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

• Administrative focus: My inbox is my nemesis at the moment. I have a lot of crap in there that hasn't been processed. I feel like I'm just accruing crap in there without managing to process it more. I've taken to digitizing them in the hopes that it'll manage to get me to look at it better, but all that seems to do is just get me a directory of files that I never look at. Also I've grown numb to my next actions lists so things are on there that are now celebrating birthdays. That's not great at all. I need to put some focus back into working my lists and working them more than "here's the recurring things that I need to do for today" levels, and literally spend some time each day addressing the items on those lists.

• Writing more: I've been putting in 10 minutes each day (most days) to writing and editing two books (The Mediocre Programmer and the Pepper&Carrot RPG). Unfortunately I'm finding my attention is split between the two so I need to put my focus more toward one or the other. Perhaps I just need to spend a week working on the edits for The Mediocre Programmer so I can call it done for the year. I was hoping that I would have a playable version of The Pepper&Carrot RPG by year's end but that is turning out to be more aggressive than I realized.

• Design more: See above re: The Pepper&Carrot RPG.

• Programming more: Most of my programming has been work-related, so by the time I'm done with work I don't want to do any more programming. I've set a mini-goal for working through Eloquent JavaScript again, but I'm feeling major resistance there. When I'm at Coffee House Coders the last thing I want to do is program; most of the time I'm cleaning up email or reading RSS feeds. Not good.

• Getting out of debt: Slow progress here, but still some progress.

• Physical Health: I've managed to do even less exercise and walking than I normally do. That's in part because I've been glued to the computer for work.

• Mindfulness: Had some good epiphanies related to mindfulness and working with mindfulness lately. Mostly I've been using it for focus and to help keep myself on task and recognizing the times when I'm not on task.

• Deeper work: Middling success with this. I'm still distraction-prone, but I have had moments where time has disappeared and I've been "in the zone" with my work.

I also did some decluttering in the basement prior to Thanksgiving, so I've been concentrating on getting the basement back into some semblance of order. Also clearing out old books (digital and physical) that are no longer relevant or are severely out of date.