Use your time wisely

Remember I said that after the second week the job started to feel boring. I mean it, dead boring. I started to have lots of free time. I would finish really fast my deliverables and wait for the date in the timeline to arrive.

That situation gave me the opportunity to use my free time in whatever I wanted. I tried different stuff. I goofed around. I tried to talked to my co-workers (these guys were really busy, they talked two or three times then got back to work) but in the end it was still boring.

Everything changed when I started reading in my laptop. I found a great site where I could read technical books online. I started learning more about the technologies we were planning to use. I read a lot of different technical books, great books.

Those books helped me a lot in the future. I didn’t have a plan I just read what seem insteresting to me at that time. I know it sounds strange, but all the information proved to be valuable in the near future.

I got better at my job. But the best thing is got better at the job I wanted to have. I was getting prepared. The opportunity haven’t arrived at that time, but I was getting ready. I could have done a lot of other things in my free time. I could have bypassed the company proxy (it wasn’t hard) and watched kangaroo fights in Youtube all day, but I did the opposite. I’m not really sure why, but it just happened that way.

Another important thing is that I found people to talk to. Sometimes when I was heading to the bathroom I would bump into people, random co-workers. I just said Hi and start talking. I ended asking questions about their jobs. What they liked, what they hated and what they thought about the company.

These talks were a great source of information. Not at that time. Some years later, I interacted differently with these co-workers. I needed things from them and they needed things from me. Those talks helped me understand them and understand their job. I talked to literally anyone, and almost everything was valuable in the end. I also made a lot of friends and it is a lot easier to work with someone you know a little than working with a complete stranger.

The things I did worked well for me, I am not sure if it’s going to work for you. Maybe you don’t need to read or you hate talking to people, you need to find out what things are going to work for you, but I am really sure you need to:
“Use your time wisely”