I publish a monthly review of habits, work, etc. You’ll be able to find them all here.
I really dropped the ball on these reviews in May and June. I was fortunate enough to attend SupConf in San Francisco in May, a meetup in Durham, North Carolina in June, and a camping trip plus a trip to Vegas in July. The travel combined with family coming to visit meant that blogging slipped down my priority list. Now that things have calmed down (a tiny bit), I’m hoping to get back at it starting with a recap of all the awesomeness in July and what I’m focused on for August!
Goal Recap From July
Since I didn’t do a monthly review for June, I don’t have goals posted anywhere that I can point to. Many of my goals carried over from previous months, but as you’ll notice below, the lack of accountability really showed.
✖️ Write 4 blog posts on my personal blog
I didn’t publish a single blog post in June or July! Need to get back on the horse.
✖️ Push 5 PRs to Calypso
I fell short here as well. I did quite a bit of testing on our mobile app which translated to 8+ issues reported, but I only landed 1 pull request due to time away from the keyboard. Looking to get this back on track for this month!
✖️ Read 3 books
I ended up finishing a total of two books so I was close. I finished reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and listened to The Graveyard Book on audio. I’ve been trying to get a bit more into fiction lately. The former came at the recommendation of a friend, and the latter came through the Tim Ferriss podcast where I’ve heard him mention it several times. Both were really great reads. Up this month, I’m going to finish reading Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives and start/finish Extreme Ownership and Einstein’s Dreams.
Homescreen
I’ve been testing out a few new apps over the past month:
- Launch Center Pro for creating quick app shortcuts
- Path for tracking the places I visit on trips
- Todoist for getting things done (I moved from Things)
- Momentum for tracking habits like no alcohol Mon-Thur
Books Read
As mentioned above, I got through two books in July:
Time Spent Coding
11hr 57m (Tracked via WakaTime)
While I didn’t hit my PR goal in July, I did complete this awesome Learn Redux tutorial, whcih gave me a much better understanding of Redux in general.
Goals For August
Here’s the real benefit of this post. I want to publicly state out some goals for August so I can really hammer down and have better follow through even with some planned trips.
Goal: Push 4 PRs to Calypso
I’m focused on a few other items at Automattic taking up mental energy so I’m scaling my goal back from 1.5 PRs a week to 1 a week.
Goal: Publish 4 blog posts on my personal blog
Among other topics, I want to write about how Automattic handles all-hands support, non-traditional work schedules particularly with remote work, and some tactics for building a team of leaders.
Goal: Read 3 books
Ideally, I’ll hit 4 books here (read 3/listen to 1). I’m getting better about carving out the evenings for reading so hopefully that will translate to greater success here.
Habit for August
I really want to focus on my shutdown routine for my workdays.
My routine thus far has been to stop working at 4pm so we can make the CrossFit class at 4:30pm. I’ll then enjoy dinner and hangout with my wife until she leaves for work at 8pm. Then, I’ll hop back online to do a bit more work, which inevitably keeps me looking at a screen until 9:15pm or later.
I really want to get in the habit of shutting down my computer by 5pm each night and not logging on again until the next morning. Part of this involves strictly enforcing a shutdown at the end of each day with prep for the next workday. Another part is spacing out my coding and writing each day so I’m not overloaded. If I’m successful here (80% of the time or greater), I’ll write a bit about it.
Photo credit: Unsplash
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