Christmas and New Year’s Day have come and gone, and though I’m not officially doing any goal tracking yet I feel like writing-up a review.

From December 12 to January 1st, I was pretty much in vacation mode, though I only decided to call it that on December 31 :-)

I haven’t been doing billable work or tracking time AT ALL, confining my activities to (1) eating things and (2) pursuing comfort. A productive side-effect of pursuing comfort was cleaning up my living room to make it MORE pleasurable to be in. Behold my cleaned-up workspace!

I converted my dining area to my home office back in July. I used to have the office in the living area behind the white KALLAX dividers, but I wanted to have that space be more for socializing / coworking. I have a long-term house guest at the moment too, and he needed a place where he could get out of the guest room to work. A perfect test of the LIVING ROOM CAFE concept!

Anyway, back in the office area is my gaming PC (left corner), which is now connected to a roomscale Oculus Rift setup. My primary work computer is the old Macbook Pro which lives on a wheeled cart loaded with A/V gear for doing podcasts and livestreams. A major change I did was hanging the cables that formally lived in a rubber floor conduit, so it’s much easier to wheel the cart from the dining area to the living area.

Now that it’s January, I wanted to reflect on what I’m looking forward to for the year. My slothful December did have one major benefit: I’m REALLY ANTSY about getting moving again on my projects. I think last year’s Groundhog Day Resolutions ended really well, and the refined processes from November will help keep me going. That’s what I hope, anyway…I think I might have a handle on the minimum effective discipline I need to feel like I’m making regular progress without anxiety. So let’s do a quick review of the week and see if that feeling is legitimate or not! (more…)

I know I said that last week’s review was the “last official review” of the year, but I feel like doing an unofficial one today. The holiday madness is in FULL SWING and I haven’t quite switched gears from work, so I’ll use this review to try to gather my thoughts.

My attention was split last week between tasks that I found more draining than expected:

• writing the final Groundhog Day Resolutions Report of the year
• reviewing finances and raising issues with the accountant, unsure of whether I wanted to continue using her services.
• spending more money than I wanted to
• dealing with technical blocks and managerial issues on top of that
• clearing up a major issue with my corrective vision prescription which may date back several years, and having to communicate this with the eye doctor’s staff.
• finalizing plans with family for Christmas (which are still not finalizing)
• car inspection and expensive unexpected repairs, feeling irked by the poor quality of work by my former long-time mechanic.
• arranging for major appliance repairs.
• maintaining my calm in the face of this, and also trying to be helpful to close friends who are also going through high stress times.

Now that I’ve written this all out, I can see why I am feeling so out-of-balance: I’ve been dealing with a lot of worry and stress across multiple unrelated domains. None of these tasks are “business as usual”, and so it was difficult to get into the groove. They have loomed uninvited over me like this orange cat occupying the dish drying mat on my kitchen counter. Sigh.

I’m going to try constructing a counter strategy to reclaim my balance for the coming week. Let’s blow through the review template and see where we end up.

(more…)

Hi everyone! This is the LAST OFFICIAL weekly review of 2018, since the 2018 Groundhog Day Resolutions are ending on December 12. I’ll be writing up my final monthly assessment, and will probably followup with a year review sometime in January. Groundhog Day Resolutions will resume on February 2, 2019! Until then, I am giving-in to holiday madness and other end-of-year activities.

The key win of the past week was a positive perspective shift on the realities of development so I am less frustrated with it. Coincidentally, I also recently purchased an Oculus Rift CV1 Bundle from Amazon “for work”; as someone who works with realtime graphics it behooves me to gain experience with such things…right? Amazon had them on sale for $79 off, so I jumped on it!

Anyway, let’s review the past week! (more…)