I skipped a week of writing my ‘Tagebuch’ because I had enough buffer built up
I also became increasingly burned out at the same time: As nice as those two or three weeks were, where I felt like I was on top of everything in my life, I couldn’t sustain the pace
On the other hand: A project I can’t say anything specific about worked out and lots of time was spent on that, so I don’t feel too bad about me slipping on productivity-porn type things.
I was away for the weekend to visit my family and skipped a weekly review, which is due to derail this evening. I’m gonna try to call non-legit instead of entering fake data this time just to see if and how this makes feel differently about fake data (see also). I also scheduled a break through support for this weekend and somehow ended up with beeminder free days until today, which was not what I had asked for but what I appreciated none the less.
Since this one big project I mentioned before now needs lots of my attention I have dialed back a lot of goals and archived some others.
I’m way behind on my vocabulary goals, thankfully I have had lots of safety buffer built up. Still I halved my daily commitments (clozemaster: 224 -> 112; memrise: 2200 -> 1100; anki: 1 -> 0.5).
I archived my blogdraft goal (that’s right: No blog goals remain right now…).
I have also archived my read goal, for now.
Both will probably return pretty soon, but I would like to see how I would read/write/take care of my blog by using taskratchet for specific tasks rather than making progress that isn’t attached to a specific project I would like to have done at some point.
I think I can now reveal what that big project was, I alluded to last week: I am changing jobs! In about six weeks I’ll be working 100% from home. … And I’m changing countries, too?! Yes I do! I’m moving from Hamburg, Germany to Kuusamo, Finland. My SO and I will finally be able to close the distance after four years!!! I’m super excited.
Obviously there are a lot of changes to come and things to plan right now, so I have archived some more goals.
I also feel that I have started slipping productivity-wise a lot lately. It’s not so much a bright lines issue (even though I’ll have to admit: that’s there, too) as it is a situation in which I’d rather move forward instead of doing too much meta work. This often means that I am planning outside of my todo list and loose the feeling of safety a holistic view of what’s on my plate can provide (that’s probably mixing metaphors… I hope you get the point). But this time I try to stick with it. I got reminded of this older article on macsparky: Task Management When the Bullets are Flying and the two tips it has for these kinds of situations: 1. Review every day 2. Forecast each day. (Both are now goals of mine, see below)
I remembered that I got los of milage out of Complice when I was in a similar stressful situation a couple of years ago. So I’ll give it another shot. It still lacks a backlog and I’m not sure if I can afford the price, but complice is probably still great at making me do reviews, reflect on my goals every day and prepare the next day beforehand, which is what I’m looking for right now. I still have 106 days left on my account, which I paused a while ago, so I just went in and updated my goals over there. Let’s see how well Todoist and Complice will mix and match…
The problem with my vocabulary goals is (or was) that I don’t look at the points I’m supposed to get every day and instead always aim to review all words that are to be reviewed that day and do at least one set of new words, which means different things in clozemaster, memrise, and anki, respectively, but obviously adds up. On top of that I have two decks which are not part of my language learning effort. I’m not exactly overcommitting on these goals, but the natural stopping point for me with these activities is at a much later point in time as my commitments (which in a different world is probably a good setup!). So with a kinda heavy heart I have opted to leave memrise and clozemaster for now and deleted the apps from my phone as well. This sucks especially for clozemaster, where I am in 11th place all-time of english-to-finish learners. But I might pick one of them (or both of them) up again, when I have survived moving a few kilometers south of the polar circle…
I also decided to archive my freecodecamp goal for now. I’d love to pick this up again, when the dust (or snow?) has settled.
I opted to archive asi (actual setup improvements) and eatthefrog as well as monthlyplanning.
The first two are goals which in my opinion work best, if you have an established routine and you need tools for continuous improvements of some kind of status quo. But everything changes right now and it’s better to stay mindful of that instead of reading everything that happens in terms of setup improvements or ugliest frogs. Maybe those will come back when I have established a new routine.
I love doing reviews and would love to do daily, weekly, monthly quarterly and yearly reviews, but my practice isn’t there yet. The monthly planning which was so successful for me, almost made no sense, when the priorities for this month (Move to finland!) are so crystal clear. Again, something I might pick up later. Maybe Complice will stick instead. We’ll see.
The two new goals are roughly equivalent to daily reviews (outcomes) and daily forecasts (intentions).