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I’ve been on a lot of flights in the last year. A lot. Only a handful of long haul, but I’ve been to Australia three times, the USA twice, South East Asia, and I’ve been making quite a lot of flights around New Zealand, most of them short hops.

Almost every flight has been with Air New Zealand, and eventually this starts to get recognised. In July I made it to Silver Class, which brings a few limited benefits. But look at what the Air New Zealand mPass app on my phone showed today:

New Tier Status: GOLD. Now I’ll get some worthwhile benefits. Lounge access, Priority check-in, Priority boarding, Priority waitlisting – now we’re talking! Priority check-in is irrelevant for Domestic flights, or even International originating from NZ. But Air New Zealand lines can be long in other countries.

There’s one other benefit which is particularly interesting to me – Fast Bag Tags. These are not just the usual ‘priority’ tags that everyone has. No, these are are special tags that apply to flights on turbo-prop planes. Rather than having to check your bags in, you can carry them out to the plane, hand them off just before you get on, then get them as soon as you get off the plane at the other end. This only works for the smaller regional flights, but it’s perfect for me, especially for all the short trips I make to Tauranga. I live relatively close to the airport, which means you tend to cut it fine when planning when to depart. You can’t afford any delays at checkin – now I don’t have to worry about that if I’m checking in a bag. I can turn up 15 mins before the plane leaves, swipe my phone to check in, and go straight to the plane. How good is that?

The flip-side to it all is that I’ve had a lot of time away from home, and a lot of early mornings and late nights. If you’ve only ever done casual travel, you don’t realise just how draining it can be doing business travel. Here’s an example: Recently I had full day of work in Christchurch. This meant getting up at 5 AM, departing the house at 6 AM, for a 6:50 flight. Work from 8:30 -> 6PM in Christchurch, then head to the airport and back home, getting home around 9PM. Shower, bed, up at 6AM the next day and back to the airport, off to somewhere else for a couple of days. I enjoy moving around, but it doesn’t leave a lot of time for anything else.

At least now things will be just that little bit nicer at the airport.

A couple of months ago I was the one finishing a long slog of study. This time it’s my wife’s turn, as she has now finished all her exams. All going well, this will mean that she will have completed her undergraduate degree. It does not mean the end of her studies – there’s at least two more years to go – but it does mark an important milestone.

Academic studies do not come naturally to Anna, and it has not been an easy path getting here. But she has persevered, learning how to learn, working out which study techniques work, and which ones don’t. In the last year in particular, she has really gotten into it, and now regularly achieves high praise for her work.

The last couple of weeks of exams were fairly intense, but I did what I could to help, and we got through it.

Since she has been working so hard, she decided she deserved a holiday, especially since I had a couple of ‘holidays’ in the USA earlier this year. I don’t think anyone who has been on a boot camp run by Narbik would describe it as a holiday, but we’ll let that slide. So she’s headed off to Brisbane for 10 days, leaving me home alone.

She thought it was a wonderful idea going to see her friends in the Brisbane area, until a couple of days out, when she realised we would be apart for 10 days. I don’t think I would be much use over there though – between Anna, Lara and Sarah, I wouldn’t get a word in the whole time.

To occupy myself, I’ve been in Wellington this weekend, at Kiwicon, a rather informal security conference. Lots of fun too. Good chance to catch up with various people I know in the industry.

Business travel coming up this week too, so I’ll be away again. Also means I won’t let the house get too messy while Anna’s away. Don’t want to get in trouble…

I’ve had a couple of questions come up about how I organise my life around work/study. I can’t promise all the answers, but I can relate what I’ve done over the last 18 months. Pretty much all the other certifications I’ve studied for were trivially easy compared to CCIE, or I was studying full-time, as in the case of my degree. This one was different. Far more time consuming, and I had to better organise things if I was going to get through it. The additional challenge I had was changing jobs about a year ago. Previously I was working at one place, so I had one list of tasks to do. Now I work in more of a consulting role, and I’m often in quite short-term engagements. That means multiple lists of tasks, for multiple clients. My previous methods weren’t keeping pace.

