Productivity
😎
I started a new productivity experiment at work. It went very well all week. Instead of letting myself extend my workday several hours to make up for wasted time, I’m only letting myself work between 7:30 am and 5:30 pm, and I can only make up 2 hours on the weekend. If I have more wasted time to make up for, I have to use paid time off. I loathe using PTO for lack of discipline, so it’s sort of a commitment device for staying on task.
My time management after work was far weaker. I was tired at the end of the workday and let myself lounge around doing nothing. This week I’ll apply my workday techniques to my evenings.
Finances
🤔
Thanks to my poor time management last week, I didn’t get around to my taxes. I’ll try again this week.
I waded deeper into trading topics with Investopedia. I listened to sets of articles using these starting points:
These are the aspects of trading that make it feel like magic to me. I still don’t understand them clearly because I was only half listening, but sometimes when I plan to study the material later, the purpose of listening is to give me the gist while simply keeping my mind on the subject and sparking related thoughts. My very tentative idea is to try making a trading bot sometime, if it seems worth the time and effort, once my other financial goals are covered. If nothing else, studying these concepts a little will tell me what’s happening when I’m watching trading streams.
Coffee
🙂
I give Coke with Coffee Dark Blend 5/5. One of my streamer friends was drinking this one day, so I decided to try it. I was a little scared, but it was surprisingly good and not at all bitter. I tasted caramel and vanilla, even though it wasn’t the caramel or vanilla variety. And it was only 70 calories.
Outdoors
😎
I spent the week watching desert hiking videos. I played them on mute while I was working, with a playlist of drone music in the background. The videos were supposed to cathartically symbolize to myself the desolate, frustrated way I sometimes feel about work, but (1) I wasn’t feeling that way last week, and (2) the videos were surprisingly beautiful and got me curious about nature and hiking. So my plan completely backfired.
I spent Saturday night making a list of parks in my area where I could walk. I felt a strangely sad nostalgia for when I used to do that, as if I couldn’t have continued almost this whole past year and as if I weren’t about to start it up again. Some of the nostalgia was for my overall circumstances at the time, but now it’s time to make new memories in new circumstances.
Spirituality
🙂
Every Moment Holy gives me a lot of good material for the prayers I have in mind. I don’t know Douglas McKelvey’s writing process, but I thought I glimpsed the kind of approach I would take: Think of all the important things to say in the situation, and craft them into some artful form. The audiobook is narrated by a tag team of Fernando Ortega and Rebecca K. Reynolds. Fernando Ortega gave a good, standard reading, and his voice faded into the content. Rebecca Reynolds had a distinctive style that I never really got used to. But it was a very fitting one for a Rabbit Room book. I felt like she should be reading classic children’s literature. And, in fact, she does.
