Monthly report: January 2019

Trying to get a jump on this whole monthly thing by getting to work on it sooner rather than later. An end to procrastination, but not just yet.

I've become somewhat dissatisfied with my journalling arrangements, partly as a result of listening to an episode of Automators. MacSparky and Rose are both gung-ho for Day One, but then also duplicate their stuff all over the shop. I gave up on Day One because I don't want to pay a subscription and I don't want to have to deal with an export if (when?) something happens. So over the past year I've experimented with a single flat text file and also saving notes to exist.io every day. Both have drawbacks. Exist isn't actually easy to search, but it is fun to be reminded of things a year ago or three months ago. The daily text file is super easy to search, but not that attractive.

So the first thing I did, with help from Rose and people in the Automators forum, was build a little shortcut so that I could add to the text diary as easily from my phone as from the desktop. And that prompted me to clean up the workflow from the desktop. Now I want to think about maybe adding an image to the text file, which ought to be easy enough if I can settle on a place for the images to live.

The other thing I want to do is journal what I'm watching, reading and listening to. Back in the day I would write a little one-paragraph review of films seen and so on. That fell by the wayside when I moved my CMS to Grav, and I never really took to adding such things to my Stream. But I want to, as an aide-memoire as much as anything else. I have thoughts about how to do that based on the log files created by Jen Myers, which I found because I follow ~cgrayson. I've only just started thinking about this, and I have no solid idea of how I will implement it, let alone automate any aspect of it, but by this time next month I hope to have something to show for it.

That something will not include podcasts. For that, I have something else in mind, which will be to translate cleverdevil's very clever script for sucking all that information out of Overcast.

That's the plan, at any rate.

Our Daily Bread

Managed eventually to get over my fear of rejection and sent a package off to a possible new agent just within the month. Now another agonising wait. In the meantime, I've been reading up on self-publishing and how to make sure one doesn't completely screw up. So in the event, with luck I won't screw up.

Exist.io

Steps has been trending down gently since mid-November. Sixty-day rolling average on 3 February was about 8,800, vs 10,500 in mid-November. Still way better than the global average of 6,100, and I fully expect it to start climbing again as the weather improves. Average time asleep is up by 23 minutes over the same period, and that I fully expect to fall. It is so nice that the days are getting lighter at both ends.

I'm not surprised to note that the word most strongly associated with my worst mood rating is "brexit". And that's all I will say on the matter. Anxiety levels on that score are high.

Work

Logged 95 hours for the month and worked on 17 of the 31 days. No logging for almost all of December, and started only on 7 January.) Not a huge amount of paid work this past month. Might need to put myself out there a bit more.

Month	Total	Daily	Admin %	ETP %	Other %
01	95	5.4	39	13	48
10	100	4.2	41	34	25
09	131	6.5	45	23	32
08	185	8.0	14	85	1
07	68	5.25	25	63	12
06	96	5.75	34	9	57
05	151	6.0	36	20	44
04	159	7.5	29	29	40
03	152	7.0	20	10	70

I'm pretty sure there was some solid under-reporting this month,. But I'm not going to agonise.

Goals

Woohoo! 13 posts on this website, although three are old posts. Recorded Reading (a book, not the computer, for at least 30 minutes) on 11 days. More would be better

Niggles

Some things have been on my niggle list for far too long. I am still very bad at finding good stretches of time to get back into code. I guess some of those things just aren't enough of a priority. Mind you, I did get the sparklines done, which I've been talking about since the October 2018 report.

Final remarks

Life is still good. I rate my mood as a 4 almost every day, with an occasional 5 and an even less frequent 3.