First piece of advice: Find a partner that will support you in everything you do, and make sure that you discuss your plans with them. If you’re going to invest a lot of time in something, you need to make sure that those around you understand when you will be busy, and when you will be available. Without their support, it doesn’t matter what else you do – it will end in tears.

Now for some specifics around managing tasks. I worked out that my challenges came down to keeping track of all the things I promised I would do, and making sure I was getting through my study plans. So I started looking around to see what was out there in terms of A) Strategies, and B) Software that could help.

After a bit of investigation, I settled on using a version of the Getting Things Done system by David Allen, also known as GTD. I certainly don’t follow all his steps exactly – I use a modified version, based in good part upon the writings at Asian Efficiency. These writings proved extremely helpful, both in providing general strategies, and specific instruction around how to use the software package I settled on – OmniFocus.

You can have a read of the strategies at Asian Efficiency yourself, but some of them I try and use are Eat That Frog, and the Pomodoro Technique. The first one means: That task you don’t want to do? Get it done first thing, and then the rest of the day is easier. The second one is about how to divide your time into manageable chunks of time, with scheduled breaks. Another strategy I’m working on (not always successfully) involves not checking your email first thing, but spending the first part of the day doing things like exercise, and planning your day. They have a series of posts on how to use OmniFocus, and how to integrate it into your life.

I chose OmniFocus for its reputation for power and quality, and because it works across the systems I use – MacBook Air, iPad, iPhone. OmniFocus is a tool for “staying on top of all the things you need to do.” It works well with the GTD system, and it has clients for OS X and iOS. These all synchronise, so updates on my phone show up on my laptop. The only problem is the price – it’s not cheap, especially if you buy all three of the apps – one for OS X, one for iPhone and one for iPad. But I’ve gone down the path of using it, and I think it’s helping.

Any new tasks that come up get added to OmniFocus. Initially they’re not sorted – that gets done once per day. Tasks are grouped by various projects – e.g. each of the customer projects I’m working on, or CCIE study. They can also have a “context” applied – so I can quickly find all the tasks for a specific project, or all the specific types of tasks – e.g. chores around the house. Tasks can also be set to recurring. So I can add a task for getting a haircut, and set it to re-occur 4 weeks after it is completed. The task comes up as due, I get a haircut, mark it as complete, then it disappears for 4 weeks. You can play around with how things re-occur too – some will come up again every week, regardless of if you completed it last week or not – e.g. paying rent. Others will only come up again a specific period after you completed it. Haircuts fall into that category – if you leave it a couple of weeks, then the next one is due 4 weeks from when it actually got done, not 4 weeks from when it should have been done. Tasks can have start times, and/or due times. They may not have any specific due date. Some things I note down simply because it’s something I would like to do one day, but there’s no pressing timeframe. That way it doesn’t get forgotten.

An example of the way I use these systems is that I have recurring tasks set up, where every morning I need to review my calendar, and choose my most important tasks for the day. This ensures that I don’t forget the meeting I scheduled weeks ago, and that I go through my list of tasks, and give myself 3-4 to do that day. Now I have a plan of attack, and I know where I’m going to spend my time that day. As I finish tasks, they get marked complete in OmniFocus. Every evening, I check to see what tasks I’ve added during the day, and make sure they get correctly categorised.

It does sound like a bit of work, and it is a bit, but you can do the steps pretty quickly. It’s no more time than would be spent on managing paper lists, but this is far more flexible, since I can assign dates to things, re-categorise them, shuffle them about, etc. And since it’s synchronised across my iDevices, it means I can almost always readily access my list of things to do.

When studying, I would add separate tasks for each of the sections I wanted to study. I would also have daily tasks set up for reviewing flashcards. This made it far less likely that things would slip. By having everything written down, it also takes it out of your head, and means you’ve got one less thing to worry about.

I guess it’s just another one of those ways that CCIE study has changed me – it’s not about the technologies, it’s about the methods, the strategies, the techniques – these are things I can apply to anything else I do in life.

Am I an Efficient Asian? Perhaps not yet, but it’s a work in progress, and I continually aim for better. I actually need to sit down and see how far my current practices have diverged from the recommended ways of doing things. Anyone have any thoughts they’d like to share on how they manage their life?

