Happy October! It’s time for yet another Groundhog Day Resolutions Update, which I have decided to do as just a picture (above). It took 4-5 hours to draw, but it was a novel way of approaching the report. I’ll provide a little more information in the RECAP.

Recap of the Past Month

For the last month I practiced trackerless productivity again. You can read about what I was thinking last month if you want the hoary details, but essentially I’m just trying to focus on just one or two things at a time and not track things at all. The net result is a reduction in time-triggered distraction. I believe I am doing roughly about the same amount of work as when I was tracking it diligently. Tracking was good for helping me get a sense of how fast I could do something, but it really stopped having benefits a long time ago.

In practice, though, I’m doing minimal tracking primarily to protect my time and maintaining continuity on my reduced goals list. Here’s what I’ve been using

• My Weekly Sheet (right) – for overall ‘big picture’ continuity and remembering things that I eventually need to do.
• Google Calendar – for scheduling events, and making sure I don’t overschedule a week with more than two errands on two different days.
• Discord – for virtual coworking with like-minded online friends.
• Slack – for timeshifted conversations related to billable work.

This has been enough, and learning to be happy with the limited amount of work I can do has been very helpful. I do still have thoughts that I’m a terrible developer and not fast enough to be a true professional, but I try to ignore them. I’m starting to hit my stride, finally, with the new code environment and this is exciting.

A second major thread has been the large number of social commitments that I’ve had to prepare for as an organizer. Up until yesterday it had been a VERY STRESSFUL MONTH because I was trying to prepare for every contingency. At some point, though, I convinced myself that I didn’t need to make a fuss about every possible problem, and relaxed. I figured I could just trust myself to handle what came, and this reduced my anxiety about screwing up. The stress experience even lead to a major epiphany about how I missed being on a team, and that I’ve CONTINUED to miss this. While community is a big part of what I like, it is community in the service of doing COOL STUFF that really excites me. For that, I need to be part of a team. And I realized that maybe I’m ready to lead one on my own volition because it would be interesting and fun.

Here’s the list of things from last month:

• Trans group restarting – INAUGURAL RESTART MEETING DONE. Materials written. It’s going to be OK.
• Ralph Baer activity group – KICKOFF MEETING DONE. Was great to plot the next year with friends.
• Southern New Hampshire Meetup – INAUGURAL RESTART MEETING DONE. Used some materials from the other groups. This group is also going to be OK.
• Cooked every workday to make tasty lunches – Largely DONE. I got my curry making skills sharpened.
• Grants – Closing down one (a bit late), and new one is scheduled in Nashville.
• Write content for io.davidseah.com and write Javascript text parsers to autogenerate index pages for Jekyll for a mixed system – NOPE DIDN’T DO IT.
• Work on brows, styleb – Got brows shaped! Bought brow stuff! Still terrible at it!
• Work on house cleaning to make space – Small Improvements
• Work on house improvements for holiday season – Small Improvements
• Look into alternatives to Amazon, or take care of problems on Marketplace – This is still a big problem, but I’ll get through it. I am not fretting about it.

For October-November month, I’m going to continue working on the same things and NOT track very much:

• Start updating the new websites for groups and prep for next group meetings
• Recruit volunteers and team members for all activities
• Continue to get a lot of work done on projects
• Keep cleaning-up the house
• Take care of chores and stuff as they come up.

My weekly tracking sheet is doing a good job of helping me remember what’s important to me, and the ease of copying/updating the sheet every week (it’s a digital notebook) is really nice. What I’ve lost, though, is the sense of urgency to get more things done. That said, I think I’m actually accomplishing the same amount of stuff without all the self-imposed stress.

It’ll be interesting to see if adding more team activity, whatever that ends up being, will change the formula. My working style is much different when I am in the same room as people with a shared objective.

But that’s the report! To summarize:

• I like not tracking in detail because I’m now able to trust myself to “do the things”, and my minimal tracking system is good enough given the small number of people I work directly with. I don’t know how I’d handle more people, but I guess I’ll find out if my scheme to build teams comes to fruition.
• I still seem to be getting stuff done.

So weird.

Here’s this year’s calendar: