Tuesday, 25th of February, 2025:
Today was a day of focus and productivity, and I felt ready to tackle the tasks I’ve set out for myself, mainly on my project cheshire. A day that felt like a split between “work” and “fun work”. A big challenge was to resist distractions, an issue I’d anticipated. Even though there is a world of interesting things that can come up along the way, I stuck to the idea that I should accomplish specifically set deliverables. I can evaluate them retrospectively and refine my plan if needed, but they’re helpful guiding posts for now.
The major tasks for the week are continuing the development on cheshire and making it public. Today, I added the functionality for generating end-of-day questions for past dates in case I can’t get to them on the day itself. It was a heavier refactor than I first approximated, but I feel it made the code more robust overall.
I also started to add a section for the cheshire content on my website. Made some progress there, the task isn’t wrapped up completely yet, but I’m fairly positive I’ll get it done by tomorrow. For tomorrow, I’m considering adding the code for the insertion of Jekyll’s front matter into the generated journal entries.
Reading chapter 6 of the ‘12 week year’ (“Confronting the Truth”) came with a resonating takeaway: track results, no matter if they are good or bad, for observable progress. The analogy used was quite fitting - sports. In sports, every metric has its place in strategy and training. I can definitely see the same applying as I am building on cheshire.
While still fresh in my memory, last week was a significant period for family time, being outdoors, and physical activities. However, today, I was eager to get back to personal improvements and make solid gains. Another chance I took today was reaching a contact about some possible new work opportunities that I am sincerely hopeful about.
The “fun work” part of the day was helping out at the biathlon range, work for my enjoyment. It gave me a nice balance - time spent outside, interaction with other people, and a break from heavy-duty physical activities. Even though the financial pay-off could be better spent elsewhere, it is one of those activities that contribute positively to my wellbeing.
To sum up, today bore a sense of progress and personal accomplishment. There was a pleasant beam of gratitude for the time well-spent with family last week. These feelings make the trouble of re-focusing worthwhile, be it on personal projects or potential new exciting ventures. Onward.