EDIT: One more thing to add about productivity – I have been Facebook-free for some time now. Very liberating.

On September 21st, in Sydney, I took the CCIE R&S lab for the second time. The first time I wasn’t fast enough, nor did I have a sufficient depth of knowledge at my fingertips. This time, through a combination of hundreds of hours of practice, revised study techniques, and a little luck, I proved to be good enough to pass the lab. The average number of attempts is around 2.7, and right back at the start I said I’d be happy to pass it in two attempts. Well guess what? I am happy about it.

There’s a reason you haven’t heard much from me in the last couple of months, and that’s because I’ve had to become very narrowly focused, eliminating all distractions. I couldn’t afford to take a month off work, so instead I needed to use all of the available time I had outside work for study. That meant I have done very little other than work and study for the last couple of months, since I got back from LA. Most nights and usually both days at the weekend I could be found stuck in the office. Time on the bus wasn’t wasted – I would be reading flashcards on my phone, or maybe flipping through Ruhann’s Routing-Bits handbook. When I was doing a long drive, I’d put on the INE audio bootcamp, to listen to Scott Morris talking about MPLS, BGP and PfR. Not surprisingly, this tended to be only on those trips when I was alone in the car.

All this work started to take it’s toll. I now have a handful of grey hairs I didn’t have when I started. I started getting RSI from all the time spent at the keyboard. I put on a little bit of weight from the reduced activity levels. It placed a bit of stress on my marriage, as Anna only had me around for limited times, and I was always studying. But she did everything within her power to help me succeed. She looked after me, gave me support, and gave me space when I needed it. Without her love and support I would not have been able to do this. I have no idea how people who have young children manage to get through it.

Last year, I didn’t feel like I was all that far off passing. I passed the Troubleshooting section, and only two questions were (I felt) unanswerable. I’d gone in with a strategy of “know the basics well, and know where to look in the documentation for the remaining sections if you get stuck.” That wasn’t good enough. The CCIE lab exam has moved from being a logic test to more of a speed test. You need to be able to rattle off a wide range of configurations. You just don’t have time to go looking for things in the documentation. As far as I can tell, they also seem to deliberately slow down access to the docs too, making it a painful process searching for content. Or maybe it’s just that they use an old version of Internet Explorer? Regardless, I needed to improve on my speed.

So this year I took a different approach. Rather than working on multi-protocol labs, where a range of technologies were configured to interact, I instead focused on individual areas. Work through all the options for a technology, then move on to something else. I also signed up for Narbik’s bootcamp in LA. This gave me access to new materials, and a new way of looking at things.

The other big change to my study techniques was the the move to using flash cards. These have come a long way from when people would write out hundreds of cards, and carry them around. Now we can use tools like Mental Case. You still need to type out your cards, but now you can synchronise them with your phone. It can also track them, remembering which ones you got right and wrong, and using “spaced learning” techniques to decide which cards you should study, when. As I worked through different technologies, I would add to my set. I particularly focused on small snippets of configuration. Each day, I aimed to flip through 30-50 cards. You get sick of them after a while, but I think this really helped, especially with the “non-core” technologies, where you don’t configure them as frequently.

In the last few weeks, I took a couple of practice exams, and scored reasonably well. Every evening, Saturday and Sunday, and all the last week, I booked time on labs of real equipment. I took the last week off work, and used that time to really drill into the topics I didn’t want to see on the lab. After a while, I would have been quite happy to see them on the lab, as I felt I had a good understanding. Cisco seemed to know that though, and so they didn’t ask many questions on those areas!

I flew over to Sydney the day before the exam. I used up one of my free upgrades to get bumped up to Business class. A little bit of a waste for a short-haul (3 hour) flight, but I had to use it up soon anyway. That gave me more space, lounge access, etc. Worth it. Only did a little bit of study the day before though. I wanted to be a bit more relaxed.

