I initially started this post back at the end of July with the hope to have it out early August. However due to my somewhat glacial pace of writing at the moment, it has made this review seem even later than it should have done.
It is (was) that wonderful time of year again where HR ‘encourages’ all employees to waste an unholy number of working hours to fill out a yearly performance review, where everyone gets to celebrate crawling a few steps closer to fully embracing the company brainwashing Values and Standards. And so, resisting the temptation to have ChatGPT write me a glowing report, I figured I’d get myself in a reflective mood by doing a review of something that is actually important in my life. Therefore, it seems like an appropriate time to do a (somewhat late) mid-year reflection on my goals and hopes laid out in my 2023 End of Year Roundup, and see how we’re doing!
Sticking to (mostly) the original format:
Goals Progress
Always a bit of a murky area as they change quite a lot.
In terms of grand plans, still looking to buy a house long term, though somewhat on pause due to external factors awaiting resolution. Will just address that one as it goes. I highly doubt it will happen in 2024 as originally planned, but hey, such is life.
In terms of just general life goals, been shuffling around how I approach them somewhat recently.
Side Projects
Various projects on the go, in various stages of completion:
- projwarrior: Using an excellent plugin, I’ve started being able to use obsidian to help keep track of longer running projects in taskwarrior, which has helped a lot in terms of keeping relevent information and notes all in an easy to access place. This has greatly reduced the need to actually implement any changes I had planned for this particular project, and so has somewhat fallen to the wayside.
- albert extensions: Have tidied up and released extensions for obsidian, wallabag, linkding, and paperless. Still hoping to have a look at potentially writing an extension that can interface with akondai (KDE’s PIM database) for Contact/Calendar integration, buthave not hadthe time/headspace to set aside and do some deep diving (needs a lot of work, as QT/C++ knowledge required).
plantee: A little idea I had for a self-hostable web app to help with plant care related chores, so they hopefully don’t die, and I hopefully hold onto some employable skills as a web developer. Had an attempt at making a barebones project for this using fresh & deno. While interesting, was hard and didn’t really help fix a lot of the issue I have historically had with JS development. Recently been pretty impressed with fastapi, so tempted to start again with this and see if we get any further.
- This blog again!: It’s not exactly been going swimmingly, with most of my monthly posts amounting to short form book reviews, but it’s still going! More details below.
Future Ideas
There are many…
At this point I think I have enough unfinished ideas going that I really don’t need to be thinking about more. This means a lot of stuff getting shoved in cupboards, potentially never seeing the light of day again.
Overall I think my sanity will thank me for this, and more options can be explored if I ever get to the point where I don’t have a million things I want to do that aren’t getting done.
Task Management
The omnipresent TODO list is still my ultimate Holy Grail of Stuff that needs to get done in order to live a halfway functional life that isn’t eternally dominated by procrastination induced stress (working on a catchier title).
As before, the task burndown result looks like the following:
So, once again, I’m basically finishing more tasks, but also creating more. The general entropy of unfinished tasks is sitting at around 230 currently, but is probably going to continue steadily rising.
My process of managing these tasks in terms of sync/availability is getting a little unwieldy at this point, something I plan to write about in the future. At some point I’m probably going to have to bite the bullet and work out a better way to manage things.
Additionally, taskwarrior’s recent release of version 3.0 broke everything, so I took the only sensible course of action and rolled back to v2 and have tried very hard to pretend that updating isn’t something I should do in the future.
Habits
Briefly running through these, as a lot has changed in 8 months in terms of priority and methodology.
