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:
- Performed 65 workouts out of 70 (93%). My workouts got more volume in almost the same amount of time, by the addition of 4×50 air squats and an extra set of pushups.
- I did 9 runs out of 14 (64%). I also ran my first timed half marathon at 1h57m!
- In terms of fat loss, it was a momentous quarter. While I didn’t get to my goal of 10% body fat (yet), the DEXA scan I took on week 12 yielded 12.1% body fat, at 8.6kg fat + 62.3kg lean tissue (a gain of 2.5kg of lean mass and a loss of 1.7kg of fat since my previous scan on August). I’ve never been so lean in my entire life.
- Summary for my net caloric balance and waist measurements (in cm), per week:
- -6mcal, 88
- 0mcal, 88
- -0.5mcal, 87
- -5mcal, 88
- 0.5mcal, 87
- -5.5mcal, 87
- 1mcal, 86
- -6mcal, 87
- -4mcal, 87
- -4mcal, 87
- -4mcal, 87
- 3.5mcal, 87
- 4mcal, 87
- 3mcal, 89
- Net for the quarter: -23mcal, 88 -> 89
- A 25mcal deficit should get me to 10% body fat, assuming I can maintain lean mass.
- I started tracking my sleep on a weekly basis. I averaged 6.9h per day, including naps. I could definitely benefit from bringing this number up to 8h. Here’s the breakdown by week: 6.9 6.9 7.1 5.9 7.1 6 6.9 6.3 7.1 7.3 7.3 7.2 7 7.
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:
- Reading 51/60 (85%). I managed to read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Atul Gawande’s Complications and started Naum Jasny’s Soviet Industrialization.
- Piano 52/70 (74%). Despite putting time into it, my progress was disappointing. I’m learning a Bach’s fugue. I already had memorized its voices. In this quarter I determined my fingerings for the whole fugure. I also learned to play one of the most difficult sections, with hands separate. My stumbling blocks are two: 1) I cannot seem to memorize fully the piece; 2) progress is achingly slow, not so much on the technical aspect, but rather on figuring out the fingerings and retaining the piece in my mind.
- Russian 55/70 (79%). Making progress learning grammar from Nicholas Brown’s New Penguin Russian Course and adding flashcards into Anki. I’m pulling all the stops and adding every single exercise into the flashcards. I’m done with about 1/3 of the book.
- Dutch 64/70 (91%). I studied a lot of Dutch since I took my A2 exams in November. The external motivation of taking the test was indeed great, although not something that you can have going all the time for all the aspects of learning, let alone life.
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.
- On the ustack I only worked 35 out of 70 possible sessions (50%), for a total of 53:05 hours (1.5 hours per session). In this quarter I finished the code & tests for gotoB v2. Incredibly enough, the library now works also in very old browsers like Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 6! That definitely took work, but I feel it actually made the library better. I’ve been working on gotoB all year and despite not being able to finish it this quarter, I’m happy about its progress; the limiting factor now is time, but the feeling of blockage I felt early in the year is gone, and progress proceeds apace with every working session. I also made significant inroads in rewriting all the examples, the documentation and writing some of the tutorial.
- On ac;pic I worked 61/70 sessions (87%), for a total of 74:40 hours (1.2 hours per session). Progress was slow but steady. We finished the mammoth task of implementing import of pictures from Google Drive. We also added support for more image formats and some other small improvements; we’re inching towards a solid beta. Towards the end of the quarter I started focusing on increasing the energy level of the work sessions, rather than just showing up and doing my best. This definitely made a difference in my experience of it, although perhaps not yet in results.
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.