On the day of the lab itself, it took me about 10 minutes to get into the rhythm of it. At first you’re a bit stressed, but then you start answering questions, and things fall into place. Around the middle of the day I thought to myself “You’ve got a damn good chance of passing today, if you don’t mess it up.” But there was still a lot of work ahead of me. All I could do was keep plugging away at it, and not get bogged down with anything. With around 45 mins to go, I went back and checked over my work. Found a couple of stupid mistakes, which would have cost me at least 10%. I believed I’d answered everything, but I couldn’t be certain I hadn’t missed any key details. I also could have broken some restrictions (some of the wording was a little unclear). Not much I could do about it though.

Just tried to relax for the evening, have a couple of beers, watch some TV. I had been hoping for results before I went to sleep, but it wasn’t until early the next morning they came through. They don’t just email you the results, they send you an email telling you to login to check your results. Quickly try and login, try and make sense of their 1990s-style website, and there’s the result: PASS. I didn’t jump up and down (It was 6am and I was still in bed), but I was pretty happy. I’d put so much more effort into it this time around, and I knew I was so close, so it would have been extremely disappointing if I had missed out. First thing to do was to let Anna know. She was probably more nervous waiting than I was.

On the way home, I had lounge access at Sydney airport, so could have had free beer and wine. But it was only 9am, and I was just too drained to bother. When I got home, Anna and I had a rather expensive bottle of champagne. No great celebrations though – we were both tired, and quiet night on the couch was just what we needed.

I haven’t worked out exactly how much I’ve spent over the last 18 months. Probably somewhere between $15 and $20,000NZD. God knows what the time cost. All going well, it will be repaid over the course of my career. Having a CCIE doesn’t quite guarantee you a job like it once did, but it gives you opportunities. It doesn’t mean that I will move jobs, but it does mean that if/when I do want to move, there’s more doors open to me.

I haven’t decided exactly what I’ll do next. For the next few weeks I’m just going to take it easy. Even now, over a week after the exam, I’m not quite back to normal. I was tired for days afterwards, having been under so much stress. For now, I’ll just do jobs around the house and relax. But in future…Narbik thinks I should take on another CCIE. He says I’m young, why WOULDN’T I do it? I’m also tempted to do HP’s Master ASE certification (much easier cross-over now I have CCIE), and maybe CCDE. Will have to have some negotiations with Anna first. Right now it’s my turn to look after her, and help her get through her exams this year. She deserves some payback for all she’s done for me.

I’m currently sitting in the Air New Zealand Lounge at LAX, waiting for my flight back to Auckland. I’m still feeling a little shell-shocked, after what was a full-on week of CCIE training. I’ve just completed a 5 day CCIE bootcamp with the well-known Narbik Kocharians, of Micronics Training. I’ve been on all sorts of training courses over the years, and I can tell you that I have never been on one like this.

Training isn’t always easy – normally I end up going to training in the day, and then doing my “normal” work in the evening. It makes for days that are a bit longer than normal, but nothing excessive. This was different. For this course, I deliberately had my phone off all week, and never even looked at my work email. There simply wasn’t time. Training courses are normally much more relaxed affairs, usually no more than 6-7 hours per day. Not so for Narbik. We’d start around 9am, and just push on and on. Class would finish around 9-10pm, and then you’d go back to your hotel to work on labs for another hour or two. Except on Thursday. Then I stayed working on labs until 4:15am. That’s right, we were in class until 4:15 in the morning. Another hour and it would be getting light again. And I wasn’t the last to leave.

It wasn’t hard to pay attention though. Narbik won’t let you drift off. No Powerpoint presentations. No projector in use at all. I know other instructors will regularly demonstrate things on live routers, but Narbik sticks with the whiteboard. Technologies broken down, diagrams and tables built, then he just reels off Cisco IOS commands, and all their options, simply by writing them up on the board. It’s one thing to know the configs off the top of your head, that’s quite another when you can list all the options a command has. He says that he’s getting older, and his memory is not so good, but then he goes and lists 30 or 40 RTP Payload types and codes. This is all done in a highly engaging style. Apparently Cisco routers are run by little green guys, who are pissed off at everyone else for being taller than them, and this explains why IOS has so many inconsistencies and bizarre implementation details. Oh and apparently working on BGP labs is good for your cholesterol.

And then when he’s done talking about something, he’s got complete workbooks with hundreds and hundreds of pages of labs, with full explanations. These are not chances to show off all sorts of devious little IOS tricks – instead each lab focuses on a technology, and covers it from all angles. Everything outside of the technology is simplified, so that you can focus on exactly what you need to. Rather than being told “OK, do lab 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 and then I’ll review your progress,” things worked a bit differently here – Narbik would suggest working on say BGP labs. It was then up to you to work out how much you wanted to do, and where to focus your attention. This recognises the fact that everyone has a different journey towards the CCIE, and making everyone do the same set of tasks doesn’t make sense. Some people were early on in their preparations, some had attempted the lab multiple times. Some are strong in MPLS, others have only vaguely heard of it. Ideally you already need a strong foundation before attending this course – it’s not for beginners. To get the most out of it, you need to have a pretty good idea of the fundamentals before you get there. But what if you do find it’s too much for you at this stage? No problem – Narbik offers a policy of free re-takes. I’ve never seen this before with training courses. You can keep coming back as many times as you like. No problem at all. In fact he encourages it.

This is another thing that is different – Narbik is genuinely concerned with helping people achieve their potential. Need to call him because you’re stuck on something? No problem – here’s his mobile number. Having a problem with something a few weeks down the track, and a quick back and forth with email isn’t helping? No problem – he’ll do a Skype session with you. For free. The other thing he’ll do is give you an honest assessment of how prepared you are for the CCIE lab. You might not like it, but he’s got no problem with telling you that you’re not ready. He’s been training CCIEs for a while, and he can fairly quickly gauge where you’re at. If he think’s that you are ready, then it doesn’t mean you’ll definitely pass – but you probably will on your next attempt, and almost certainly within 2 attempts.

The other thing about this course was the people. Rather than a bunch of people who’d been told by the boss they had to attend some dull course for compliance reasons, this course was all people who had decided they wanted to become CCIEs. Many were paying for the course out of their own pockets, so you’ve got a bunch of committed people, all intelligent engineers with a strong networking focus. You just don’t regularly get 20 of those in one room. Many were staying for the full 12 days too, which goes deeper into the non-core technologies. Due to time and money, I only did the first part, which focuses on core technologies, and is the basis of Narbik’s traditional 5-day bootcamp. That’s OK, I’ve got plenty of labs to work through the rest of the material, and I know Narbik will offer advice if I get stuck.

Oh and the most random out of context quote from Narbik during the week: “Don’t run like that man, it makes it look like you shit your pants”

We were the first class to run in the new training facility in Glendale, CA. Narbik holds courses all around the world, and they will be held in hotels and the like, but now he’s got his own dedicated space, in his hometown. There’s a few minor items still being sorted out, but nothing that caused us any problems. I thought there was plenty of light already, but he wants even more lights put in, so there’s absolutely no chance of anyone falling asleep. Not that you were likely to anyway. Well maybe on Friday.

I stayed at Extended Stay Hotels, which was just down the road from the training centre. An easy walk, maybe 5-10 minutes. This was probably the best option, as it’s cheaper than the Hilton, and you don’t waste any time getting to or from the training centre. Trust me, this is a good thing when you’re heading home well after dark. You don’t want to be mucking around with transport, trying to get to bed. Free Wi-Fi too. Perhaps not as nice a place as the Hilton, but you get a usable kitchen and good-sized fridge. Another useful thing when you might be eating at strange times, and/or you’re trying to keep costs down. Narbik will also pick you up from here or the Hilton if needed, as it’s on the way to/from his house.

The only problem I had with the hotel was…bedbugs. Again. But not in Singapore for once! It’s funny really, considering the number of places I’ve slept in – shady hotels, restaurants, garages, ditches, brothels, couches, floors, police checkpoints, abandoned buildings… Yet I’ve only had bedbugs in very clean Singapore, and now in a perfectly respectable hotel in California. I can’t really fault the hotel though. These things happen, with large numbers of people moving around it’s just too easy for them to spread. It wasn’t nice finding 3 bedbugs around my pillows, fat with my blood. Only around 10-15 bites though. Far fewer than some previous attacks, where I’ve had 10 in just one line of bites. The hotel moved me to another room, and I saw that they got professional pest control in to treat the room. It was undeniably bedbugs, as I’d preserved some of the evidence (squashed bedbug). The hotel staff even moved my luggage to a new room while I was at training, even hanging up the shirts. No big deal, but I could have done without a few hours of lost sleep, during a tough week.