To be completely honest, I somewhat forgot some of these were even habits I wanted to cultivate back in December, but will comment on them regardless:
Going Well
| Habit | Goal | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Chess | 10 mins/day | In a bit of a weird place at the moment, as I’m not really actively playing chess as it stands. Still keeping up my daily spaced repetition on chessable.com, more out of a sunk cost fallacy rather than any firm evidence that it’s helping my game. |
| Flash Cards | Daily | This has expanded from just being a tool for languages to supporting programming syntax, system tools and many other things. Got a command that’s useful sometimes but hard to remember? Make an anki card for it! |
| Stretching | 10 mins/day | Despite all internal resistance, I’ve actually managed to squeeze 10 minutes of lower body stretching into my morning routine! Am I seeing results? No, but it is at least happening after decades of neglect. |
| Wrist Health | Daily | My wrists have started complaining about the various forms of abuse they’re subjected to once more. I’ve reintroduced some basic strength & rehab exercises for each to do daily as a form of preventative maintenance. |
| Note Taking | Daily(ish) | This has become less of an X notes daily and more of a make notes when appropriate habit. My albert-obsidian extension has finally solved my problems with note retrieval issues, and it now actually feels like something that’s worth doing! I still have a growing pile of things I need to write up notes on, but progress has been made! |
| Climbing | 2/week | Ups & downs on this one. Has been hard to establish true consistency here, and I’m probably averaging more like 1 session a week currently. Have managed to up the amount of sport I’m doing, and not just bouldering though, so all good there. |
| Task Planning | 1/week | This one seems to always be evolving in some way. I do occasionally drift into the regions of productivity porn, and spend a lot of time organising things, but not actually doing them. I currently have 1-2 sessions a week where I plan out what I want to do for that week, and clean up & process TODO tasks. |
Going not so Well
| Habit | Goal | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Article Review | 1 article/day | Tied to the above Note Taking, this covers articles I’ve read and want to make notes on. While my process for highlighting articles to is pretty good at this point, my actual diligence in making said notes is not. Might need to look at ways to reduce the friction on this one. |
| Running | 1/week | Was actually going really well over the past few months, and has been recently crushed by the heat wave in the UK. I’ve been following the surprisingly good Garmin Coach plan for running, and it’s given me a solid structure to my training, something that has been seriously lacking. Hopefully when the weather cools a little, I can pick things back up again. |
| Weight Training | 1/week | This has just plain stopped happening. I found that I only really enjoy going to the gym with my partner at the moment. As both my partner and I work very different hours right now, it’s very difficult to find a time that regularly works for both of us. Maybe there’s some mileage in finding another friend who would want to go, but the motivation to do so hasn’t come around just yet. |
| Hobbies | ??? | I haven’t picked up a paint brush in almost half a year now. Time is really at a premium and the free headspace to sit down and paint hasn’t really been there very much recently. I want to at least touch base with some form of hobby work, so going to need to find ways to break down the barrier to entry here. |
| Guitar | 4 times/month | I still pick it up and play every so often, but certainly not feeling like I’m working towards anything in particular. Would be good to actually set some goals out and actually finish a song or 2 that I’ve decided to learn. |
| Finger Health | Daily | Had a brief period where I was able to slot it in at work during longer project compiles, but has since really fallen out of habit.Given I’m still climbing a fair bit at the moment, would be good to find a slot where I can fit this in, even if not necessarily every day. |
So that’s about 7-6 in terms of score for good/bad. Could be better, but could also be so much worse.
Habits are a bit of a tricky one at the moment. While it feels great to actually be able to set some time to do eveything I want to every day/week/month, it’s amazing how quickly multiple 10 minute/day habit slots start to stack up to eat 30-40 minutes of time per day, which as a result ends up not feeling quite so effortless anymore, and therefore more likely to be skipped at hard times.
And the trouble comes when I do actually miss a day’s habit, I feel worse than if I hadn’t even tried to start the habit in the first place. Hmmm. I do consider that maybe I should decrease the breadth of habits I want to build and focus more on a core set that I genuinely want to see results in. Then again, we’re all very bad at evaluating our own progress, so maybe things are working slowly in the background and I’m just stressing for no reason?
Either way, I’ve been juggling the various daily habits between morning, during downtime throughout the day and immediately after work, trying to find a setup that works, and trying to not be too upset if I do miss a day here or there. Hopefully we’ll eventually settle on something fairly reliable.
Conclusion
Aside from being almost 2 (almost 3 by the time of publishing) months late to be a proper mid year review, it’s nice to look back and see where I am compared to where I wanted to be back at the end of 2023.
Otherwise, life is great I guess? Looking forward to chasing some goals further, and locking in some more habits in the final 4 months before the end of the year!