Monthly Review: July 2015
At the start of each month I do a review in my journal of my goals, habits, and experiments from the past month. In January 2015 I started publishing my monthly reviews on my blog instead of keeping them private. You can see them all in my monthly reviews category.
WHAT DID I COMPLETE THAT I AM PROUD OF IN JULY?
- Trialled two full-time roles.
WHAT GOALS DID I ATTEMPT IN JULY?
- Start a new full-time role: YES! I officially joined the team at Ghost as their first content crafter at the end of July.
- Finish the dashboard in my Exist app: Nope. There's a lot to do still. I did make some progress, and I'm really enjoying having the dashboard available on my phone now. I have a few big things to add, and a lot of small bug fixes and some polishing to do yet. ### WHAT 1 HABIT DID I FOCUS ON FOR JULY? (HOW DID THAT GO?)
Getting up early: I was aiming to be up by 8am on 80% of mornings in July. My habit tracking app lost all my data, so I don't know for sure how I went with this. At a guess, I'd say I hit at least 60%. Definitely some room for improvement still, but I'm working on a new morning routine these days to help me stick to a wake-up time of 6am.
WHAT EXPERIMENTS DID I TRY?
- New morning routine. I've been using an app called Sessions that creates timers for your habits to try out a new routine. When I wake up I read articles in my read later queue for 15 minutes. Then I shower and eat breakfast, and make a coffee to bring back to bed where it's warm. While I drink my coffee I use Sessions to track a 5-minute French practice session and then a 30-minute reading session of my current nonfiction book.
- New work routine. I'm still figuring out how to fit everything around my full-time role at Ghost. I'm working on Ghost Tue-Sat, which takes away my Saturday coding sessions. So far I've moved coding to Sundays, along with general lounging around and recovering. I've set aside Mondays for the few Exist tasks I still take care of (mostly admin stuff).
MY HOMESCREEN IN JULY
MOST PLAYED MUSIC IN JULY
- The Mowgli's
- Adam Jacobs (Aladdin Broadway Cast Recording)
- American Authors
TIME SPENT CODING
14h 55m
Ouch! Down from almost 47 hours last month.
BOOKS READ
NONE! I got halfway through Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close before giving up on it. I've started a new novel but I'm really struggling to get through much fiction reading lately.
In the past couple of weeks I've made a habit of reading 30 minutes of my current non-fiction book every day, and I've been listening to another non-fiction audiobook while running, so I'm making a lot more progress on non-fiction reading at least.
I'm going to try using Sessions to time my fiction reading before bed so I hit a minimum of 15 minutes every night.
PLAYS SEEN
- Swipe Right, The Butterfly Club
MONEY SPENT
~$3,552.07.
Biggest chunks: $1293 for rent, $700 tax repayment, $356 for groceries ($80 of which was a big supply of coffee), $196 on t-shirts.
I always think when I share what I spend money on that it must seem like my wardrobe's overflowing, since the biggest chunks often include clothes shopping. But usually I'm replacing clothes, so I haven't actually accumulated too much in the way of new clothes. When I bought these t-shirts, for instance, I threw away just as many old ones to make room.
Goals for August
I WANT TO COMPLETE:
- Publish the first of my new blog series about building the iOS app for Exist.
- Work on Exist for iOS: switch out circle graphs for some that animate, layout sleep and wake times graph, finish adding custom colours for attribute groups.
I WANT TO FOCUS ON THIS 1 HABIT:
- Exercise. I really want to make exercising a more regular habit, but I need to fit it better into my routine so I don't skip it. I'm going to add exercise into my morning routine every workday, if I can.