The area itself is a very pleasant suburb. Tree-lined streets, nice houses, that sort of thing. Obviously a bit better part of town, which was just as well since I was regularly walking home late at night. There’s a good-sized supermarket directly opposite the training centre, and a Starbucks. This being the USA, there’s a lot of fast-food around. Within a few blocks, there was McDonalds, Burger King, Del Taco, El Pollo Loco, Pizza Hut, Jack in the Box, In-N-Out Burger, KFC, and probably some others I missed. Most major intersections had fast food chains on at least 2 or 3 corners. After a few blocks, the chains started repeating themselves. America can be strange sometimes. Oh and if you want any Armenian-related supplies, you’re in luck – this area has a large Armenian population.

Finally, I quite enjoyed the experience of flying Premium Economy last week. Possibly a bit too much. As I settled into my (relatively) large, secluded space, I thought yes, this is the life for me. Then the FA brought glasses of bubbles around, along with hot towels. Dinner was several courses, served with multiple sets of cutlery, on real crockery. Wine was poured in proper glasses, in large measures. A beanbag to rest my feet on? A blanket that does more than cover my knees? Plenty of space around me to spread papers, laptop, iPad, etc? Yes, this could just be the life for me. I wasn’t quite as prepared as the girl sitting next to me, who changed into pyjamas after takeoff. That’s organisation, that is. See, when you can carry on more luggage, you’ve got plenty of room for the sleepwear.

It already had me thinking about a long haul trip with Anna, working out if we can afford the centre pair of seats. They’re well suited for a couple, as you can even have dinner facing each other. I guess we’ll just have to see how business goes over the next year or two. I was thinking that I wasn’t looking forward to going back to the back of the plane for the return trip…but I just found out, 4 hours before takeoff, that I’ve been upgraded for the trip home. Thank you Air New Zealand! Now how am I ever going to return to my regular position of 56K?

For the second time in as many months, I’m leaving Anna, and heading to the United States. Only for a week, although Anna tells me it will be like an ETERNITY. We’ve been through this before, and she survived that time, so I’m sure she’ll manage. Possibly with plenty of wine. Definitely requiring the help of her friends.

This time I’m paying my own way, and doing something a little more challenging. No more hard-hitting investigations into drinking culture, no this time I’m doing real work. I’m attending a CCIE bootcamp in Los Angeles, run by Micronics Training. A ‘bootcamp’ is an intensive training experience, running from 9am to 9pm every day, except on Thursday when it goes to 3am. Not going to be a lot of time for exploring Hollywood I’m afraid.

Because the course is full-on, I’ve decided to spend a little extra, and pay for a Premium Economy seat. It might surprise you to know that in all the flights I’ve done, I have NEVER been upgraded. Not once. I’ve always sat at the back of the plane. Usually RIGHT at the back of the plane – recently I boarded a plane with a printed boarding pass saying I was in row 29, when the plane only had 25 rows of seats. Yes, that far back, that’s where I normally belong. I don’t ever turn left.

The closest I’ve come is flying Works Deluxe. For those unfamiliar, Works Deluxe is perhaps best described as an approximation of how flying used to be. Or at least how we think we remember it. So nothing over the top, but a nicer experience than modern economy class. Premium Economy should be a step up from that, which should mean I get a little more sleep. That’s the main advice from the instructor on this course – get as much sleep as you can beforehand. Should be lots of fun.

The good thing about going away for a week like this is that I can entirely focus on CCIE studies. No more trying to fit it in after work, or at the weekends. No interruptions (Yes, I do love you Anna, I just may not be in the mood right now to discuss what colour curtains we should get…). The plan is that this will push me along with my studies, and help get momentum going for another lab attempt in the next couple of months. I’ll report back next week on progress!