Scheduled the day again. Realised I can break it into 4 blocks:
- 7am - 9am: Shallow work (active 1 hour)
- 9am - 3pm: Deep work (active 4 hours)
- 3pm - 9pm: Shallow work (active 2 hours)
- 9pm - 11pm: Deep work (active 2 hours)
By shallow work, I mean things that would take me a few weeks to train somebody
else to do. By deep work, I mean things that require intense concentration, and
which leverage the domain knowledge and engineering skills that I’ve built up
over the last three decades. By active, I mean sitting at my desk doing real
work, and not just pretending to be busy. In breaks I can still passively work,
by answering emails and things like that, but I may be doing that on my phone
while I’m distracted with something else.
This makes sense to me. It’s hard to do more than six hours of active, deep work
in a single day. It can be mentally exhausting. Most “knowledge workers” in a
traditional open-plan office would struggle to achieve half of that. But that’s
where the value is.
I like that rough schedule. It gives me time to work my main job, and time to
make progress on hobby projects.
Speaking of which, didn’t work on HackTile at all today, even though I’d
planned to. Got delayed reading The Queen of Sorcery to Eliza and cleaning up
the kitchen, then listened to two episodes of The West Wing Weekly. It was too
late after all that to begin working on something.
Kids had their flu shot today. Picked up Eliza from string orchestra practice
early. Jack being very silly (annoyingly so) all afternoon. He’s developed a
habit of lying for fun. Must change that. Dzung made pork ribs for dinner. I’m
doing OK; still 75% health after recovering from this cold.
Watching S02E01 of Legion. Amazing sound design.
Refactoring some of the HackTile code. Pretty easy to get things up and
running with SDL2, and I have a basic CA working (Conway, of course). Updating
50k cells at 50Hz minimum. I remember why C is so much fun!
Still unwell. Made lamb rogan josh for dinner… the kids can handle curry these
days. First time making Indian for the whole family though. Eliza had Quiz Club
after school. Jack played the trumpet during a music incursion.
Deep work is paying off. Scheduled each hour of the day. Doesn’t take much
effort to do, and I found I could focus and commit to a particular task more
easily. May it continue!
I’ve decided to start keeping a diary again.
I’m 46-years-old and working from home for a US-based startup. My kids are 11
and 8, and doing well at school. My wife works from home once or twice a week,
which allows us to have lunch together.
It’s nice, but I want more. I want to be creative, and do good work.
I also want to generate a passive income.
I have a few project ideas kicking around:
- Jack and I are working on a password manager “for your mum”.
- Jack, Rob and I still occasionally post to our “Link a Day” Slack channel.
- I’ve started toying around with SDL2 and vanilla C again.
Yes, C. It’s quite refreshing, and I think decades of experience with
higher-level languages means the C code I write nowadays has matured without me
knowing about it.
Anyway, I plan to resurrect the HackTile project. Hopefully this diary will
help me keep track of that. But I get easily distracted from side projects.
I’ll be trying to apply the principles of “deep work”. I’ll schedule daily
blocks of time to work on one of the aforementioned projects, and I’ll track my
progress by writing it down here. I want to keep at it for at least 100 days,
like I did with the 7-minute workout. That’ll help to make it a habit.
But I’m still recovering from a severe head cold. It’s a beautiful Autumn day,
and we had a lunch of banh-mi-tet at the park in East Perth, but back home now
with the kids (looking after Lilian, Lachlan and Yoshi because their parents are
at the footy).
Future posts will be shorter. I just want to capture the essence of each day.
Onward!