Monthly Review: February 2017

February was a hectic month, but I think I made good progress on my financial goals and continued to do well on my productivity goals.

Productivity

The big takeaway here is that, at a minimum, I’ve fallen into decent productive habits, as my productivity pulse remains the same, and I spent 4.5 or more hours on all productive time all but 3 times at work.

What I really need to do is get into the habit of putting more tasks in Todoist and then marking them as completed when they’re actually completed. I’m so bad at putting tasks into it that an average of 0 completed per day makes it sound like I do nothing (whoops!).

• Productivity pulse of 70 (+0)
• Average of 0 completed tasks per day
• Met All Productive Time goal 17/20 days

RescueTime Top 5 Categories:

1. Communication & Scheduling (29%)
2. Software Development (22%)
3. Reference & Learning (12%)
4. Social Networking (11%)
5. Business (9%)

Correlations:

• I’m more productive when I listen to more music (25%)
• I complete more tasks when it’s Thursday (30%) but I’m more productive on Mondays (28%) and Wednesdays (31%)

Health

I really struggled with sleep this month. A big, big drop in time asleep. This was caused largely by the stress of breaking up with my girlfriend at the start of the month, and late night phone calls reconnecting with an old friend towards the end of the month. A bit surprised the lack of sleep didn’t have a bigger impact on my productivity. I guess that’s something I’ve still retained from college.

While it appears as though my financial goals were a bust, most of my spending was from paying someone about $400 I owed them, paying down my credit card, and booking a flight to NYC to visit the aforementioned friend at the end of March. The only thing that kept me from going over, however, is that I got my tax return on February 28th. Gotta love the clutch tax return.

• Average of 4,823 steps / day (+9.8%)
• Average of 2,256 calories / day (+1.1%)
• Average of 6h 20minutes of sleep / night (-11.4%)
• Average weight of 139.34lbs (-0%)
• Average body fat percentage of 11.3% (+0%)
• I spent 95.8% of my income in February

Correlations:

• I have more good days when I wake up later (24%)
• I consume more calories when I spend more time asleep (27%)
• I have more good days when I’m not tweeting (18%)

Main Goal Progress

My main focus in February was to get a real start on my financial goals of having $5,000 in savings, and paying off my credit card. I did very well on both fronts, I think.

I deposited $211.83 into savings, bringing my balance up to $2,763.55. I started the month roughly halfway to my goal, and I’m pretty happy with my progress this month. I’ve also paid my credit card balance down to just $175, down from $206 the statement before (I use it for certain things to earn rewards, so as long as I’m going down each month by any amount, it’s progress), and down from $376 at the start of the year.

Overall, very happy with this first month of focusing on this.

Main Goal Next Month

For March, I’d like to just keep focusing on productivity and financial goals. One or two good months in a row is fine, but I’m hoping a third month will really help all this stuff become habit before I try to do something else.

I wanted to start a shopping freeze in February and failed, so I’ll be doing it for real in March - the one exception being sending my brother something for his birthday. This should mean I put away even more into savings this month, though I may just pay off my credit card instead, I’m a little undecided.

For productivity, I’m going to try to remember to put things into Todoist more consistently, but haven’t defined a system for doing so, so we’ll see how that works out. I’ve also decided to schedule a “focus hour” every morning from 10:30 - 11:30. This gives me time in the morning to sort through little tasks like email and such, and decide what to accomplish in that hour.

Focus hour means putting that hour on my calendar so I (hopefully) never get scheduled for a meeting in that time, enabling a FocusTime session with RescueTime so it blocks Facebook and other distracting things, setting my status to “Away” on Skype to deter notifications, closing my email and (possibly) muting Slack. I’m not going to be too strict on cutting off all communication platforms just yet, but eventually I hope this can guarantee me 1 uninterrupted hour of work every morning.

The last thing to focus on: getting more sleep again. Plain and simple.

Here’s to March!