Quarterly review – Q4 2020

To continue the tradition that I started this year, here’s the review of my fourth quarter of 2020.

The idea of making public reviews of my own life comes from James Clear’s annual reviews. The goal of these public reviews is twofold: to keep myself accountable by sharing my goals and actions; and to provide useful information and perspective to those embarked on similar journeys.

Warning: this might be very boring. I think these reviews are mainly useful for myself.

Goals

My goals are still the same. The only difference is that I’m fully focusing on Altocode, which means that I only will launch paid versions of ac;pic and ac;tools (to the exclusion of OneMillionLoops).

Here’s the list:

Physical

Overall a very good quarter, thanks to habits, lockdown and not being on holidays:

Overall, I’m very happy with my current physical habits and am excited about the prospect of fulfilling my 10% body fat goal. It truly feels within reach.

Learning

On week 3 I started reading 20-30 minutes of non-fiction as part of my learning block from Monday to Friday. I did this because I realized that I was reading very few books per year and so I decided to dedicate a specific block of the day to read.

I maintained learning piano, Russian and Dutch. I expect no changes in my learning block in upcoming quarters or even years. I’m very happy with the combination of reading, music and language.

Consistency and results per item:

In terms of time, learning takes 1.5-2 hours of every Monday to Friday. It’s a lot and I have to finally admit it takes significant time even when it’s an ingrained habit. I’m considering cutting out TV completely in the evening to make time for it. Despite its cost in time, I feel it’s absolutely worth it. It is a great way to start the day (particularly for an owl like me who never feels sharp in the morning) and to bring different thoughts and problems into my mind rather than the very familiar ones of work and routine.

Projects

As per my goals, I strive to work every day on both my open source stack and one of my apps (ac;pic). The ideal is to work 1.5 hours per day on each of them, Monday to Friday.

While not pertaining to either of my goals, during this quarter I had the great luck to join Hedy, a fantastic programming education project. I’m very happy to be part of it.

Summary

I’m very happy with this quarter. Despite not being able to reach any of my goals for the year, I made significant progress on all of them, while consolidating my habits. It now seems that all of these goals might take longer than a year, even with a good process in place.

I had the luck to finish the quarter (and the year) with family and friends, for which I’m very grateful. I’ll leave the rest of my conclusions for my yearly summary.