Category Archives: Personal

My Year in Weeks

I released my 2025 Journal PDF (for Supernote) yesterday, and in the middle of describing it, I realized that I have never explained how I plan my year around weeks and 13-week blocks. There are mentions of it in a few posts, but nothing canonical.

I use a week as my main planning timespan, not months or quarters. Additionally, I use Monday as the first day of the week, which is normal for a lot of the world, but not Americans. When I think of how a week flows, the Saturday and Sunday are a unit. I think of them as the start of the week, but almost no software will let you do that, so I got used to them being at the end.

So, all of my projects are estimated in terms of weeks, and I program in sprints that are a multiple of weeks. Then, I split the year into four 13-weeks “quarters”, which is close to a year (364 days). This year, 2024, started on a Monday, and because it was a leap year, April 1 and July 1 were exactly on 13-week boundaries (Oct 1 was only a day off), so my system correlated to normal quarters about as well as it ever could. This doesn’t happen again until 2052. I hope I am there to see it and that I still care.

My journal is set up to follow the flow of a week. Days of the week tend to be similar to each other—so, there is a feel to a Monday, a Tuesday, a Sunday, etc. But March 3rd will not be like April 3rd or October 3rd. A lot of recurring meetings are weekly or bi-weekly, or on the “Third Thursday of the Month” or some other pattern that works well with my system.

When a year doesn’t start on a Monday, I have to incorporate some of the previous year into it. For me, 2025 starts on December 30, 2024. I usually start my yearly goals in the previous year just to get a running start, so it doesn’t really matter if a few extra days get into my journal.

If I have to deal with something that is on a month or quarter boundary, they are just a regular day in the journal. External deadlines can be on any day.

If this sounds good to you, you can use my 2025 Journal (PDF).

My 2025 Journal PDF for Supernote A5

I finished adding features to Page-o-Mat to support the journal I wanted to make for 2025 to use on a Supernote Manta. I fixed some bugs and added the following features:

  • Internal Links to pages: This is supported in titles, section titles, and rectangles
  • Start/End Dates on Pages: This is so I can show a date range in a title
  • More support for using expressions as values: This is so I could calculate a page link inside a loop or do more date math.

My Journals do not use heavily templated pages—Most pages are nearly blank, but they have a 5mm dot grid on them. You could do bullet-style journaling, sketches, or whatever you like.

The main opinionated thing I do is that my year is based around four 13-week “Quarters”, not the months or the typical quarters, and my weeks start on a Monday.

So, 2025 starts on Monday, December 30, 2024 and goes to Sunday, December 28, 2025. I did add on the week after, though so that Dec 29-31 are in the Journal (and the rest of that week). The full 2025 journal is 53 weeks with a little of 2024 at the beginning and a little of 2026 at the end.

Download my 2025 Journal

Since this was created with Page-o-Mat, you could customize it and make your own. See the config file in /config/2025-journal.yaml in the repo. The script uses Python—I added installation instructions to the README.

EDIT: More explanation of my system in My Year in Weeks

Christmas Computing Memories

When I was thirteen, my mom got me an electric typewriter for Christmas. It didn’t work, so we had to take it back to Radio Shack. I convinced her to get me a TRS-80 Color Computer instead (they were both $50—so an even trade). It had 4k and no permanent storage. I booted every day, wrote programs and then when I shut it off, those programs were gone.

The next year I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas, but still without a disk drive. The only thing you could do with this computer was program it in BASIC, which is what I did.

When I was sixteen, I was taking digital electronics in high school. Some students in the class wrote a version of The Twelve Days of Christmas except with the names of chips instead of the usual gifts. The only line I can remember is “Five 555’s”.

November 2024 Blog Roundup

Whenever I am near the end of a year, I start planning for the next one. This has made me blog more than I had been in the early fall.

I wrote about planning for 2025

I’m also going to start podcasting soon, and I’m trying to find a way to bring them to YouTube

One of my major activities this year was working on my book on tech debt. I am wrapping that up and starting to think about marketing.

My next draft of the book is due on December 4, and so I will be spending most of December finding things to do while waiting for it. I hope to have some new podcasts with my major lessons learned writing it.

