What is useful to do in the holidays?

Or how to make, that was not excruciatingly painful for the wasted flying new year holidays?
If in connection with the devaluation of the ruble you're suddenly not going anywhere for the holidays, or go, but assured that there will be plenty of time, which you still don't know what to do (e.g., the road), I suggest you 7 ways to spend pleasant and helpful.

1. To see the video conferences
Many are now in awe of TED. Yes, there are interesting and useful things, but I wonder if development in the fields of management and IT, I recommend the website IT Talks. There is a collection of the most interesting thematic conferences in recent years.
Still a very interesting collection of videos from seminars at CodeFreeze
To watch the videos offline (plane, train, etc) I can recommend a couple of extensions for FireFox:
• addons.mozilla.org/ru/firefox/addon/download-flash-and-video — shakes almost everything except Vimeo
• addons.mozilla.org/ru/firefox/addon/video-downloadhelper — almost all shakes and Vimeo in particular, but the names of the files generates anyhow.


2. To clean up my friends page
When you have 5-10 minutes of free time many of us almost unconsciously climb check pendency in the social. networks. But the new year is the time when the SOC. the network of almost complete calm. A great activity for 5-10-30-60 minutes (depending on how it all started) to clean news feed from really useless information. Most friends are not one hundred people, and half of them you saw live. And very often we did not wonder what they eat for lunch and how cool jumping their dog. Therefore, virtually all popular social. networks there tools unsubscribe from updates without deleting people from friends. So if you are tired of the constant posting of one of your friends about politics, or about work, just hit "unsubscribe".
There is really a side effect of unsubscribing from most updates, you often than not will take 5-10 minutes of free time in the future but hopefully today's selection will help you to solve this problem :)

3. Read a book
As corny as it may sound, but seriously! Sure there are plenty of books that would allow you to grow professionally, which is very useful in our unstable from an economic point of view. Know what weekend you want to relax and not think about work, specially for this is a compromise solution: entertainment"obajatelnyj" books. This so-called business novels and just written lightly or with humor professional books. Examples of such books:
• Freeman E., Sierra K., "design Patterns" – Without exaggeration design patterns chewed for blondes (tested on one blonde verstality :-) ).
• M. E. Litvak Psychological Aikido is surprisingly alive psychological benefits in communication in conflict and not very situations in life and at work.
• Slava Pankratov, "the Black book Manager" – more like a presentation than a book, but very concentrated guide for managers, helping slightly to look at ourselves.
• Michael Lewis, "MoneyBall. How mathematics has changed the most popular sports League in the world" – the Book not so much about mathematics as it is about how you can make a breakthrough, a discovery, both in business and in the established scientific community. She is in the top 10 recommended business books in the United States. I admit that have not read the book, but the film made a lasting impression on me.
• Ayn Rand, "Atlas shrugged" is a Book, like, art, but it is significant that no author of fiction has become philosophical, so the book itself is somewhat in the middle. According to surveys in USA, this book is in second place after the Bible in the rating books, the biggest influence on people.
• Shrivers Joop, "How to be a rat. The art of intrigue and survival at work" — hesitated to add a book to the list. Personally, I didn't bring her any advice, but I can say that if you are working with gasohol or "natural" monopolies, the book will help you better understand on first sight seem logical, some actions of heads and ordinary employees of these companies.

4. To do a retrospective of the year
In both classical and Agile methodologies of management there are different procedures to look back to see what was done well and what is not. I used to do these "looks" after each facepa or major victory, but nevertheless it is still worth periodically stop and see whether what I do helps or I should change something. If you do this exercise, covering the past year, just to remember:
• Large setbacks and failures (if not largest, then at least those who remember)
• Major victory, good luck, and "Like A Boss" moments
• Those things, actions or people who constantly "get", bothered, interfered with the concentrated work or relaxation.
• The most memorable moments of relaxation
• Etc. the list can be extended depending on your preferences and values in life and at work.
Then try to analyze why these things happened. The process is called smart Root cause analysis (RCA). There are many techniques for this, including the Ishikawa diagram, "5 why" and others. Many of them are described in Chapter 6 of the book of Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, "Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great", if you have difficulties with English or prefer to watch a video, you can see video report by Boris Wolfson "Effective retrospectives". The only thing I want to warn: to shift the blame for failures on others or external circumstances. Yes, it is easiest to do and our brain has learned to do it on the machine, but the goal of a retrospective is to find what we can change. And if you blame it all on external causes, then to improve something we just can't do it.
When understood the true causes, you need to understand can you change something of these causes, and, if so, what needs to be done. Then you need to take long-known, but not lost its relevance the SMART technique to your plans for the year sounds "from January 12 to start going to the gym". You need to set a specific goal, the achievement of which will be easy to check (measure) and a clear deadline. For example, in the bench press to lift 90 kg by may 1, 2015. In addition, you should always know your next step, for example, "to get to the mezzanine shoes for exercise, buy a gym membership NNN", etc.

5. To do your body
Since I started talking about sports, if you are on new year holidays do not eat at the ski resort, so obviously you need to recover your health after long hours at the office, eating doughnuts, pizzas and other products, the usual office worker. You can do it without buying a gym membership. There are plenty of other inexpensive and interesting ways:
• ski slopes in the city or the suburbs,
• cross-country skiing in a nearby Park,
• ice skating
• climbing wall
• horseback riding
• building snow FORTS with the kids (or without ;))
• Panda-parks,
• pool
• workout-s in the yard or in the Park,
• squats and push-UPS right at home for the lazy :).
In General, it was desire.

6. Train your brain
Brain to train is as important as muscle. In the Network described by many exercise for brain training, but I liked the American financier James Altucher: "Every day, write down 10-20 bad ideas a day. Or good ideas doesn't matter. After 6 months you'll train your "mental muscle" you will feel like a "machine of ideas". It's like a superpower which has no end."
7. Spend time with children
This item is the last not because it is not the most important, because not everybody still has children. Why is it important to devote a significant amount of free time, and sometimes to carve out time specifically to communicate with their children? Because that's what you as parents can teach them the things that they most useful. And no matter how much your child: 16 days, 16 years – in every age have something to teach the child or just about to have a heart. By the way, with 16 years it is possible to carry out retrospective about the conflicts between you. This can only add links on the book of Masaru Ibuka "After three too late" and note "Agile in the education of children"

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru