September 2018 Review

September was highlighted by time spent with Tia’s family. One weekend for a birthday celebration, a long weekend for a vacation in Connecticut – a county fair, a night at Foxwoods, and a couple days at a campground – and an engagement celebration.

I also started working with CUNY Tech Prep, a full-stack development bootcamp for CUNY Computer Science students. I’ll be spending a few hours a week with the students as a project mentor, advising them on their semester-long projects. They’re just now diving into their projects here at the start of October, so so far it’s just been sitting in on their weekly class to see what they’ve been learning, but the real work will start ramping up soon.

I also learned about a fantastic caffeine tracking app called RECaf. Because it sync to HealthKit, Exist is able to read caffeine data from there. I’d previously being trying to sort of track caffeine by tagging days with “coffee” in Exist, but now I’ll be able to see correlations with actual numbers, which should give me a much clearer picture on how caffeine affects my days. I’m pretty excited about what this may turn up, but it will have to wait until next month’s review for there to be enough data to surface anything useful.

And now, on to the numbers!

Productivity

Small dip in productivity pulse, but missed my all productive time goal at around the same rate and saw a small uptick in average productive time so overall I think I’m just hovering where I have been.

• Productivity pulse of 74 (-2)
• Met All Productive Time goal 10/17 days
• Average 5h 9m (+6m) productive time per day

RescueTime Top 5 Categories:

1. Software Developement (32%)
2. Communication & Scheduling (30%)
3. Business (11%)
4. Social Networking (9%)
5. Utilities (6%)

Correlations:

Seems like my eating/productivity correlation has flip-flopped from last month… Maybe I tend to snack more, or prefer higher calorie foods on days I am distracted?

• I’m more productive on Tuesdays (22%)
• I eat more when I log more distracting time (16%)

Health

• Average of 7,076 steps / day (-17.3%)
• Average of 2,391 calories / day (+7.8%)
• Average of 7h 22minutes of sleep / night (+4.5%)
• Average weight of 140.9lbs (+1%)
• Average body fat percentage of 11.9% (+3.4%)
• I spent 78.7% of my income

Correlations:

Couple interesting things in here. Unsurprisingly, mood and how much / what I eat and how much sleep I get are all pretty closely coupled. I had a hunch that twitter had been negatively impacting my mood, but seeing it quantified like this is kinda helpful.

• I get more steps when I’m less productive (28%)
• I have more bad days when I consume fewer carbs (14%) and spend more time active when I have a better day (16%)
• I have more great days when I work out more (17%)
• I have more good days when I tweet less (28%) and when I sleep more (15%)

Books Read

None, unfortunately.

September’s Focus

1. Finish my passport application

The application is finished! Just waiting to get it now.

2. Get my eyes checked

I didn’t manage this in September, but I did get my eyes checked today before publishing the review so I’m going ahead and crossing it off.

3. Start running

Since my shoes did arrive late, and I failed to stretch enough after my first run, I only managed to go on a couple runs in September, but I have started so I’m still crossing it off. So far at the start of October I’ve done 2-3 runs a week, which I hope to continue. Managing a 10-minute mile so far, which I’m not too impressed with, but hopefully after a few weeks I start to see an improvement.

4. Read another book

I, unfortunately, did not get around to reading a book - though I did pick up a new one I’m looking forward to - It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founders of Basecamp. I’ve read and very much enjoyed their earlier book Rework, which I also highly recommend.

October’s Focus

1. Start Christmas shopping

Yeah, it’s early, but I’m hoping that by getting a jump on it I can spread out the cost a bit more and not stress about it.

2. Continue Running

I aim to run every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning before work, and on those days I do find that I settle in to work a bit more quickly, but having the motivation to get out of bed and go is still a bit rough. I typically run for 15-20 minutes, managing 1.5 - 1.8 miles in that time. I hope by the end of the month to have managed a full 2 miles in 20 minutes. So far I hit the first mile in about 10 minutes, but fade pretty quickly thereafter.

3. Bake something

I’ve been saying for a while I want to get into baking more, but haven’t made too much an effort to actually do that, so I hope to actually bake a thing or two now that fall has arrived and I can’t use the hot summer weather as an excuse to not bake.

#Blog/Monthly Review#