April Retrospective

I had four goals for April. I did okay this month, but not as well as I wanted:

1. Finish cleaning up my resume. I got everything translated over to xmlresume and hacked up the XSL to add the sections and formatting that I wanted, and I did enough editing so that I had something I could send out in the event of an emergency. I’m not really happy with it in general but decided that I didn’t want to spend any more time thinking about job hunting during what was supposed to be my vacation. We’ll call this one a partial success.
2. Get some sort of regular exercise. This is the only goal where I’m actually happy with the results. I’ve been walking about 5 miles 5 days a week, and this last week I started adding in some running intervals.
3. Write a non-trivial Ajax web app. Again, a partial success. I’ve got a functional web app; there’s some javascript in it, but no asynchronous interaction between the client and server. I haven’t really needed it yet and there’s been other functionality I’ve wanted to work on instead. I still feel like I haven’t gotten as much done as I could have, though.
4. Write at least one insightful blog post. Meh, I knew going in that this one was going to be dubious. My posting rate has dipped to about one a week, which is less than I was hoping for, and I’m not sure I would classify anything so far as ‘insightful’. Still, I’m happy that this hasn’t been a complete FAIL yet.

Where did things go wrong? First, I got distracted by the Internet a bunch this month. On the plus side, most of these have been relevant distractions, looking at project ideas or technology details or other things related to software development. I’d like to cut these down or at least schedule them better, but I’m not unhappy about what I’ve gotten out of them.

Second, I think I did too much context switching, trying to squeeze in a little bit of everything every day. I’ll be better off if I actively devote an entire day to a single activity rather than jumping around. I know that I’m more productive this way, but I fooled myself into thinking that not having a job to go to meant that I had so much free time that I didn’t need to worry about focusing. Definitely false.

About the blog specifically: it’s still taking too long to write short posts. I’ve got a bunch of one-line ideas searching desperately for a point. I need to constantly remind myself of this and ponder some tricks for generating more quantity without worrying so much about quality (which ends up lacking anyway because I finally publish just to get something new up).

Overall, I’m happy that I avoided falling into the “I’ve got a ton of free time, so there’s no pressure to do anything today” trap. In the mortal words of Herm Edwards, “We can build on this!!” Stay tuned for some thoughts about May, coming soon.