Jorg's Brain Log

Weather has changed big time! No more 30 degrees but 20-22 with big winds, which are creating very big Hawaii style waves. The surfers love it, and after some careful dips in the water, me too!

It’s very humbling to float in the ocean and see a house of a wave coming to you. Sometimes I duck and let the wave come over me and I look at it come by. Amazing sight! A little bit too much force to take my underwater house and camera with me in the sea. If I get caught by a wave it sometimes takes around 20-30 seconds before I come up again. Thank you, freediving!

Of course no condition for the kids and for a warm-blood mammal like my girlfriend Helle. So loads of swimming pool and city visits to explore the nearby cities.

Looking at the forecast weather will not be changing a lot in the coming days. No problem, because the kids are having loads of fun and we manage to get some rest in the mean time. The evenings are always great at a camping. All together doing some games and watching 44 road runner episodes I brought on my computer. I don’t think Helle liked that last part so much…

Tomorrow we’re going a little bit further away and visit an island…

On Saturday morning we drove to the famous Mont Saint Michel. I’ve been here before as a kid and I really wanted to go again. It was only a 50 kilometer detour from our route, so worthwhile to visit it again.

Mont Saint Michel is nothing more then a rock with a big church built on it. In the last centuries some houses has been put on the island as well. There is a road from the mainland to the island that used to get flooded when the tide was high, so that you can only reach the island with low waters.

When I was a kid this was still the case and I remember crossing over the road to keep in front of the upcoming water, because my parents left a little bit late. Nothing has changed I guess with them.

Anyway, due to all the mud and canals in the bay of the island, the water doesn’t come over the road and the parking places anymore. So the real spectacle is lost. However I understood that the France government has decided to fix this in 2011 by building some sort of big hydraulic dam.

The visit itself was great. Beautiful place with a LOT of tourism, but even on this small island and probably because we were there early, we found some good rest places to drink some coffee and get a snack. Great visit and we will surely visit it again when the road will be covered with the sea again, like it should be.

And on we went to the camping site in Bretignolles–sur-mer. The last 100 kilometers took almost 2 hours to complete, so I didn’t expect that. Loads a small roads to get to our place. Not a lot of tourism as would become clear in the coming days.

Camping site and caravan are great! Very quiet, not a lot of people. Good swimming pool. 200 meter walk to the beach. Only thing missing is a close by play-field for the kids to walk to without our supervision. The camping roads and caravans are placed in a maze of some sort, so we can’t let the kids walk around freely.

Wifi is free, so I can get my daily dosage of Internet usage. I’ve got a minimal connection at the caravan, but it’s enough to go my google reader and GMail every now and then.

The weather is great! Good temperature and today around 30 degrees  in the shadow. The beach is also great, but as we are stationed at the golf of Calais we’ve got some pretty serious waves! Surf dudes are walking around from the campers to the sea and back. Pretty cool environment to be in.

Kids are having fun in the sea and sand. Good excuse for me to dig some holes and make some castles in the sand. The pleasure of having kids is that you have a good excuse to behave like a kid yourself as well!

Today is the second day of our summer family holiday. We’re going to bretignolles-sur-mer on the West France coast.

Yesterday we drove from Eindhoven to Mondeville near Caen, which was a distance of almost 600 kilometers.

We left at 9:15 in the morning and arrived around15:30, so it was a pretty good drive. Kids no problem at all with entertaining themselves in the car, so that was easy as well.

Arriving at the hotel it turned out we were way to early for check-in and decided to go visit the nearby coast which was 20 kilometers.

After arriving at the beach it turned out to be quite windy. So windy that the sand of the beach was sandblasting our legs, so the kids were pretty fast back in the dunes. I couldn’t resist the urge to at least stand in the water with my feet and feel the ocean. Mysterious…

After our short beach visit we decided to get some food (crepes/pancakes) and walk on the boulevard. Indy amused herself by getting on the trampoline with the bungeejump cords so she could do some massive jumps and salto’s.

Rody had fun collecting shells afterwards on a part of the beach were it was somewhat less windy. It’s always amazing what you can find on the beach! Beautiful!

Returned to our hotel, we received the key and put our stuff in the pretty small room. It was good enough for 1 night with a toilet, shower and 1,5 bed. But for sure not more! After a pretty loud neighbour party stopped around 11pm, we’ve got a decent night of sleep.

In the morning we had some good breakfast and the kids took all the little cheese out of the box and made sure that our money was returned in the form of food. Good for them. Now we’re going to drive to Mont Saint Michel, the famous island with the church in the water. More about that in a follow up post.

Starting with a new job means that you’re going to get a whole lot of new information to process. Through the years I’ve developed my own way of handling with these warehouses of information that need to be stored in my head.

