Designing a Well Lived Life: Checking In (January 2019)

Checking in for January, 2019 for my "Designing a Well-Lived Life" blogging. This is about making small changes during the year to make larger changes.

  • Administrative focus: I made some headway on this. I've been creating the configuration in Ansible for the web server that I want to deploy and I think it's mostly ready to take on its duty. All I need to do is fix up the mail system so it can communicate with the mail server and we're good to go. At least that's the plan. I'll be migrating these systems hopefully in the coming week.

  • Writing more: Been keeping up a bit with the monthly check-ins and the Django weekly check-in, but not much else. Also let my writing for my book lapse a bit. I've been trying to keep a journal which has had moments where I've been writing and moments where the writing just hasn't happened.

  • Design more: Haven't done much with this as of late.

  • Programming more: I've been rather pleased with my progress with the Django for Beginners book and have moved into the REST APIs in Django book. I've been keeping a morning practice for this as much as I can.

  • Getting out of debt: Still plugging way at this, but it's still going slower than I would like.

  • Physical Health: I'm going to take on a challenge for the month of February to do 10 minutes of exercise on the bike we have in the basement. Looking forward to this.

  • Mindfulness: My meditation really took it in the teeth in January. Part of that was the "Drop Deeper" challenge, which was supposed to be about dropping deeper into mindfulness meditation. What happened was just a cascade of failures, where I would miss a day and then feel like crap for it. I've been working slowly on getting this practice back and being more mindful during the day, but I still have some resentment at myself for not being able to meet the challenge.

  • Deeper work: I've been putting taking a cue from my unprocrastination sessions and allowing myself to just set the timer and see what happens. This has helped me get into states of focus, and has allowed me to take some of the weird windows of time that I have and turn them into areas where I can practice and focus. I know this isn't 100% what the Deep Work book suggests, but I have a hell of a time scheduling my day in advance, and I have a harder time taking any schedule like that seriously. So we go with what works and see where that leads us.


links

social