It's the beginning of October, September just ended, and there is no review for August on my blog? Shame on me! This was my one goal I laid out in the previous review and I completely failed it. Well, actually sort of I didn't. I had this post almost completely written on September 5th. Then I left for a short trip to Berlin and got caught up in more urgent work on return. Following that I procrastinated around editing and finishing up this post for the whole month. But here it is now.
Accomplishments
I published one CloudObjects post, "The Micro API Design Pattern". There's nothing to announce about other projects and unfortunately my own microblog is lying dormant at the moment.
Highlights
A new local group for self-employed creative people has been formed in my hometown and, since I knew the organizers, I went for their inaugural meetup, which was a nice way to get to talk again to a few people I met at other meetups and also get inspired hearing the stories of other people. Apart from that there was the usual share of meeting friends and playing board games as well as another visit to an Escape Room.
Productivity
Let's start this section by looking at the RescueTime category numbers:
- 23% Software Development (up by 1 point from 22% last month)
- 18% Social Networking (down by 1 point from 19% last month)
- 14% Entertainment
- 9% Communication & Scheduling
- 8% Utilities
Social networking time has decreased once again but it still feels like too much of a time sink. As promised, here's a deeper analysis of it, and that's what I'm about to do now:
60% of the Social Networking time is spent at the computer, with the following top 3 networks
- Mastodon
40% of it is spent on mobile devices, with the following top 3 apps
If I manually summarize the percentages of the equivalent websites and apps, these are the top networks:
- 26% (13+13) Twitter
- 23% Mastodon
- 19% (12+7) Facebook
- 13% Instagram
Twitter in the top spot surprises me as I haven't felt that I spent a lot of time there, but probably the huge firehose of tweets can easily make you forget the time. Instagram in the last spot is another surprise as I feel that I open the app quite often, however I think it's that I get bored of pretty pictures quite easily and the absence of external links is really a feature and I hope it won't be addressed as a bug. It's interesting that the relatively young and niche network Mastodon has made it to the second spot. I'm following quite a few people from there as well as on GNUSocial via federation and some of them are very active so there's always something new and the web interface is quite pleasant to use.
Exercise
I'm still riding the bicycle regularly though I haven't exacty counted that. I only went swimming once.
Mood
Based on my daily rating in the Exist mobile app, my average mood in August was 3.58, which is lower than 3.82 in July but higher than the 3.47 in June. There was one bad day with 2 and two very good days with 5, so there were almost no huge ups and downs in the month and I paddled along in average territory.
Daily Routine
To continue the observation of my daily routine I'm including the same analytics chart for the distribution of productive time throughout the day:
Just like last month, I've marked the biggest blobs for "very productive". They have shifted a little but the overall picture doesn't look too different.
Entertainment and Media
A new category has creeped into the top five in RescueTime, Entertainment. The reason is that I re-enabled my Netflix subscription. I've always been a fan of Star Trek and other science fiction shows but, within the Star Trek universe, the only series that I have followed extensively was Voyager. I have only seen a few episodes of the other shows and wanted to catch up. I've started watching The Next Generation in August and I'm through the first two seasons now.
Goals
Any goal section doesn't make sense at this point so I'm skipping it.
Final Remarks
Analyzing the month and writing this post took me 3 pomodoro sessions, two on September 5th and one (plus a few minutes) on October 2nd. Kind of stupid to procrastinate on a 25 minute task, right?!