My Stupid Ego

I’m pretty sure I’ve reflected on this a few times in the past. I know I reflect on it in my head all the time. This week I want to lay out some thoughts on how my stupid ego causes me to struggle and stress for no good reason.

This is definitely not just a problem for me, most people struggle with their ego to some degree. Even those who appear to be the most selfless on the surface are driven by their egos. I suppose the only real way to get away from it entirely is to become a monk and isolate yourself from the rest of the world. I certainly don’t want to do that, I like living in the world, as do most people. So, we all struggle.

Ego itself is a manifestation of self-esteem, basically how you see yourself. I think it’s safe to say that everyone wants to be recognized for succeeding in whatever they choose to do, whether it is external or internal recognition, and that builds up self-esteem. For better or worse, I am much more externally motivated, I rarely get satisfaction from doing something unless it is appreciated by others. The very reason I am writing these posts at all is because I desire that validation.

So what are the things that I wish to succeed at? What do I want others to appreciate me for? For me, two things were defined pretty early in my life and I haven’t deviated much from it. The first is that I always strive to be liked by everyone. The second is that I want to recognized for my creative endeavors. Let’s break down each of these.

When I say that I want to be liked by everyone, that really does mean liked. Not loved, but liked, and certainly not disliked or hated. I’m sure that this stems from my early childhood where I got picked on a lot and I grew to have a fear of confrontation. To this day I don’t like arguing with people, and when I get hot under the collar it is because someone else is calling me out or yelling at me for whatever reason.

On the surface this doesn’t seem like a bad thing. Trying to get along with everyone is a respectable goal. But, in practice, the only real way to avoid confrontation is to be bland. I take everything in stride and I do nothing to rock the boat or sway the opinions of others. I come across as just another warm body in the room. The result is that instead of being someone that everyone likes, I am someone that everyone forgets about. And that’s where my stupid ego gets in trouble with itself because I want to be liked, not ignored. Yet I can’t bring myself to be more memorable because that necessitates being more open and potentially controversial. Ultimately, if I want to be liked I need to be okay with knowing that you can only be liked by some people if you are also disliked by others. It’s not a zero-sum game here, most people will probably like you, but at least one person is going to dislike or hate you, and I am trying to be okay with that.

This is not to say that I am completely forgettable. I have plenty of very close friends who like me and think about me all the time (I assume). They know that while I may not be the most opinionated person out there, I am certainly one of the most dependable, and the few insights I do express tend to be novel and accurate. But it does take a very long time with most people I meet to get that across. My stupid ego would probably prefer it if it took a little less time.

Between the two things I want to succeed at, the creative side is probably the more frustrating of the two. My stupid ego wants me to produce way more than I do, which is almost zero, but year after year passes by with little to show for it. There are three obvious reasons for this. One, going back to what I just talked about, I find it difficult to be motivated to do much because internally I feel that no one really cares about what I do. This stems from the feeling that most people find me forgettable. Two, I have a lot of interests and I have a lot of trouble picking with one and sticking with it long enough to actually produce something. Three, due to a combination of the first two points, I don’t prioritize doing creative things so I never make time to do them and nothing ever gets done.

On the first point, making something creative requires that you take a stand on something. And when you train yourself from an early age to not express opinions to avoid confrontations, it is hard to reverse that. So when I try to approach writing something, I ask myself why anyone else would read what I write. For the most part, I can’t come up with anything, which is why I rarely start on anything. I get an idea that I think could make a seed for a cool story and I work on it in my head, but I can’t think of what makes it worth someone’s time, so it just remains there in my head until I deem it otherwise. The positive is that over time the ideas do get better as I gain more experience and they reflect how I see the world now, but that doesn’t get them any closer to being in front of others. One of the reasons why I’m posting every week is to try to get more comfortable with producing half-baked ideas.

The second and third points might be harder to contend with. So many interests and never enough time to do them all. Prioritizing has never been my strong suit and it only got more difficult over time as I got more obligations and free time shrank. At any given time there are a dozen or more activities that I could do and be perfectly happy doing. Not only are there a bunch of options, but I need to decide how much time to devote to each. I can either try to get to them all and spend small amounts of time on each, or give more time to a few. These days I’m going with the latter, dedicating each evening to one activity so that I can focus and hopefully be more effective. Most people who do creative things for a living will tell you that you need to do it everyday to be effective, but I’ve tried to do that multiple times to little success. It tends to scatter my brain too much, I’m a lot better at giving something multiple hours and getting into a flow state. Whatever it takes to keep my stupid ego from being upset at not getting anywhere.

In the end, will I ever really be recognized for the things that I want? I certainly hope so. But I also need to come to terms with the idea that I may never get there, and my stupid ego is going to have to be okay with that.

Two Months in NYC (vs Seattle)

This is a continuation of my post from a month ago about how my first month in NYC went. At the time I wrote it I wanted to devote some time to talking about how life here has differed from living in Seattle, but didn’t have the time and that post was already getting long. So I’m going to complete that thought this week with a little more experience under my belt.

Just to start off, the biggest difference between the last post and this one is that, since then, everything has been moved here from Seattle, including my wife and cat. So right away I can say that it is a lot less lonely and it is starting to feel like home, though we both still have several moments each week where we have to remind ourselves that we really live here now. The only other comparison I can make is when I moved to Spokane for college, but that was always with the understanding that it was a temporary thing. With this move, we don’t know yet how long it will be. Hopefully it will be a good, long while since we both like it so far, but the future is never set in stone.

Let’s go ahead and start in with the differences between NYC and Seattle. First, the apartment we’re in, since we spend most of our time here. Definitely smaller than our old townhome, it’s somewhere between the sizes of the previous two apartments. But since we got rid of a ton of stuff during the move, it honestly feels more open than it used to be. Due to the design of the townhome we could only host 8 or so before it started to get crowded. The new layout allows for 10-12 easily. Plus, since it’s an apartment building, there are community areas that can fit even more if required.

The other big difference is that this apartment is 100% wood flooring. Living in Seattle we never had a home that wasn’t mostly carpeted. There is one part of me that will always prefer carpet over wood since it’s just nicer to walk on. On the other hand, wood floors are easier to maintain and you get a better sense of how dirty things actually are. Carpets are straight up nasty if you think about it. The wood floor, along with other aspects of the apartment, will lead us to be better at keeping things tidy and clean, so it’s a benefit overall. Just have to be more careful about dropping things.

In terms of other apartment amenities, most of them we’ve seen before. Rooftop deck, courtyard, fitness room, community area, garage, etc. The only real amenity that’s different from Seattle in general is the 24/7 doorman (or woman). It is super common here, particularly for luxury apartments like ours. The hole-in-the-wall apartments don’t have them, but any building that has a front desk of any kind will usually have one. Plenty of apartment buildings in Seattle have leasing offices that handle most of the same functions, but I can’t think of any that were 24/7. Suffice it to say, it’s pretty convenient, and since we see them so often, it quickly becomes a bond like being a familiar at a bar or restaurant.

The next big area for me is working, since that’s a good 50+ hours of my week (including commute). Speaking of the commute, outside of the obvious differences of using a train instead of a bus, there really aren’t that many actual differences. The trains are more frequent and don’t get held up by traffic of course, unless there are delays for one reason or another. I will say that work on the subway is consistent enough that you do always have to be cognizant of what might impact you and how you have to work around it, which never really happened taking the bus in Seattle. There are really only two cultural differences in the commute. One, people rarely shoved to get on the buses in Seattle. It is as common here as it is in any other big city you might visit in Europe or Asia. Two, pedestrians in Seattle definitely do not jaywalk like they do here. I know there is a general stigma because police in Seattle will actually write people up for it, but it’s simply not enforceable here so literally everyone does it.

As for work itself, this is the first job where I’ve had a standard 9(ish)-5(ish) schedule. My first standup of each day is at 9am, so I have to be there by then (I usually get there by 8:45). And I leave sometime in the 5-6pm hour, depending on how long of a lunch break I took and whether something urgent needs to get done. I think the only reason why this actually works for me is because rush hour isn’t that big of a deal here, as long as you don’t drive. Trying to get around Seattle during rush hour was literal hell, so most people I worked with shifted hours to avoid it, including me. It doesn’t seem to be that big a problem here, so most people hold more standard hours.

The culture of the company itself is different in plenty of other ways. I can’t say how much of it is really coast-versus-coast rather than Amazon-versus-literally-everyone-else, so I won’t get into it. I’ll just say that it’s more old school here where people are more interested in protecting their backs than collaborating towards a common goal. What I can say is coast-dependent is that everyone here dresses so well. I feel like a damn slob most days because I haven’t had a chance to update any of my wardrobe yet. About the only piece of clothing I have that isn’t embarrassing is my jeans. Luckily everyone understands that I’m west coast and haven’t transitioned yet, but I feel bad about it. I just want to look good too.

The last area I want to mention is around the food scene. I’m sure there are plenty of other cultural areas I could get into, but since we haven’t had any real time to explore I don’t have any observations there. But when it comes to food, it is a pretty easy statement to say that the quality here is off the charts compared to Seattle. I’d like to think that most of the places I liked frequenting in Seattle would probably do just fine here as well, but there’s a good 90% or so of Seattle restaurants that would be laughed out of town. And it’s not just the flavor either, you can tell that the ingredients are also better. You go to any grocery and the stuff you find is all high quality. The side effect is that none of it is cheap, but that’s just an adjustment you have to make in general.

One of the things that I noticed within the first week of going to work and getting food around the office is that NYC as a whole is a bit behind most cities on the west coast in terms of eco-friendly packaging. Even though it has technically been banned, I’ve been to a few places where everything is still styrofoam. And plastic bags haven’t been banned at all, so they are freaking everywhere. It is legitimately difficult to convince people that you don’t want or need a plastic bag to take something with you. The idea of reusable bags at the grocery story is novel to many cashiers. Seattle hasn’t even had the bans on these things for that long either, but it’s been long enough that it was immediately apparent what a difference it makes.

In terms of the varieties of food, NYC is certainly going to be more diverse, but it’s interesting to see which cuisines get more favor. The biggest thing I miss here so far is a distinct lack of Vietnamese food and teriyaki (sushi and ramen are pretty common though). There is a lower percentage of Asian food across the board here compared to Seattle, for obvious reasons, but those two in particular are things I’ve had trouble finding. Over here what you will find a ton of that Seattle has relatively little of is Mediterranean/Middle Eastern food. It seems like every other food cart on the street serves either bagels or shawarma. Another thing there’s more of in NYC that I never saw in Seattle is South American food. I’ve had a chance to have Venezuelan, Colombian, and Peruvian stuff here and it’s all amazing.

Another obvious area where Seattle reigns supreme is in coffee shops. Sure you expect there to be more Dunkin Donuts here versus Starbucks, but there aren’t that many of either compared to Seattle. In my experience most people don’t care that much and will just have the office coffee or get whatever is closest to the office, whether that be Starbucks, Dunkin, Pret, Joe and the Juice, or whatever. I don’t care being a coffee avoider, but my wife will probably miss that aspect of Seattle over time. On the flip side, NYC has pizza everywhere in the same way. And yes, the pizza here is better than any pizza in Seattle, with a couple exceptions.

I think that’s enough bloviating for one post. I’m sure there will be more observations to make in this area, so maybe another update will be due in a few months. Until then, going to try to do as many new things as possible.

Gone Girl and Unreliable Narrators

The idea for this post actually came to me about a week before I sat down to write this, but I wanted to make sure I finished the book before I gave my complete thoughts. The book in question is Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which is not a book I would normally read but it was one of those audiobooks I decided to listen to specifically because it is outside my normal wheelhouse. I’m sure it got recommended to me by Audible because I also listened to The Girl on the Train after it got a bunch of accolades. I’m glad Gone Girl ended up being a lot better than that book was, but it did bring up a major gripe I have with certain works of literature.

This post is going to be half-review and half-deeper analysis about why the book ultimately failed for me.

I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago that I might be on the verge of quitting on my first piece of media this year, and that was this book. The first few hours of listening were rough, I just couldn’t get into the characters, the writing, or the performances by the two readers. I do appreciate that, since the book is told through alternating viewpoints of the two main characters, Nick and Amy, they got different readers to voice each character, but at the beginning both of them came across as cloying and artificial. Having gotten through the rest of the book I understand why, but it didn’t make it any easier to get through.

But I stuck it out for the five hours I said I would, and by that time there was enough mystery building up that I did want to see where it was going. And when the big twist happened in the middle, I definitely wanted to finish it out. Unfortunately it’s one of those books where the second act is the peak, and the third act ends up being unsatisfying as it limps across the finish line. I don’t want to get any more specific than that because I’m not one to give spoilers for no reason.

In the end, I don’t regret listening to it, but I could’ve done without it. Both of the main characters are awful people and where they end up is not satisfying for me. I could be more elaborate on exactly why, but again, spoilers. I will say that though the readers started out as an annoyance, they were really good by the end and they brought a lot to the emotional beats of the story.

What ultimately came out of this book is something that I’ve noticed before but hadn’t thought about in a while, so I think it’s worth mentioning here as to why I can never fully get into books like this.

I hate unreliable narrators.

You might be saying, “wow, hate is a pretty strong word,” or something like that. And it’s true, I reserve that word for very few things. I keep it for things that truly make me angry, not for annoyances, but for things that this world would be better off without. Time after time, when I read something that’s told by an unreliable narrator (and in this book there’s two of them!), I get angry. And not just angry at the character for being dishonest, but also at the author for using such a lazy way of telling their story.

I get angry at the character because once I find out that they are unreliable in the way they tell their side of the story, I immediately know that the character is an awful person. By definition, people who are dishonest all the time are awful people. It’s one thing to have a character who lies a bunch to other characters, but it’s another to also lie to the reader. Granted, a lot of the dishonesty in this story isn’t actual lying, it’s more being dishonest through omission of details, but there is also just straight up lying. Even more frustrating than that, Nick or Amy will lie to someone else, admit to the reader that it was a lie, but then provide nothing else. It’s hard to get on a character’s side when you don’t know what they are hiding until much later.

But you could say that’s the whole point. The mystery is built because none of the people telling the story are telling you everything, you need to be held in suspense. Well, that’s where I get angry at the author because it’s an artificial way to create suspense. Keeping details away is necessary for mysteries of course, but it really only works well (for me) if the reader is learning them at the same time as the characters. If the character knows some stuff and waits until they are forced to divulge it to the reader, that is just frustrating. Case in point, the whole first half of the story all you really want to know is if Nick had anything to do with Amy’s disappearance or not. But because Nick is an unreliable jerk, you don’t get a straight answer about anything, which is exactly why the other characters in the story turn on him. As a reader, I don’t blame them because he does the same thing to me. And when you step back a little bit, you realize that there is no reason for it be written that way, it is artificially created. Nick could have been honest the entire time and he still would’ve ended up in the position he does, and I probably would’ve felt sorry for him. Instead I simply don’t care about what happens to him, I just want to know if he did it or not.

Of course whenever I think about the concept of the unreliable narrator, I always come back to The Catcher in the Rye, which is famous for that very reason. And I freaking hate that book too. I totally get that it just means the book wasn’t written for me, there are plenty of other people who understand and empathize with those stories. It does make me wonder a little bit about those people though, that you would feel for someone who is clearly an awful person. The thing is, it’s totally fine to have awful, dishonest people in stories, they create tension. But when you read a story, those people need to have foils, and you need to believe that the foils are keeping things in balance. When the story is told by the awful person, you can’t really believe that the foils are keeping balance because you can’t trust the narrator.

Anyway, I don’t know how much more I can say about that. The only reason I didn’t end out hating Gone Girl as a whole is because the unreliable narrator thing isn’t used the entire time. Once you get halfway through to the twist, most of it falls away and the characters are more direct and don’t contradict each other. At the end of the book, I can’t help but feel like the story would’ve been much more compelling if it had just been told from a different perspective. It would’ve necessitated a different ending of course, but as I already said before, it could’ve used one.

Grooming the Backlog

This post is, yet again, at the last minute for this week due to a number of factors, mostly that our stuff has finally arrived in New York so we have been unpacking and getting things sorted as quickly as possible. Obviously that leaves less time for anything else, so I’ll be quick this week and touch on a couple of the process changes I’ve made to how I work with the backlog of stuff I want to do. Yes, it is very exciting stuff.

As I’ve mentioned many times here before, I pay for and use JIRA to keep track of my backlog and how much time I spend on things. For those not in the know, JIRA is a tool lots of companies use (including the one I’m at now) for keeping track of development work for teams and projects. I discovered it when I started working at Amazon and not too long after that I realized it had the potential of being a good tool for other work besides just development. So for the last 5 years or so I’ve been using a personal instance to track various things I want to do. These include books I want to read, games I want to play, movies and shows I want to watch, as well as various creative projects.

It’s been a really useful tool, though it definitely has its share of negatives as well. The biggest one being that with all the reporting it has built-in, it’s easy to see just how bad I am about getting anything done at times. The last month and more has definitely been one of those times where the numbers are pretty stagnant. Not a whole lot I can do about that. But there have been a couple other negatives that I’ve been trying to address.

The first negative is something I’ve also seen on various teams that I’ve been on when it comes to using JIRA at work. One of the aspects of the way the backlog works, at least if you’re using the agile tools, is that you can arrange your tasks in buckets that are called epics. In a development team, an epic will usually tie into a specific feature, like adding a new page to a website or a new set of APIs to a service. But often times you will see that for tasks that don’t fit nicely into a feature, they will end up in generalized buckets that don’t have a goal in mind. It ends up being just a way of labeling things in a more visual way than the actual labeling functionality built into the system. These epics never, ever get finished.

