Monthly Review January 2018

I caught up with the missing monthly reviews for the previous year last week, so let's get the new week started with catching up to the new year. Time for the January review.

Accomplishments

I have built a tiny project on the Zapier platform, an app for 10Centuries. You can view it on GitHub or try it on Zapier.

Unfortunately, I did not publish any blog posts in January.

Highlights

In the November review, I wrote about a talk on Effective Altruism (EA) and meeting those folks another time. We gathered again, and it seems there's now an active core group of people that tries to meet up roughly every three weeks. Two of those meetups happened in January. I really enjoy these meetups because it's an opportunity for political and philosophical conversations with people from different backgrounds. As a group, we have concluded that it's too early to focus on outreach and activism for the ideas of EA but rather the time to educate ourselves and form our opinions. To that end, we are going through Doing Good Better by William MacAskill together.

Also, I managed to meet two friends I haven't seen in a while, played some board games and attended the first local Webmontag meetup in a new and exciting location.

Productivity

According to RescueTime, I spent 196h 39m in front of a screen and that time can be broken up like this:

  • 27% Software Development (up by 6 points from 21% last month)
  • 17% Social Networking (down by 7 points from 24% last month)
  • 9% Business
  • 9% Design & Composition
  • 8% Utilities

focus booster tells me I had a total productive time of 97h 13m.

Mood

The average daily mood, based on my nightly ratings in Exist, was 3.8, just slightly below last month.

Entertainment and Media

I'm happy that Star Trek: Discovery continued, so I had a Monday night ritual I could look forward to. Regarding other Star Trek shows, I finished watching Star Trek: Enterprise, so there's now another series that I've seen in its entirety. I really enjoyed Enterprise because of the theme of the founding of the federation and the Human-Vulcan relations in this era (but sad that T'Pol/Tucker didn't work out …).

Final Remarks

I've realized how difficult it is to analyze a month when some time has passed already, so after this and the upcoming February review I'll make it a priority to write the monthly review straight at the beginning of the next month. Writing this article took less than two pomodoro sessions.