Well, I gave up on looking for a book I was talking about the other day. I looked on amazon.com fairly exhaustively and all I could find was shit. Maybe someone can suggest one. Oh well, onward and upward.

We have been trying to get rid of a piece of shit system at work. I will spare you the details, but it is long overdue that this mechanism go away. We have a programmer and a couple of other guys that are highly intelligent that worked on tools to get rid of said system for months. Even after all their hard work, it is pretty much a manual process. Essentially, what is having to happen, is for someone to open a user's mailbox, and dig through it manually folder by folder, and find items that have been archived into this system. Then you have to highlight the items, then click the restore button, then move on to the next folder. Well, the problem is, that end users are for the most part, complete retards. They do not know how to properly maintain their mailbox, or they do know how, and they choose to not. A typical user at my company has between 25 and 50 sub folders under their in box, and rules to send mail to these folders automatically. Additionally, they appear to never empty their deleted items or sent items folders. There are typically thousands of emails in each users box spread across say 50 folders, so needless to say, it is a long arduous process.

Anyway, so there is now pressure to get this done as soon as possible. There were only two guys working on it, in addition to their other tasks, so it was moving quite slowly. They were averaging 3 per day each. So 6 per day total. My theory is that when something like this comes along, you pretty much have to go full on, all out, hamster kamakaze style. This way you get it done quickly, and then it is out of your hair forever.

So Thursday of last week I kicked it into full gear, and dedicated every free second I have to only doing this task. I was averaging 12 per day until yesterday. Yesterday I decided that I could increase output by using more machines to do the job. Today I got 18 done, and the bottleneck is still the computers, and not me.

...Moving on to the true heart of this matter. I have noticed in my life that I tend to approach things like this as much as possible. Something strange happens to me when I get into a serious groove on something. I sort of go into a tunnel vision trance kinda mode. It is hard to describe other than to say that my body adjusts to doing the function, and it sort of goes into cruise control, which allows my mind to focus on other things. This happens every single time I do something that is repetitive. I have found that in this mode, I can do something for hours on end without really putting much thought into it. I have used this mode in the past for activities like walking, running, etc... I am certainly not the only one who does this, I'm sure most people do, but it is interesting what people are capable of doing. Maybe I can use this somehow for my 30 day project. More on this later.