Week 47 of 2023 Talk: How to approach technical problems I held a talk for a company internal event (dev week: talks and events focused around the development discipline). See the relevant page (I’ll make the recording available after I pieced it together). It completely took up my focus for Mon-Wed and some of last week as well. I went with a very interactive format that asks the audience to propose how they would approach a given problem that I presented and then step by step revealing more information as they take the right steps and ask the right questions.

Week 46 of 2023 Update for the No Complaints challenge Plenty of resets this week. While the absolute number of fails is not decreasing, I’m noticing a shift from vocalizing complaints/cursing to only thinking them (external -> internal.) There were a lot of judgments of myself and others. I did stop myself multiple times from swearing or complaining. Swearing generally is getting better, though I’ve noticed some phrases utilizing “fuck” or “shit” are hard to shake.

Week 45 of 2023 Update for the No Complaints challenge After two consecutive non-failing days it was back to complaining about circumstances with the work VPN and the “incompetence” of some colleagues. Also a lot of resets for cussing (mostly “fuck”), which we paid more attention to. After getting my mom, brother and their yoga group to join the challenge, I found out that they interpreted the challenge stricter than we did.

Week 44 of 2023 New habit: Getting out of bed in the morning Place your alarm out of reach, so you have to get out of bed to turn it off. When my alarm rings in the morning I’m ready to go. Despite this even I will stay in bed if I have my phone right next to me. Staying in bed means no starting my day. It cuts into my most productive work block and sabotages my body clock1.

Week 43 of 2023 New Challenge: No Complaints This week I’m starting a new challenge of not complaining, together with my wife. It was inspired by Tim Ferriss. We have a bracelet1 on that we have to switch from one wrist to the other if we complain. The goal is to make it 21 days without complaining. The definition of complaining we use is: describing an event or person negatively without indicating next steps to fix the problem.