Monthly Review: August 2016

I'm still shocked that August is over. This month flew by unbelievably fast. Overall, it was a pretty good one!

The Numbers

• Productivity pulse of 56 (240.2 hours logged) (+0)
• Average of 7h 22m of sleep each night (+1.1%)
• Average calories of 2,391 (+6.6%)
• Average of 2,852 steps a day (-40%)
• Money spent: 73% of income
• Books read: 1 (+1)
• Blog posts written: 2 (+1)

Exist Insights:

• I tweet more when I wake up earlier (27%)
• I complete more tasks when I wake up earlier (39%)
• I’m more productive when it’s Wednesday (32%)
• I check in to Chipotle more when I have a worse day (32%)
• I spend more time asleep when I go to bed earlier (58%) and when I wake up later (41%)
• I have more good days when I go to bed later (19%)

Rescuetime top 5 categories:

• Software Development (35%)
• Social Networking (17%)
• Entertainment (11%)
• Communication & Scheduling (11%)
• News & Opinion (7%)

Thoughts

I’ll start off by saying that my goal to re-establish a habit of reading daily has failed miserably. I managed to uphold that for about 3 days, which was long enough to finish the book I was in the middle of, but not enough to reform the habit. I finally finished Design for Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boetcher and I have to say it was excellent. It’s given me a lot to consider, and it feels especially relevant now as I’m in the middle of a huge redesign project at work. I highly recommend it if you’re someone who has any input at all on a product other people use.

I also want to take a second to call out the Exist insight about Chipotle because I think it’s hilarious. Apparently, I don’t feel great about days I go to Chipotle. I very much like Chipotle, but now I’m curious if I feel bad about the day because I ate Chipotle, or if Chipotle is my reward for dealing with a bad day. Maybe it’s something to pay attention to.

I’m a bit surprised that my productivity pulse is the same as last month because I’ve finally started hitting a real stride at work. I’m finally figuring out how to organize my myriad of projects to keep track of them all (thanks Todoist!). What I need to get better at is putting the little one-off tasks that pop up throughout the week into Todoist, even if I check them off right away that way I have a record of having done them and Exist can do a bit more magic with that. The Todoist integration is new, so my task-related correlations don’t have much data to work with, so I’m curious to see where they’ll go. I did, however, log way more time in Rescuetime this month. A big flaw with Rescuetime is it’s only able to detect activity on your computer based on mouse or keyboard input so it doesn’t capture time I spend playing video games, where most of the time I’m using an XBox controller. It did log the time I spent playing Cities: Skylines though, as I use a mouse for that (which is a big reason my time logged is so much higher this month, I think).

I’m also happy to see that I keep managing to get more sleep. I feel like I stay up far too late, often not getting to bed before midnight, but I’m still averaging an increasing amount of sleep, so I guess I’m doing alright. It’s interesting that I spend more time asleep when I go to bed earlier, though. I’m not sure if there’s a correlation there with wake up time or not, so I can’t tell if my sleep quality is better when I go to bed earlier, or if I’m just spending more time in bed asleep. Either way, it probably wouldn’t hurt to get to bed a bit sooner. (It also wouldn't hurt to move a little more. I averaged fewer than 3,000 steps a day this month... ouch.)

Finally, I published a second blog post this month which felt pretty good. It's a reflection on graduating, and it's a post I actualy started back in June and finally finished this month. I’ve received a lot of great feedback from it, too. That honestly surprised me a bit, because I practically didn’t edit it. I gave it a quick look for spelling and grammar mistakes but that’s about it. In re-reading it, I can’t help but be disappointed that it fell short of what I was hoping for. I had plenty of outside sources that reinforced a few of my points, which would elevate them beyond my mere opinions. The piece is already pretty long though, and where I ended up taking it I feel it would be difficult to piece those sources back in. It may deserve a follow-up post, and that’s something I’m going to consider for this month.

I’m also going to take a crack at putting my nose in a book a little more often. But as I’ve found over the past few months, it’s difficult to actually follow through on these things I say I want to do. As you can see, I still haven’t adjusted the format of these reviews like I said I wanted to. On the plus side, at least this one was published on time.