Tuesday, July 26, 2011

What's Next?

Part of goal setting is deciding what's next.

This is true for people you lead, as well.

How many times have you seen a sudden drop in motivation or performance, yet when that same person or team is given self-directed time to accomplish things, they'll spend a disproportionate amount of time researching it?

I like to call this the "summer vacation planning method".

Most people put more time into planning their summer vacation than they do into planning
  • Their families
  • Their careers
  • Their next step(s)

As leaders, we have an obligation to those counting on us to
  1. Understand where they are in their goal-reaching progress, and
  2. Help them identify the "next step" when they've reached a certain point in their progress.

I have found that 40%-50% completed is about where attention starts to fall off, and the next goal needs to be defined. This same goal will need to be sharpened, refined, and (potentially even) publicized around 85%-90% complete.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Indexing article on sqlservercentral

Indexes, Indexes, Indexes

He's got some good points. Interesting in that I'm wondering if you could schedule the pull down of the stats to a development laptop, for local analysis, and what that would do to the performance of the thing if you accidentally went some time period without downloading the stats. Think sine wave - one day, lots and lots of collected stats, and the next day, nothing.

Shouldn't have any impact, but could be interesting to test.

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Indexing/73872/

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Go Army!

Another good resource for finding "Out Of Office" opportunities in the DC region is the Army Corps Of Engineers, Baltimore District:

http://www.nab.usace.army.mil/Recreation/