2021 August
Spent some time in Spain with my family. Especially with COVID, traveling and seeing your family is harder (video/calls help a lot). I cherish those moments and am incredibly grateful for each minute I get to spend with them. My dog, Rachel too. ♥️
Did
Added more links/notes in wiki.
Got to work with Memex a bit. It's an awesome tool and Oliver is an incredible founder with a great vision for this ever growing knowledge space. I need to make Memex work for Safari first before I dive into it more and start tuning it more to my liking.
Learned
YouTube once recommended me a video about history of Rome and it blew my mind. I then spent some time more learning about Greeks & the Mongol Empire. Want to read a book about Genghis Khan & study the history of China/US/EU, WW1/WW2/ColdWar. After I release my projects and secure my finances though.
Listened
Nils released new collab album. Quite liked this song from it.
Watched
Started watching The Expanse.
Other
Wasn't as productive in moving towards shipping (completing) my goals these past months. Something did click for me recently though and I am much more focused now. It's a mixture of realizing how important 'momentum' and feeling any kind of progress is towards being actually productive (and finishing things). Without any kind of rewarding wins (small tasks/goals completed), it's easy to go into deep cycles of wasting time and being distracted. Probably due to the subconscious fear of failure (or dread for how 'hard' upcoming tasks are). Important to start off each of the days with any win you can get. And carry on the momentum from that win.
Thus I am going to waste much less time on anything that isn't making me and my projects grow. Especially early on in the day. Do productive work for some time in the morning. Only then allow myself to spend some hopefully meaningful time on news/updates that I find of interest. For me at this moment it's Twitter + Twitter Russian List / HN / Reddit / Pinboard (Popular) / Lobsters & YouTube. Such colossal sink holes of times these can be. It's especially tricky as I often feel like I am not 'wasting my time' there as I get slow dopamine hits of news/jokes/stories/.. Going to try put 'news consumption' (unless on the go where I can either do Podcast or browse Twitter as I walk somewhere) into dedicated times of the day. I once tried a system with Focus mac app where I did Pomodoro timers of 50 min focus, 5 min break. Repeating throughout entirety of the day. Going to try something similar with main goal of minimizing time spent on 'news' and more on building. Enough distractions. Also screw analytics. Going to try block all GitHub analytics pages forever. Last time I looked into it, I wasn't sure if I can blacklist based off regex (Focus does it so it should be possible). Would love to permanently block some sites forever.
TL;DR: Start off each day early with real work (tasks in my TODO list). Only then spend some time on 'news'. After that time, limit total time spent on those sites to bare minimum. Block sites that bring 0 benefit to me aside from an ego boost (personal analytics, GitHub/WikiAnalytics being main culprits for me 😿).
Also from now on, full honesty with myself above all. It's tiring lying to myself that 'I am working' or 'learning' when I am watching some videos about WW2 or whatever new news happened in Russia/US/World. Be honest with how I spend my time. Makes enjoying my breaks nicer too as I feel like I truly deserve them.
The honesty part will hopefully translate into more interesting entries here in look backs and Twitter/Instagram too. Haven't shared much of anything there due to reasons of nothing much interesting happening. This is going to change starting now.
Feel a lot better about this look back than any other one I've done. No complaining! I got this nice structure of Did, Learned, Listened, Watched and Other for closing thoughts that I will reuse for all upcoming look backs too. Life is slowly getting better & back on track.
Onwards to new month. 🍃 Incredibly excited for it.