Productivity
🤔
After seeing that my non-project time blocks were taking over my evenings, I began instituting another little productivity hack: a 15-minute timer. I put it in my interval timer app alongside my daily routine timers so I’d see it and remember to use it. It worked pretty well when I did remember, and it got me to decide more consciously what tasks were worth spending that limited time on. As always, my hope with these hacks is that little by little, I’ll clear away project time and learn how to make the best of it.
😐
I started working on separating the project interval types into iterations and days in my Notion workspace. I’m hoping to finish all that this week and move on to learning Make scenarios for Notion.
😎
I listened to The Wandering Mind by Jamie Kreiner, a survey of the ways medieval monks dealt with distraction. A fascinating book that covers several of my major interests. I’d be interested to see a similar treatment of Eastern monks. My main takeaway is that there’s no silver bullet for distraction, at least none that the monastics found. What especially stood out is that external tools and practices and environments won’t focus you on their own; you still have to work to align your mind with them. The book also highlighted that even the advanced monks were just people and had the same struggles as anyone else.
Programming
🧐
I got my feet wet in cybersecurity with Foundations of Information Security by Jason Andress. Aside from dipping my toe in here and there, up till now I’d been avoiding this aspect of programming out of intimidation, but I decided this was the year to wade in. It’s especially important now that I’ll be doing some web dev at work, and it fits in with the preparedness theme I have in mind for the year. This book was a good intro.