Probably the most important thing to do is to carefully plan the information injections so that you don’t OD in the first few weeks. One of the things I use is having a maximum of 3 interviews a day with at least 1 hour of rest in between to process what I’ve learned and heard.

A typical day at work would look something like this:

08:00-09:00 process news/email/other incoming information
09:00-11:00 create
11:00-12:00 interview 1
12:00-13:00 process
13:00-13:30 lunch
13:30-14:30 interview 2
14:30-15:30 process
15:30-16:30 interview 3
16:30-17:30 process

Today is the start of my third week on the job. After getting to know my team in the first two weeks I’m amazed about how much skill, dedication and commitment can be found in one team. It’s great to work with these kind of people, from which I already know we can do great things together.

Now I know the team and some of the biggest priorities I will focus this week on the culture of the company. Culture is that thing that is hard to describe but what makes a company tick. Culture can make or break a company, so it’s good to focus on it separately.

I don’t expect to understand it completely after 3 weeks already, but to get a general idea what drives people, how people work with each other and the atmosphere that hangs around is very important to me.

It’s clear that if you want to improve something, you have to change stuff. If you want to change stuff, you run into emotions. Emotions bring people and if you understand people you can make change a much easier action then just doing it without adapting.

I’m noticing that I’m in competition with myself all the time. Settings goals, high performance, improving, etc. It’s time to get some new players in the field and compete with some others as well!

Maybe some external competition is going to do me good by resetting my limits to new heights and seeing new possibilities. Some physical and mental competitions need to be planned!

To be continued…

In case you didn’t notice it yet: Privacy is dead! In times of Facebook, Twitter and many other social sharing sites, everything is public. So instead of fearing what comes online about you, why not controlling it yourself by putting everything online yourself.

If you look at my frontpage, you can find a link to all kinds of links about Jorg‘s online presence. And just to be sure: if you need to reach me, my mobile number is +31634027003.

After my first workweek at Copaco it’s time again to add some other blocks to my schedule again. I almost took a complete week off from all my other activities to get a focus on a good start last week. Now that I’m in the 40 hour work week again (I’ve got to talk with Timothy Ferris about this one), it’s time to start with some other stuff again.

The most important one for me is writing! Actually I did write a lot last week, but that was mostly Copaco related. So I’ve got some catching up to do again. Oh well, no problem about that! Inspiration is fully here.

All my writing is going pretty well, except for one blog, Life Skills. Maybe that’s because the book I’m writing is about that subject and I don’t want to publish too much about this already. Or maybe just a lack of time or interesting subjects? Anyway, it’s time again to renew my commitment and downsize my plan to update Life Skills from 7 times a week to 3 times a week. A more noble schedule, with more time and subjects to put into my book.

The book is actually coming along pretty well. Some topics need research and some more time, but the outline is getting there! I guess my first draft of the book will be done around january 2010 and at the moment I’m guessing the book will be around 200 pages thick, a4 style. Pretty happy with the content outline.

My favorite topics to write about stay the same most of the time: Sports, ICT, Business and Life Skills. My personal writings on this blog or more like a public diary and really for ‘entertainment purposes’ only. I guess I easily stay above the 1000 words a day minimum I set myself. I wish I had a word counter that could measure all the words automatically I did on a day. Any suggestions?

The first week at Copaco is over again. It has been a very intense week, absorbing information like a sponge and getting to know many new people. For the next 2 weeks it will be more about the same, but as things have to get done, it’s also time to start planning and prioritizing in the next week.

One of the things I was a little bit afraid of was the fact I would be working from a business office again. full time! That’s been a while. 2007 was the last time I had a fixed desk, but even not 40 hours per week. Last time I was in the same office for 40 hours a week was in…. pffff…. oh yeah! Atos Origin time frame, around half way 2004. That’s 5 years ago.

The last months I worked mostly from my home office and it worked pretty well. But to be honest, this week 40 hour workweek at the same location (with the exception of visiting the location Nijmegen on Thursday morning), meant a very high productivity week. Starting early to get a head-start and between the meetings some serious information absorption.

My conclusion after a week of office work: if you’ve got a good workplace, you can achieve very high productivity. The difference between working from home and from the office is clear. Concentration and focus is the key benefit in here. No distraction from other private related stuff and a real getting things done mentality.

Time for the weekend and adding a block to the schedule.

After my announcement of Monday that I would be joining Copaco as their ICT manager, I’ve got some questions from friends about my own company and its future. In short I will outline what I’m using it for.

Dyrion will still exists but not for my normal ICT projects anymore. Dyrion is taking care of my business activities like speaking engagements and my writing projects. Also it’s my investment company for some long-term (business) investments (my pension and holder of some deposited brand names.

Of course Dyrion is also holder of the Shark brand that has focused completely on their sport based activities that will be cleared in the near future.

The website of Dyrion will be restyled in the coming weeks to make  the change more clear to its customers.