Plans For the Future

So I decided that if I'm going to blog, I should blog regularly. Starting today, I will be posting a new blog entry every Monday. And it won't just be a short "goddamnit I was up late last night" post; it'll be a full, interesting post. I'll still do the other variety as well.

Repurposing of the Blog... AGAIN

So obviously I haven't been writing much in here. Personal events of good and bad nature have happened, my goals have shifted, and things are just different. So prepare for a shift!

Day whatever: New approach

Firstly, my activity since last update:

Nothing except last night, when I spent about two hours organizing and photographing my Magic Cards for impending EBay auction. Very tedious, but I stand to make anywhere from $40 to $120 from it, and those cards were just sitting in the closet, so it's free cash really.

Secondly, my protocol:

Obviously, I missed posting most of last week. I began to found posting here somewhat tedious, especially with the format I was using. It's not like all this needs to be machine readable (yet!). Maybe I'll write a webapp on my website (when I finally write it) to handle all that crap for me. But for now I'm going to just post what I do and not worry about "success" or "failure" or all that crap.

Fair enough?

Day 19: A Conundrum

Last night I did several errands with Annie. We went to Petco, Stop & Shop, and CVS, three stores in pretty much exactly opposite directions from each other (spare me your geometric diatribes!). It took us about two hours, maybe two point five. So does this count as meeting my goal?

I'm going to take a step back. My original purpose for the goals was to get me to do web development (and some other projects I might not otherwise do) on my own time. I think I've somewhat fallen from that, given that my last three or four successful days were not web dev.

So where do errands fit? I don't know. I'm still in trial mode here, so I'm not going to refine my parameters for success yet. Maybe around day 30 or 45.

Date: 3/12/07
Status: Failure

Day 9: A New Hope

Was productive yesterday, but on work stuff. We have a semi-annual review process at my company, and they require you to write a self evaluation. Employees typically also write an upwards review of their boss. Also, anyone can request a coworker to make a lateral review. So I had to write a self evaluation, an upwards review, and a sideways review. I wanted to look professional, so I spent about 10 minutes on each, a little less on the sideways review, for a total of 26 minutes (I clocked myself). So I booted up RadRails and poked around at my RoR test project for about 10 minutes.

I don't think my times should be additive for my goals. For example, if I spend 15 minutes during lunch on one project and 15 minutes later on another project, that should be a failure (because really, what can you get done in 15 minutes?). Mark it down as a rule!

Date: 2/27/07
Status: Success
Project 1: Evaluation forms for work
Time: 26 minutes
Project 2: Website
Time: 10 minutes (no constructive work done)

Day 5: First Friday

So my fear came true; I did not meet my goal yesterday. I did not have any social plans or anything, but I still couldn't find time to be productive. Granted, going to bed at 10:30 didn't help.

The first idea that comes to mind is to not count Fridays. My gut is against this.

My second idea is to push that 30 minutes to another day. I don't really like this either because it makes my goal more of a job.

Well, I don't really have enough data to detect any patterns, so I'll just mark it as a failure.

Date: 2/23/07
Status: Failure
Project: none
Time: 0

Possible complications

I had a thought this morning: I will have trouble on Fridays reaching my goal. Today shouldn't be a problem because Annie and I do not have anything big planned (we might go see a movie). However, last Friday I got home from work, changed, went out, and did not return until past midnight. I had no chance of being productive.

I'm not sure how to handle this. I'll have to come up with some sort of proviso.

Protocol Update

Today I started a paper log of my productivity in a small stenography notebook. I did this for two reasons:

1. If I'm tired, it's easier to write "date: project: time" in a notebook than logging on and writing a blog post.
   
2. I might forget what I did if I didn't write it down.

Crazy, I know.