First off, applause for me please. I’ve been consistent with these weeknotes since the second week of December!
Quick reflections:
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Wanted to know that I can be persistent at something long running - check
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Wanted to get into the habit of publishing what I write - check
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Wanted to keep friends all over the place posted on what was going on in my life, especially since I stopped social media - the success of this one is a little debatable. Not all of my friends signed up to the newsletter or got an RSS feed to read this website. That’s alright, it’s quite hard to change behaviour. But even if they didn’t, some of those friends have quickly skimmed these notes before meeting me after a long time, which I appreciate. With these notes up, I can move on to actually talking to my friends when we meet after forever, instead of spending the whole time just playing catch up.
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I wanted to convince myself I was doing things. Without a 9-5 day job some weeks it feels like you haven’t done anything, but you have. Other weeks you really haven’t done anything, and writing the note for me was a good wake up call. I didn’t look back on these notes the way I expected to, but the act of writing them planted the seed for things I was going to do differently. This has been incredibly valuable to me.
Moving forward, I’m going to attempt to do things a little differently. I’m going to give a little more space to what I’m thinking about (like this reflection!) and a little less space to what I’m doing, day to day.
With people who weeknote, there is often a question of when it will end. It’s daunting to think that you will write these for your whole life. I will probably stop in a year, ngl. But I’m hoping that this weeknote practice kicks off a longer writing practice in general, and that will serve me well.
Work
I moved tanvibhakta.in from plain html/css/javascript to astro, so I can do things like build custom interactive widgets into my blog now. I’m a big fan of dark mode and I’m building it into this blog, but it’s been hard to manually figure out what color is replaced by what other color in the context. I want to build some kind of lookup table so the website knows what the equivalent color to apply is in dark mode and I don’t have to have text-neutral-800 dark:text-neutral-100 everywhere.
I’ve been struggling a little with my shipping speed. My feeling is that my personal velocity isn’t as high as I’d like. I don’t actually have the data to back that up, so step one is moving all my programming projects to linear and estimating them correctly. URGHHHHH. I’m just getting the hang of personal project management. Why are there always so many things to do.
Life
Todoist has been really nice. I’ve added every single task I possibly need to do on there, and I get so much more done by sheer virtue of not having to think about it. My 10-step skincare routine is also happy about this. Have I written about prioritisation before? I continue to not be happy with how I’m oraganising my tasks by priority in todoist, but I spent some time on creating an ordered list of how I want to spend my time, and wow. The gap between what I want to be doing and what I’m actually doing is too high. I told my friends a year ago that I’ve spent enough of my life so far going broad and now it is time to go deep, but my behaviour hasn’t change enough to reflect that. That’s my exercise for this week.
The nesting partner is away for a while, and my sleep schedule has been thrown off so hard. This week has otherwise been good. So many chores got done. Met Divya after a long time. Did not do a trampoline thing, which I’m very sad about, but this is what happens when you have a priority matrix. Poetry writing has been frustrating because I’m not doing it. Puzzling has been excellent and I am excited about how many of my friends have joined the bandwagon. I had two days this week without Mandarin so I lost my streak :( I don’t know how much progress I’m really making on this.
Health
Has been alright. My body is calling out to me but I haven’t made the time for active workouts. I’ve signed up for a Calisthenics class this Saturday that will decimate me I fear.
I haven’t had an appetite for a few weeks now, and I’m very sad about it - food is such an important driving force in my life. I’m hoping more movement in the next week will help bring it back.
But I’m afraid of starting the movement intensely, really, because of how much ambient pain my body has been in in the last two weeks. I can never trust if the pain means I should move or if I should stay still.
Media consumption
Honestly haven’t had too much time to do this.
I’m on the 7th Murderbot book, and I’ll be sad to see it go. What should I pick up for my next audiobook read? Something hopeful, and not depressing.
I watched Alapuzha Gymkhana on Saturday. It was a very fun movie, but it felt like it squandered potential. - three or four different plot points were just dropped - some dialogue didn’t make sense - the pacing could/should have been much tighter.
The fight scenes were great but I wish they had paced it so that they could have the story in there too.
Around the web
- This really sweet article by Vasvi from Bangalore Queer Tango.
- This hilarious cute project from Dries Buytaert (the creator of Drupal) that displays his battery status on his website.
- This simple explainer nemo shared with me about the importance of a demo when building side projects.