December 2018 Review

December was a fast, fairly busy month full of seeing Tia’s family, holiday parties and a long stretch of time off – 11 days in a row without work, which was a nice end-of-year vacation.

This month I saw both Wreck It Ralph 2, and Aquaman which were both good movies. Ralph, about what I expected, Aquaman better than expected. We went bowling a few times, which was a great time on each occasion.

The rest of my time off was primarily spent just hanging around, being lazy, and sleeping in which was a nice bit of recovery.

Productivity

December was definitely a more distracted month around the office, which I think was true for all of my coworkers. Office events included an all-day holiday party, a 3-hour wrapping party, and a Super Smash Bros. Ultimate tournament so, uh, yeah… No surprises here.

• Productivity pulse of 74 (-1)
• Met All Productive Time goal 5/15 days
• Average 4h 28m (-9m) productive time per day

RescueTime Top 5 Categories:

1. Software Development (35%)
2. Communication & Scheduling (28%)
3. Business (10%)
4. Social Networking (7%)
5. Utilities (5%)

Correlations:

Still on the trend of being more productive at the start of the week, which is good. Using VS Code more when I’m more active is an interesting find. Perhaps spending a few extra minutes being active and walking around makes me more focused? I’ll keep an eye on that one, I think.

• I’m more productive on Mondays (24%) and Tuesdays (23%)
• I use Visual Studio Code more when I spend more time active (19%)

Health

Big drop in average steps, thanks to having a long vacation and being pretty lazy during it. Also ate a bit more during the holidays, of course, but despite those two things my weight was basically unchanged.

As evidenced by my spending, getting my Christmas shopping done in November meant December was pretty okay!

• Average of 6,163 steps / day (-15.2%)
• Average of 2,502 calories / day (+5.1%)
• Average of 7h 47minutes of sleep / night (+1.3%)
• Average weight of 142.2lbs (-0.2%)
• Average body fat percentage of 12.7% (+4.1%)
• I spent 83.9% of my income

Correlations:

More protein leading to more steps in an interesting correlation here but is probably coincidental. Strengthening of the correlation between caffeine and getting less sleep is very unsurprising but noteworthy nonetheless. I’m also not too surprised to see that I have a better day when I don’t tweet. Whether that’s because my tweets tend to be negative, or because my best days I’m simply too busy to tweet I’m not entirely sure, but regardless, doing more things to keep me too busy to tweet would probably be a decent goal for 2019.

• I get more steps when I consume more protein (21%)
• I consume more caffeine when I sleep less (42%)
• I have a better day when I spend more time in bed (17%) and when I’m not tweeting (30%)

I didn’t have a December’s focus section in November’s review, so I’ll skip right to January.

January’s Focus

1. Write my 2018 Review

I want to conduct an annual review again, so I need to get that written up.

2. Decide on 2019’s overall goals

I have some thoughts about this already, and they’ll be detailed a bit more in my annual review, but I think it would be helpful to write them out separately for myself as well.

3. Setup an email newsletter

Sort of related to 2019 goals again, I’d like to get a monthly newsletter setup to try something out this year. More about this project in a future blog post!