2025 Pre-Planning

In 2024, I applied The Four Disciplines of Execution to my life and business. I detailed the process for my 2024 plan in a blog post for each discipline:

  1. 4DX: Applying the First Discipline (pick a goal)
  2. 4DX: Applying the Second Discipline (identify and work on the leading indicators)
  3. 4DX: Applying the Third Discipline (build a scoreboard to tell you if you are winning)
  4. 4DX: Applying the Fourth Discipline (review with accountability)

The first discipline is to pick a single Wildly Important Goal (WIG), but that’s because they imagine that you are doing this only for work. I do it for three completely segregated areas of my life that I can stop from interfering with each other: Work, Personal Growth, and Fitness. I can always make time for each those three independent of the other two. This is important, because the enemy of your WIG (in the book) is the Whirlwind of activities you need to do just to keep going. My work Whirlwind will interfere with my work WIG, but (for me) it doesn’t stop me from working out or working on my personal growth WIGs.

This is just a brain dump of possible WIGs for 2025 in each category.

Personal: I have sold 0 copies of Pay Tech Debt to Go Faster Now (it’s not done), so I want to have it available for sale by end of Q1 2025 and sell 1,000 copies by the end of the year.

Alternatives: (1) Outsource the end tasks of the book and start a new one (2) Sell whatever I can and build a course based on the book that is the focus (3) Sell whatever I can and try to do workshops at tech conferences based on it.

Work: I have a working, but not useful MVP of a new web application, and am mid reconfiguration into a simpler (and somewhat different) mobile web app. I am trying to get to a new MVP by January 2025. My goal is to have paid customers by the end of Q1.

Alternatives: (1) Give up on this idea and try something else (2) Give up and don’t try to make a software product — e.g. turn the book into my business

Fitness: I am in a fitness stasis, which might be what I have to live with for my age. It’s fine. But I still want less than 20% body fat by the end of the year. The way to do it is radical change, which I will think about and perhaps aim for 20% by the end of Q1. The rest of the year will be about maintenance and sustainability. The answer is probably a combination of regular exercise (easy), daily walking (takes time, but could multitask with something), and a more significant calorie deficit accomplished with more careful eating (hardest).

Alternatives: (1) make maintenance the goal and just be happy with my level of fitness (2) make having fun the goal and go for more varied experiences.

This year looks a lot like 2024, but geared more finishing (where 2024 was about starting).

2024 Retrospective

I do my yearly retrospective early because I use it to figure out my plan for the next year. Last year around this time, I thought 2024 would follow the theme of “Heavy Lifting” because I wanted to do more strength training and also take on large projects. But when the year actually started, I had settled on three processes for the year—they were supposed to accomplish bigger goals, and judged on that, I failed on all three. But, the processes resulted in me making progress on each one.

I had thought that I could write two 50-page books this year. Instead, I am almost done with one 130+ page book. I ended up here because my plan was more successful than I thought it would be. In April, I had those 50 pages mostly done and I posted them online for feedback. When I did, it was discovered by Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) who asked me to write an article for his newsletter. It took me four months and a two major drafts (and several rounds of edits) to write an acceptable article. Almost none of this text was in my original 50 pages, so I ended up with about 40 pages more text, some of which was in the article, but more than half was not. Right after that, I was approached to give a webinar to a group of CTOs on technical debt and that led to a whole new section on how Engineering Leadership should think about tech debt.

So, I am here in November with a first draft of my book on tech debt close to done, but in front of me I have several rounds of editing and all of the non-writing work it takes to get a book published. I hope to be done by Q1 next year, and then I’ll be focussed on selling it. My goal is to sell 1,000 copies in 2025.

My fitness goal for 2024 was to lose body fat. I worked out all year, but didn’t really make a dent. I kept trying things (strength training, intermittent fasting, more walking, more cardio, etc), but nothing helped. I kept to a plan all year — I work out 5 or more days a week, eat pretty well, and live a healthy lifestyle, but I might not be ever able to lose this last bit of body fat without radical change. In 2025, I am going to go back to a more cardio-heavy regimen. I was worried about running and my long-term knee health, but I have access to a rowing machine and elliptical, and can do more cardio-based strength workouts with low impact.

