General
- After removing the Urgency integration of Taskwarrior and last week also removing all my scheduled goals AND having problems of entering a lot of tasks with proper metadata quickly and correctly into Taskwarrior AND being frustrated how hard weekly reviews had become since I started using Taskwarrior AND incidentally reading about deep work on the doist Blog I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t justify the amount of work I had to put into Taskwarrior to just keep it up to date anymore. I felt I needed to change this asap. I also felt that I couldn’t go back to OmniFocus directly, because I would just face the same frustrations as before I made the change to Taskwarrior (namely: no good way to integrate with Beeminder, slooowww improvement curve of the software itself and therefore added frustration about the uncertainty how long it would take for Omni to have an api, webhokks, ifttt-Integration, etc.). The same goes with all the other task management apps and services, I’ve tried. Every one of them had something else I found frustrating or not ideal. I wanted to try something new (to me). And since I found myself already on the page of doist. I almost on a whim signed up for a year of todoist premium (it was just 30$ and therefore easily justifiable). This again means a lot of changes to my productivity system. But the first few days have already been much better.
- I will also just generally note here, that I have created 11 ifttt triggers (yoga, weighin, weeklyreviews, news, journal, callmom, callgrandparents, calldad, callbrother, bmndrjrnl, anki) and 2 direct label integrations (asi, eatthefrog) to beemind from todoist directly.
- Work Cycles has been a fantastic addition to my productivity toolkit! I’ve used it about 10 times already since last week and I love the structured approach to work.
- Focusmate on the other hand doesn’t work for me. I just found it too stressful.
- I have tagged all goals in Beeminder with a camelCased version of the heading under which they appear in this journal. This should help keep me organized when I add new goals. If they don’t yet have a tag, I probably haven’t added them to the Tagebuch either! (More about beeminder’s hidden tagging feature)
- I have started to plan out my whole day in my calendar. This has been especially helpful in the evening, when a little bit tired, because I already made the decision of what happens next. I replan the schedule if needed, but I rarely have to delete appointments with myself to the a specific task. It helped to realize how much time I actually do have at my disposal and led to creating a quitontime goal (see below).
Learning
Current goals:
I have renamed the section to learning, since it now includes not only goals pertaining to my goal to learn Finish, but also to my goal to become a better developer.
New goal: Freecodecamp makes me do freecodecamp lessons for two hours each week. I reset my progress there last week, because I did FCC such a long time ago, that I missed out on a lot of lessons and also felt like I needed a refresher on some of the basics. Weekends are off as per usual. I use the timer feature of the iOS-App to track my time spent with FCC.
I doubled my commitment to clozemaster (112 -> 224 points per day). I slightly raised my commitment to memrise to (2000 -> 2200 points per day). The memrise iOS-App seemingly stopped working for the community courses I use (as was announced a while ago), so I have started using the decks website on my phone, which actually works quite well and even has some advantages over the app:
- I can use the difficult words feature
- I can review all my words in all of my courses at once
It has two annoyances, though:
- When writing my word, into the text field, iOS automatically capitalizes the first letter, which means I have to remember to tap the shift button once before writing my word
- Autocomplete remembers what I have written and makes it sometimes easier than it should be
Still, I’m mostly happy so far, actually.
The new Anki goal works and consists of three decks right now:
- [W/ audio] Finnish - English Core 900 (Spoken Language)
- a FreeCodeCamp deck
- a self made deck to the online Course “Learning How To Learn”
I don’t see the need right now to track progress anymore closely than “doing all the cards every day”. I have it set to show at most three new cards every day per set.
Keep a Daily Rhythm
Current goals:
I have added a quitontime goal which should help me to leave not latter than 8 hours and 30 minutes after I came into work. The way I have set it up is this: I enter a 0 datapoint with a comment of my planned quitting time (giving me a chance to stay longer if work makes it absolutely necessary). When I leave I update that datapoint to a 1 if I left on or before the set time.
Stay in Contact With Family
Current goals:
No changes.
Reading, Writing, Consuming Media
Current goals:
blogdraft as an input based goal has been great! I have made it so that it automatically trims safety buffer after 7 days.
After admitting last week to being addicted to podcasts, I actually stopped listening to them as much and got a lot more done. I also started to take some vitamins, so I’m not sure exactly if it is listening to podcasts as much, but I listen to about one a day now and have therefore lowered my allowed podcast episodes per day to 1.5 for now.
General Productivity
Current goals:
No changes.
Sports, Weight Related
Current goals:
No changes.