For the last few months, I’ve been working off a varying series of to-do lists to drive my life. I use a mix of the Things app, my bullet journal, and a calendar. Basically, my setup is to have annual Smart Goals, broken down into achievable chunks, then broken down into tasks to knock off todo lists. On the face of it, it’s a way to organise a wiggly world. ...
This is part 3 in a series on lessons I’ve learned from several years of freelancing. You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here, though you can read these in no specific order really. Watch your mental state When you’re working a full-time job, you’ll have people around you who will get to know you over time. Professional relationships start to develop, people will start to recognise you ‘on a good day’ or ‘on a bad day’ with enough ‘bad days’ on the trot almost always a caring co-worker or a good boss will check in on you, perhaps help with your workload or just lend an ear to listen. ...
This is a series of posts on lessons I’ve learned while freelancing for the past four years. You can find Part 1 here. Focusing on “profits only” I’ve alluded to this in my previous post, but, now that you’re a business, you may start to make decisions that optimise being a business, not a person. It becomes easier to start making decisions that might lead to say personal burnout for the sake of professional business health. Taking holidays was a big one for me, while contracting I never once took as many holidays as my partners mandatory holidays in her full time roles. Knowing your invoices were about to take a big hit next month by taking say, two weeks off will always be hanging over your head. Even if you’ve calculated that you would get paid a whole lot more over an annual period if you took a bunch of holidays while contacting when decision time comes for that month, it can be tough to make the call to take that time off. ...
Looking back on this year, many of the lessons I’ve learned had less to do with specific technologies and more to do with long term career growth. I’ve been a developer now for 9 years and as a result, I’m starting to think more about longer term goals and happiness. As a result I made the decision to move from contracting back to full time work towards the tail end of the year so a lot of my reflections are tied around the costs of short term thinking and contracting in general. ...
Recently I’ve written on another site how I use Rescuetime to provide metrics on my overall productivity that I can review each week. One useful feature I noticed was Rescuetime highlights, which gives you a good overview of your accompishments throughout the day. The first thing I wanted to add to this (obviously) was git commits. Luckily it turns out someone had already thought of this and implemented it. The script itself is here, I’m just going to reproduce it below. ...
Over the last few months I’ve been trying different ways to increase my productivity, specifically during work hours. From todo lists to pomodoro’s, xeffect cards, the autofocus method and even back to GTD. I’ve noticed a pattern with a lot of these techniques. They all require a pile of maintenance and none of them actually give you much in terms of positive feedback. When you mark a task off a list, you’re often not getting the satisfaction of completion because that task is in the middle of a huge pile of other tasks you have yet to face. These lists goal to complete, all lists and systems have done is given me two problems to solve. The Pomodoro technique especially, the amount of over-head and tracking you need to do just to discover productivity trends is painful. How off were your estimates, how many interruptions did you log last Tuesday, it’s all a bit messy and overwhelming after a while, and difficult to maintain. ...
Four years ago(to the day) I wrote a post on why I was Giving up on wikis and I have to admit, four years later my opinions on the topic really haven’t changed. It’s been 4 years, 700 questions(with 800 answers) and several server moves later and by and large the process hasn’t changed all that much, everything is just little more streamlined. Tagging: When I started I simply used tagging to reflect the technology the ...
As Lance Armstrong has shown the world, putting the right thing into your body can greatly improve performance, I myself have been looking into more maintainable alternative. More and more I’m experimenting with diet as a means to improve my mental performance as well as my running ability week on week. Specifically ways of optimising the meals I’m taking in and turning them into more efficient forms of food consumption. Looking into my diet was partially kicked off by my recent foray into fasting and also looking at the spectacular popularity of the soylent project. ...
A little while ago, I read a post on Sebastian Marshall’s blog about cutting caffeine, in which goes into the benefits and a method he uses for quitting coffee. He suggests cycling off it to reset your tolerance every so often. I figured that was a really good idea since I’d gotten to the point where in the morning I needed a coffee to feel normal, it was a good time to do something about it. Sebastian’s method of taking caffeine pills I found a little extreme. There’s a certain aesthetic to drinking coffee that I really enjoy and trying to replace it with green tea and pills wasn’t going to work. Sebastian may have a mental strength I simply don’t possess so I needed to offset the caffeine with altering the experience much. ...
Leo Babuta describes meditation as the fundamental habit, the underlying habits beneath all others. Personally, I disagree. I wrote recently on how I cope with meditation when you haven’t had a particularly good nights sleep. Realistically washing your face is like taking painkillers after a serious injury, it’s only painting over the cracks of a deeper problem. Meditation and mindfulness truly can unlock the potential of your day, but a good nights rests can even more. Sleep is a physical process that underlies every waking moment. So to actively take the time to develop good sleep habits should improve every other aspect in your life, including meditation. ...