My business goal was to launch a web application that I am working on with a partner. We did an MVP (which was the goal), but didn’t get traction with the app as is. However, we did a little pivot in August, which I’m working on it now. I hope to be able to get to another MVP by the end of the year.

The thing that worked well in 2024 was having separate work, personal growth, and fitness goals, but only one in each. I can easily segregate the time between those three areas, but within each of them, trying to do too much would have killed focus, and I might not have made any progress.

Static Site Generation from Django

I created App-o-Mat in 2014 using Django (pre-1.0) and Python 2, and for all that time it was deployed on relatively cheap hosting that supported Python backends. Unfortunately, my host recently decided to stop supporting Passenger and Django had long ago abandoned fastcgi. My options were to upgrade my hosting or look for an alternative host.

I had been wanting to look at AWS’s App Runner service, so I started reading through the docs and doing a trial port of my site. Since I also use MySQL, I had to also learn RDS. At some point I knew enough to try to figure out what this was going to cost to host and it turned out to be more expensive than just upgrading my hosting platform, so I abandoned AWS.

App-o-Mat is a content-driven Django app. It doesn’t have any interactivity in the public pages—most of the advantage of Django to me is in its CMS admin interface where I can author new articles. The public site is essentially static.

So, rather than upgrade my host, I decided that I now just run the site locally on my laptop and use wget to crawl it to get a static site that I scp to my host. I had to manually cause issues to get my 404 and other error pages to be part of the crawl. I see that there’s a project, https://django-distill.com, that purports to turn any Django project into a static site generator, but it also doesn’t automatically handle your error pages.

I might use django-distill in the future, but I write new content very infrequently, so we’ll see.

February/March 2024 Blog Roundup

Personal productivity has been on my mind in the past couple of months because of a new tool I am working on. I shared thoughts in these posts

I also finally started Season 4 of my podcast, Write While True, which is where I share what I am learning about writing.

And I also shared my process for generating Transcripts for a Self-hosted Podcast.

Double Down on Things that Work for You

At the end of January, I realized that the actions I decided to take for my fitness goals weren’t working, so I decided to add more light-impact cardio.

So, it appears that for me, I might need more cardio. From my research, I know that this may inhibit muscle growth, but that effect is because of calorie deficit. So, I will add more cardio (but low stress activities like swimming, rowing, and the elliptical) and I need to find a good healthy source of extra calories

Right after I wrote that, I realized that more walking might also help and was very easy to fit into my days. It’s only been two weeks, but the effect was obvious enough that I decided to do much more walking than I planned.

I started with a daily goal of 12,500 total steps, but now I get over 20k most days. The extra walking is hundreds of calories, which I eat because I am trying to build muscle.

To get this many steps, I have added the following practices:

  1. Almost all of my reading or video watching is on a treadmill. I don’t need to make time for this. I do it in whatever clothes I’m wearing and keep it at a slow enough pace.
  2. Almost all podcast listening has to be done on an outside walk.
  3. If I have to walk somewhere, I leave a little early and add at least 10 minutes more walking each way.
  4. I installed Pedometer++ on my iPhone/Watch and use their widgets as my scoreboard. My current steps is in a complication I see all day.
  5. I try to get close to 10,000 steps in the morning (to win the morning).

20k might unsustainable long term, but I always dedicate the first thirteen weeks of the year to try to make big changes in my life so I can see what the impact would be. Then, I size it to something I can keep on doing.

Win the Morning

Using The Four Disciplines of Execution, I am trying to reach my goals by “playing a winnable game”. The strategy is to develop a lead measure that you can act on at any time (see 4DX: Applying the Second Discipline). But, I find that I win this game more often if I act in the morning.

For fitness, I am doing more strength workouts, incorporating long walks into my day, and eating a healthy high-protein breakfast. I work out at around 7am and eat breakfast soon afterwards, so this is usually done by 9. If I get up early enough, I do a long walk to the gym.

My other two goals have dedicated time allocated to them. I front-load that as much as possible, and move anything that could be distracting to late in the day (especially meetings). I want to work on the important tasks when I have the most energy for them.

According to When by Daniel Pink, for most people, the morning is good for deep work and the afternoon is better for collaboration and ideation. I am clearly one of the “most”, because this works well for me.