It's almost end of August and I haven't even published a review for July. So much for self-improvement. Anyway, I don't want to skip a month, so let's start.
Accomplishments
While I have worked on CloudObjects nothing was published or announced. Regarding my personal website, which I wanted to work on in July, I actually launched a very bare-bones version of it. The site is powered by phpMAE (my own PHP-based serverless "Micro API" framework), uses Google's Firebase Database and already supports Micropub. It's something I can build upon whenever I find the time and motivation.
Highlights
In July I was mostly working on my freelance/consulting business, both on existing clients as well as onboarding new clients, but there are no specific events I feel like highlighting here. In life outside work the most special thing was probably "the pig" - well not the pig specifically (even though it was tasty) but the event that surrounded it which, similar to the birthday I mentioned in June, allowed me to reconnect with a few people. There was also an afternoon of extensive board gaming, and I showed my support for a united Europe.
Productivity
This was the section with the shockingly high procrastination data, so let's see if RescueTime has good news for me … thankfully it has:
- 22% Software Development (up from 15% last month)
- 19% Social Networking (down from 25% last month)
- 10% Business
- 10% Communication & Scheduling
- 8% Uncategorized
I hit the goal I set for myself to keep social networking time below 20%, but barely so. Of course there's always some social media time that is at least somewhat productive as I use social networks to keep up with industry news, but I won't fool myself, a lot of it is more or less mindless browsing. I should do some analysis of where exactly this time goes but I'll leave this for the next monthly review.
For this post I'm not including any data from Focus Booster as this data is currently incomplete and thus potentially misleading. I need to sync that data with other information.
Exercise
Bicycle rides have become a staple of my daily routine whenever the weather allows, and I went swimming four times in July.
Mood
Based on my daily rating in the Exist mobile app, my average mood in July was 3.82, which is higher than the 3.47 last month (and also higher than 3.73 in May).
Daily Routine
Last month I looked at the distribution of productive and distracted times throughout the day and came to the conclusion that I'm not a morning person and should probably schedule things like exercise in the morning and keep my productive hours in the late afternoon/early evening free for work. That's exactly what I did, and let's look at the chart for July:
As you can see the biggest blobs for "very productive" are at 11:00 and 18:00, and they look even better compared to last month, so I'm right on track here. I'm still somewhat uncertain about the data because it feels counterintuitive and somewhat "wrong". I would love to run some other daily routine experiments, but have nothing planned for now.
To keep some bad habits at bay I have reenabled my account at Habitica, the "Habit RPG". As I've just started using it mid-July I'll cover it more in the next review.
Goals
August is almost over and goalsetting is somewhat pointless, so I'll keep that for next month. Only goal is to get the August review published before the 5th of September.
Final Remarks
Analyzing the last month and writing this post took me 3 pomodoro sessions.