July 2019 Review

Summer in New York has been pretty stellar. Kicked off July with a team outing at work - an escape room at which we set the time record for the room! Naturally, 5 engineers can crush a set of puzzles. Celebrated the 4th with my boss and some of his friends in Brooklyn, which was a fantastic day out.

I also finally bit the bullet and rebuilt my PC with some strong upgrades. I’d been slowly buying parts over time, and when AMD launched the new Ryzen 3000 processors this month I finally caved and bought the remaining parts. No longer am I gaming with a 7-year old PC. Given that playing games is how I spend most of my free time, the investment felt worth it. Really looking forward to diving into some of the newer titles in my library now that I have a system that will run them comfortably.

July also saw the end of my 100 Happy Days challenge on Instagram. Celebrated the 100th day with a happy hour after work which was absolutely lovely. Very glad the 100th day fell on a Friday! There’s plenty to review if you weren’t keeping up, so take a look on Instagram if you’re curious.

I started dating again a couple months ago, and that continued through July, going very well in fact. That made staying on budget pretty tough (see July’s focus below), but going a tad over budget is worth it for such a good time.

I ended the month with a great night out with one of my coworkers. We saw Lights on her Skin&Earth Acoustic tour and man was it a fantastic show. This is the second time I’ve seen her live and it was absolutely incredible. I’d definitely see her again! After the show we grabbed some pizza and beer at a bar around the corner bringing July to a truly stellar end.

It was a pretty hectic month at work, but the fact that I managed to fit in a whole lotta fun stuff too kept everything in balance. So far it’s been a strong summer, and I’m looking to keep that rolling into August.

Productivity

July came with a major spike in productivity. We packed every sprint through the month insanely full, and personally I’ve been juggling a lot of different things at the office. As a result, I’ve been much more heads down. I’ve also spent a few longer days at the office, and seeing that average productive time increase nearly a full hour over June is a reflection of that, I think. This marks 4 months in a row my average productive time is above the all productive time goal of 5h 15m I have set, so starting in August I’m increasing that to 5h 30m.

• Productivity pulse of 80 (+3)
• Met All Productive Time goal 19/21 days
• Average 6h 24m (+50m) productive time per day

RescueTime Top 5 Categories:

1. Software Development (39%)
2. Communication & Scheduling (31%)
3. Business (8%)
4. Miscellaneous (5%)
5. Utilities (4%)

Correlations:

Productivity on Mondays seems to be more strongly correlated than a month ago, as does consuming sugar when I’m less productive. I’ve also found that I log more distracting time when I get more emails. Perhaps it would be worth disabling email notifications to help keep me on task more often.

• I consume more sugar when I’m less productive (30%)
• I’m more productive on Mondays (21%)
• I log more distracting time when I receive more emails (17%)

Health

A little disappointed in myself for letting my sleep slip so much, and it’s therefore unsurprising to see a big increase in caffeine. Still, happy to see I spent a little less than I expected and that my overall activity is staying at a steady level.

• Average of 9,229 steps / day (-0.2%)
• Average of 2,242 calories / day (-8.5%)
• Average of 6 hours 36 minutes of sleep / night (-7.9%)
• Average weight of 138.6 lbs (-0.5%)
• Average body fat percentage of 10.6% (+2.9%)
• Average of 251mg of caffeine / day (+30%)
• I spent 88.5% of my income¹

Correlations:

The workout correlations are interesting, because both of them seem a little counter intuitive. But most of my workouts are logged to or from work, or at work. My Apple Watch detects my walk to and from the subway stop as an outdoor walk workout, and I’ve been going to yoga a couple times a week at the studio at the office. Still consuming more caffeine at the beginning of the week, which isn’t too surprising.

• I workout more when I spend less time asleep (22%)
• I consume more caffeine on Mondays (25%)
• I have a better day when I don’t tag “yoga” (34%)

July’s Focus

1. Still spend less on food

I did very, very poorly on this front, spending $564 total… As mentioned at the top, dating went very well all month which led to a little extra spending on food, along with going out to celebrate the end of my 100 Happy Days challenge. It’s something I do want to remain cognizant of, as it seems like an easy place to cut out a lot of spending.

2. Read 2 books

I didn’t do any reading at all, which I’m pretty disappointed by.

3. Finalize a redesign of my website

I did refine my design, so I think at this point I just need to build and launch it. I can always refine it further but at this point I just need to stop putting it off.

August’s Focus

1. Read another book

This does just keep carrying over, but I’d like to keep it top of mind to try to see it through.

2. Build my new website

I refined the design I had in mind, now I need to finally build it. I’ve been sitting on it for close to two years so, it needs to happen.

I’m publishing this pretty far into August, so I can already say that it’s been pretty packed. I’ll detail it more in the August review, but it’s shaping up to be an excellent second half of the summer, with lots of plans stretching into September already. And on that note, I’ll leave my thoughts at that.

¹Monthly spending is calculated as expenses, divided by income, minus 2%. The 2% reflects my 401k savings, which never arrives as income in Mint. This is to help me better estimate what my overall savings rate is.