2020 Week 52 Review: 21 Dec - 28 Dec

I do best when I have a structure to work with as a scaffolding when dealing with life and everything that entails. The weekly review process will be one of several structures I'm purposely building into my life so that I can be a more focused and concentrated general intelligence entity: this has the great benefit of helping me align my actions with my goals, plus you know, helping me to actually identify and remember my goals explicitly.

Last week I completed 8 of my major weekly ToDo items and failed to complete 7 of the same. I am satisfied with this amount of accomplishment, it's a good start, specifically because I started something new with my life and completed the three things I found most important. Everything else was gravy :)

Those three most important goals that I accomplished were:

1. Write publicly every single day.
2. Escape vicious depressed mood cycles by forcing myself to be extraordinarily virtually social: I'm pleased to report that this intervention was successful!
3. Go outside and exercise for at least 30 minutes every day. I did this until diagnosed with the flu on Sun the 27th. Since then the more prudent action has been to rest so I've stopped exercising for the moment.

I will continue prioritizing those three goals and so will pursue them again this week!

Things I failed to accomplish that I want to accomplish this week:

1. I did not at all work on a task I'm calling "Important but Ugh" last week. This week I must clock-in 10 hours of work towards that task, or else I will be forced to donate $50 to a political party I don't like.
2. I gave myself a task to do (let's call it: "Effort required but is Fun / Rewarding") and didn't complete it yet, I will complete it tomorrow Dec 30th or else I will be very annoyed with myself and will have let a few important people to me down.
3. I did not do enough job hunting, this week I must clock-in 10 hours of work towards that task.

Additional ToDo for this week:

• Participate in 2019 LW Review by reviewing nominated posts
• Read Acéphale issue "Escape" and ensure to write a short summary and /or review of each entry and the issue as a whole.
• Continue reading NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman
• Build group for doing Hammertime sequence
• Schedule virtual co-working sessions with friends for different types of work / tasks I need to complete.

Things I noticed while writing this weekly review.

1. I want to prioritize raising my happiness set point, this seems like one of the most important / significant things that I can do for myself. The highest priority tasks I have for this week all contribute significantly to this goal.
2. Stating publicly that I will do something is usually an effective motivator for me to do said thing, unless I overload my ToDo list too badly (and thus get overloaded myself) and/or don't add in additional incentive mechanisms to make me complete things I just really don't want to do but need to do, or things I want to do but have a lot of akrasia around doing.
3. I liked Ben Kuhn's weekly review process / structure and modeled mine somewhat off of his, I will adjust as necessary going forward. I'd like to create a weekly review process that is more tailored for me, but for now it's good to have a template to start from.
   • put together list of my favorite essays / books / posts of life advice.
4. It is greatly helpful to write a daily list of what I read that day with a short description or summary or review of said read thing. I will do this every day this week instead of inconsistently like last week.

Bugfixes: stopped using a small TV as my desktop's third monitor and replaced it with an ancient spare monitor I had. I lost some screen real estate but gained a nice quality of life improvement because I no longer have to run an xrandr BASH script every single gorram time I turn my computer on and / or wake it up from suspend (TVs are handled differently than computer monitors on Ubuntu and every time I turned the TV on or turned it off it'd mess up my display arrangement settings). Definitely an improvement and worth the loss of screen real estate, also makes my desk area look more "open" which feels nice.

Well! That is my first weekly review done!! I'm happy I wrote it, but wow did I have to fight off a lot of ugh fields and akrasia to finish it, but that makes completing it all the sweeter :)

My next weekly review will be posted by Sunday 3 January 2021 at 15:00 and will cover today the 29th through Saturday the 2nd.