Happy Monday! It’s been a pretty good week, I’m happy to report. I think I’m getting better at wearing many hats without being so stressed-out about balancing work and life. By coincidence, I also seem to be amassing quite a collection of hats (see picture) which I switch out depending on my mood.

Without any more dilly-dallying, let’s get into the breakdown of last week!

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Hi everyone! Reviewing last week’s progress here, and I’m happy to say that even though it was a short week due to the holiday, it was also productive! I didn’t have to clean the entire house for guests, since our familyk had Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant. The big positive takeaway was hints of mastery through two activities:

• I finally got a complete development environment working, from live development on a local server to stand-alone packaged application using Electron. This took weeks and weeks working-through unfamiliar concepts before I could even get to the point where I could see anything happen. Though it was frustrating at the time, in hindsight it was a good refresher for “learning how to learn”. This is an essential part of mastery! I feel a little sheepish about how angry I was during the process, though ^_^

• After Thanksgiving I felt like trying to make a pizza. I had some theories about how to better handle the pizza dough after watching several episodes of The Great British Baking Show which worked out! For the first time, I made a ROUND hand-tossed pie crust that wasn’t too slack. This has eluded me for over a year, so it is another step toward mastery of the pizza dimension.

Let’s get into the week in review! (more…)

Hiya everyone! The Groundhog Day Resolutions Weekly Review for last week went pretty well; I feel like I’m starting to get some traction on my development tasks, and maybe I’m starting to developm a FEEL for work-life balance.

I’ve decided to modify my review format yet again, simplifying it to the following three steps:

1. The Week Grade: How I Rank It after reviewing what happened.
2. Review of Goal Activity and Achievements: – What specifically advanced my declared goals in both work and personal activity areas. This is the more qualitative section.
3. Choose Next Targets: What the coming week’s goal-fulfilling activities will be, with specific metrics.

The major change is removing the extensive “data reporting” part of the weekly review to instead focus on the highlights and the goal setting. After doing the detailed dump for a few weeks, my impression is that it’s not necessary for the report itself. I’m still doing it, but it’s primarily useful for REMEMBERING the week so I can write the highlights. This might be easier for readers to digest…if not, please let me know in the comments!

With that, let’s get into it! (more…)

Hiya! It’s week four of using the new review format, and I think this might go pretty fast. The past week was a low productivity week due to the high number of social interactions (including voting on Tuesday) combined with a midweek drive to the North Shore of Boston for personal errands. By Friday I was completely frazzled and unable to focus. This transformed into depression that lingered into Saturday, when I decided I should take a COMPLETE BREAK from work and related productive activities. I played a lot of Destiny 2.

As I look back at the records I have for the week, I’m struck by how DISTANT those memories seem. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about them?

Let’s gather and review the data, and see how I’m doing on my goals.

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