Time off X-mas 2021

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It’s Corona virus X-mas 2021, the not so bad edition, and I’ve got 2 weeks off. In an attempt to maximize my personal development and satisfaction during my time off, by staying balanced, and minimizing my vegetation I’m going to pre-write what I want to get done, and adjust it as I go.

This is a combination of time off, and all the stuff for happiness, which I guess gets tangled up with half of my evergreen notes.

My top priorities: - Restart my morning habit routine, cardio and magic. - Figure out tools to create more balance - Create moments with the family (and take Selfies of them)

Moments

  • Wrote Zong with Zach.
  • TBD Jumped in the lake 2021
  • Had a bunch of walks to enjoy our snowy weather.

Success Stories

  • Only 1 day vegetating
  • Almost no time on quick sand.
  • Uninstalled TikTok, took out lots of opportunities to vegetate.
  • Used streaks to track habits. Very helpful to have that in my face
  • Took Selfies almost daily
  • Lots of good bonding with Zach.
  • Really nice relationship time with Tori, awesome seeing her engaged in projects.
  • Got Zach prepped to walk home from work.
  • Ammon reminded me the importance of jumping in the lake
  • Started Intermittent Fasting
  • Honored my desire not to go deep into tech for the sake of tech (because I did it last time off)
  • Thought pretty deeply about balance and activation energy.

Top Learnings

  • This year, reads almost identical to last year. Not sure if that means I’ve solved it, or I’m stuck in a local maximum? I guess regardless I’m not regressing.
  • Balance, it’s all about balance!
  • Prepare before you take time off so when you go in you don’t need to spend much time vegetating.
  • Pre-writing your desires for time off is good and helps you hit it. Need to think through how to have the right goals, not too hard so you feel bad, but not so easy that you feel unsatisfied.
  • Tech/content time before the kids wake up is totally fine.

Relationships

Friends

  • ☑ Catch up with Bob
  • ☑ Catch up with Slava
  • ☐ Catch up with Dave

Tori

Private

Zach

  • ☐ Setup a list of things to watch together
  • ☑ Watch a movie together
  • ☑ Work on his programming course
  • ☑ Write Pong
  • ☑ Come up with another game to write

Amelia

  • ☐ Spend time with her in the hot tub 8/10 days. OK, it was freezing, we got lots of hugs, and went bowling. Could have done better here.
  • ☐ Lots of selfies

Identity Health

Magic

  • ☑ Practice Daily - I did this, BUT Only a few minutes - need to start somewhere.

Biking

  • ☐ Bike at least every other day - It was freezing, didn’t do at all. Double miss as winter biking is fun.
  • ☐ Combine folding bike with subway for more range
  • ☐ Take a selfie with the Bicycle

Software for Balance

Interesting to think about how my blog can help me achieve balance. Prompts for things i enjoy seems like a good idea.

  • ☑ Started playing around with balance, and also activation energy
  • ☑ Some notion of weekly reviews with scoring.
  • ☑ Make up some UX for graphing my balance
  • ☑ Added Eulogy role to my todo-enjoy page. Nice since was able to bang out the Typescript and python with minimal effort since my tools are so good now (and my fluency is up in both languages).

Didn’t get here:

  • Review and have someone else score your balance.
  • Update prompting system to be stateful, so it prompts you more for stuff you haven’t been doing, or need more investment in.

Tech Guru

I did a great job writing content, but not messing around with my vim or bash or python setup. Good for me! I spent some time playing with Open AI3, but that was pretty fun, very glad I did.

DENY LIST: Shell + Enabling Environment + Python in VIM

It’s something that I’m over invested in, and need to put an upper bound on to let me focus on other things.

DENY LIST: Data Analysis - Pandas

DENY LIST: Ranking Systems

Cognitive Health

7 Habits

  • ☑ Add more prompts to 7 habits page
  • ☐ STRETCH: Update concepts page
  • ☐ STRETCH: Update first things first page
  • ☐ STRETCH: Update Seek first to understand

Blog posts

  • ☑ Merge Psych Safety talk into some of your blogs
  • ☐ Merge Anxiety Todo list into some of the blogs

Emotional Health

Meditation

  • ☑ Every day for 15 minutes! Using the streaks apps really helped

750 words/Gratefulness

  • ☑ Gratefulness daily.
  • ☐ 750 words - Dropped this as a habit, thinking gratefulness was high order bit. Probably a mistake. When I do this it clears my head.

Physical Health

Statistics

Weight Start: 228 Weight End: Gym Days:

Diet

Sleep

  • ☑ 10/10 wake up at 4:30. Probably 8 days, and the others up by 5:30, I’d say nailed that.

Energy

  • ☐ GOAL: High

House and goods

  • ☑ Get hot tub working again
  • ☑ Get propane heater working again - It was broken, I ended up buying a new one - the right call as it brings me pleasure.
  • ☑ Figure out LTC insurance
  • ☐ Expense all the stuff I’ve forgotten to expense - Sigh maybe in February.
  • ☐ Figure out Tax Audit. Forgot to stick this on the list. That said IRS is reviewing it again, so maybe I’ll wait for that.

Mental quicksand

Spending vacation days when it’s “fun time at work”

It’s a trade off taking time off during the holidays.

The pro of working during x-mas break:

  • Most folks have taken off so there are no meetings, and you can spend the time on fun projects

The pro of time off during x-max break:

  • The kids are also off, so an optimal time to spend with them
  • There are naturally 4 holiday days so spending 6 days, you get a solid 14 days off.

January is going to be a tough month at work.

January is calibration time at Meta. That’s high work load and stress as a manager, but this will be my 3rd calibration at Meta, and like the 10th?? of my career. I have lots of calibration best practices to follow, and I’ll tackle that when January rolls around.