Dumping a bunch of personal information
Various thoughts
I want to look into FastAPI and figure out what it’s good for and when it’s better than Flask.
Learning a lot about cars very quickly after buying a 2008 Toyota Corolla. The previous owner left two comprehensive maintenance manuals in the trunk. Owning an old car is a lot of work.
Also, I followed my first multipitch ice climb last week. It was Willey’s Slide in New Hampshire. Pretty stoked about that. I might try to write up a more complete blog post about my plans for ice climbing and mountaineering.
Personal planning
I overhauled my personal planning recently. Somehow I’ve survived the last two years just remembering things I need to do, but I’ve been busy recently and it was starting to feel unbearable.
I started using Google Tasks and Google Calendar a lot more aggressively to keep track of things over the last month. I mostly track upcoming chores and distant events.
I think It’s giving me a lot of peace of mind, and it makes my progress very tangible. I mean, look at this shit:
That’s progress. But planning like this has also been stressing me out a bit over the last few days.
I think the big problem is that if I schedule too many tasks for a day, I roll the unfinished ones over into the next day. But then I have tasks scheduled for the near future, which stack with the unfinished tasks and make an ominously long list.
So perhaps the trick is to do fewer chores. I need balance my scheduling so that I finish them in a timely manner without falling behind.
I also want to work on organizing the tasks and breaking them down into actionable steps. Some tasks end up being massive while lots take 5 minutes.
I find this planning is most successful for chores and events, but I haven’t been eager to apply it to my recreation. I don’t want to dilute my planning with non-essential stuff that will overwhelm me. But on the other hand, I’d like to see this kind of tangible progress on my pet projects. I’m still working out how to handle this divide.
Watching too much YouTube and media
I’m addicted. It’s bad. Here’s the statistics for one of my worse weeks in recent history:
I watch a lot during breakfast and then let it play during work. I think it negatively affects my productivity, both at work and personally. Not documented here is the additional time that I stream TV on my computer, which could be between 0-2 hours on a given day.
I’ve been taking steps to cut back on this stuff. Setting hard limits on my phone, etc. I think it’s getting better, but it’s so painful to not watch anything. My brain craves it.
I think the last time I quit consuming visual media, I weaned off using audiobooks and podcasts. Maybe I should try something like that again.
Today’s random links
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GI_glasses (“birth control glasses”)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ambassadors_(Holbein)
- https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/123848160/ice-assessment-flowchart
- https://granitebackcountryalliance.org/wildcorn
- https://americanoutdoorschool.thinkific.com/courses/wilderness-first-aid-certification