November 2019 Review

November brought a few notable events. Most significantly, the departure of one of the founders of my company… Our COO decided it was time for her to move on to something else. I’m sad she’s left, and curious to see how things change without her. We sent her off in style, however, with a celebration in Redhook at Hometown BBQ, and Sunny’s bar which was a whole lotta fun.

I also attended a show starring one of my coworkers at Carnegie Hall, the name of which is now escaping me but I found it very funny. I made a day trip up to West Point to see an RIT hockey game against Army with a bunch of other RIT Alumni. Met a couple that I hung out with the whole time and they were great. Hopefully I’ll run into them at another event because I plan to go to more alumni events after having a great time at that one.

A 5 day trip up to Maine for Thanksgiving rounds out the noteworthy events in November. Got to see a bit of my family and a few friends, which was nice. I’ll be back up there for Christmas so I’ll be seeing them all again shortly.

Near the end of the month I also decided to get back on a couple dating apps. Not spending as much time on them as earlier this year, but easing back into the world of dating so, we’ll see how that goes over the next few months.

And without further ado, the numbers...

Productivity

Happy to see the uptick in productivity pulse here. With a few days off around Thanksgiving and using my laptop at home, the average productive time per day is thrown off, but the slight increase in pulse indicates that I managed to remain productive at work.

• Productivity pulse of 79 (+1)
• Met All Productive Time goal 8/16 days
• Average 4h 36m (-39m) productive time per day

RescueTime Top 5 Categories:

1. Software Development (35%)
2. Communication & Scheduling (27%)
3. Business (8%)
4. Utilities (7%)
5. Design & Composition (6%)

Correlations:

Wednesdays coming in even stronger than October as the most productive day of the week. The yoga and sugar correlations remained unchanged, and given that I didn’t really pay attention to either of them, I think that speaks to how naturally they occur. The key to a productive December may be more yoga and less sugar - two things that are probably difficult to pull off in such a celebratory month.

• I’m more productive on Wednesdays (25%)
• I’m more productive when I tag “yoga” more (38%) and log more distracting time when I tag “headache” more (31%)
• I’m more productive when I consume less sugar (24%)

Health

I'm not surprised to see a huge drop in step activity. As the weather has gotten colder I’ve taken to waiting for the R/W train and take that one stop rather than take the longer walk from the E to my office. Also, being on vacation and working remotely for most of a week meant a lot of sitting on the couch. I have been aware that I’ve been eating less lately, but I’m a little surprised that seems to have lead to losing almost 5 pounds…

• Average of 7,171 steps / day (-27.8%)
• Average of 2,035 calories / day (-16.3%)
• Average of 7 hours 18 minutes of sleep / night (-2.2%)
• Average weight of 133.9 lbs (-3.3%)
• Average body fat percentage of 8.9% (-14.4%)
• Average of 195mg of caffeine / day (-7.6%)
• I spent 87.6% of my income¹

Correlations:

Unsurprisingly, when I don’t sleep well I’m more distracted. I also seem to eat a little more fiber on Wednesdays. Given that Wednesday is also my most productive day, it’s possible those are related (Exist did in fact surface a relationship between fiber and productivity but at just 11% confidence it’s very, very mild).

• I log more distracting time when I spend less time asleep (22%)
• I consume more calories on Fridays (23%)
• I consume more fiber on Wednesdays (18%)

November’s Focus

Filled my Christmas list with a few items that would be helpful on my trip… Packing cubes, extra phone batteries, that sort of thing. I didn’t get to do quite as much research for the trip as I had hoped so more items didn’t make the list, but that’s alright!

The more important thing to begin looking at was finding a new apartment. At the end of November I finally started getting responses from people and was able to start looking.

December’s Focus

Prepare for moving. I’ll be moving some time in January, so it’s time to begin packing up the apartment so I don’t have to scramble and do it all in one weekend.

I’d also like to start drafting my annual review so I post it on time this year… There’s a lot to dissect in 2019, so I think that will be a pretty beefy post.

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.