with accessibility and it took me a long time. My son also did some subtitling and he got some pocket money for helping out. I have to learn from this though, I didn’t appear in the videos, they were purely PowerPoint and demos and when I think of the videos that I enjoy watching, they always have an engaging presenter.

I’m currently creating a new video series called fundamentals of Azure SQL DB Managed Instances. I hope to learn from the mistakes of my RDS course, and hopefully it will reach a wider audience.