I was guilty of this for a very long time as well. Some of the epics I’ve defined have had goals in mind. Like when I got my new computer I needed to do a bunch of transferring from my old laptop, so that became a small epic. When I wanted to study Spanish and Italian, I made epics to go through all the lessons on Duolingo. But I also had epics called “Video Games” and “Audiobooks” and “Movies/TV” and so on. These were just buckets for labeling things, there was no way I was ever going to actually finish any of these buckets because more would always get added.

To fix this problem, starting at the beginning of this year, I created a ton of epics to separate everything in these bigger buckets into smaller buckets that actually could be finished. Each epic now has some kind of limit such that, once it’s established, nothing else can be added in. For most of the epics, the limit is set by the content of the thing. For example, at some point I want to read through all the Culture novels by Iain M Banks. So there’s an epic for that since there are ten novels in the series, it’s a hard content limit. The rest of the epics are limited by a time window. So for audiobooks, since most of them are not in any kind of series, I have them separated into buckets by the year when I got them, three epics in total for 2017, 2018, and 2019.

This has a couple advantages. First, it makes it easier to find most things when I’m ready to get into them since the labeling is more distinct. Second, closing out epics is extremely satisfying, and having the ability to do that more often is going to be a huge boon to my productivity. I love checking things off and keeping track of progress, so this scratches that itch and makes me want to complete more.

The other big negative to how I’ve been doing things is that when you use JIRA you are generally forced into using the sprint structure in order to make use of the visual task tracker. The sprint board makes it easy to see what is currently being worked on, what’s been finished, and what’s the highest priority to pick up after something else completes. The problem I have with the sprint board is that you have to use sprints, which are timeboxed and require a lot of maintenance since I have to make new ones all the time. In an ideal world I could just have a board available all the time and not have to make new sprints since I don’t care about the reporting it provides.

With this in mind, I took some time to see if a kanban board would better suit my needs. It functions similarly to a sprint board but it’s just always up. Should be perfect in theory. Unfortunately I had to abandon it after I discovered that many of the tracking features are removed from those boards. Yes, it’s a sprint board that I don’t have to make sprints for, but I can’t actually keep track of how much progress I’ve made on anything. I use the time tracking aspect of sprints a lot to figure out how much I can realistically do in a given amount of time, but the kanban board doesn’t have any of that. It ends up being kind of useless then.

So I don’t have a solution for the sprint problem. Best thing I can do is just keep the sprints longer so I don’t have to make them as often (I do one per month) and plan things out ahead of time so that when the first of the month comes, I only have to a make a couple button clicks to roll into the next one. I could always just create a sprint and never actually close it, but that effectively removes all of the reporting features, some of which are nice to have and I do use.

Anyway, that’s really all I have to say about that. It’s not a perfect system but it works pretty well for me. The only other thing that’s changed over time is that I actually keep the true backlog in a different place (Evernote) since the amount of time to manage the whole thing in JIRA would be significantly greater. I keep the real backlog in simpler word documents that are easy to edit and just add things to JIRA as needed. I do have to keep track of things in two places, but it still saves a lot more time than it wastes.

Goals Update: 50 Days

I’m sure it’s getting a little tired by now, but since I don’t have any other things to write about this week, I think it’s a good idea to check up on how I’m doing in regards to the goals I set for the year after 50 days. This means looking at my tracking of goals up to February 19, though this post is being written a little later. I can already say that some of these goals are pretty far behind due to the craziness involved with moving, but there’s still plenty of time in the year to catch up. Hopefully.

Run a Half-Marathon in Under 2 Hours

This is probably the one I’m the most behind on. In the first 50 days I didn’t do a single run and my eating habits have been worse than ever thanks to not having any real way to prepare normal food, since all my cookware was in Seattle while I’ve been in New York, and now it’s all on a truck waiting to get here. It’s also really hard to want to eat well when it’s cold all the time and you are traveling around a bunch to try to get things done at opposite ends of the country.

On the plus side, the amount of walking I’ve been having to do has kept my body less stiff than it got during my funemployment. I’m also trying to be more conscious about the amount of food I eat, even if most of it is just meat and carbs. My body didn’t struggle with any of the moving process either, so that’s a good sign that I should be able to ease back into exercise quickly.

Things are getting into a more predictable routine with work, so I’m hoping that in the next week or two I can cut out some time to get in some short jogs to at least get my mind and body back into the idea of doing something after work a couple nights a week. Still need to find a place to do strength training too.

Publish a Post Every Week

Well, you wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t doing this. I haven’t been on time with all of my posts, particularly in the last couple weeks, but I’ve been doing my best to make sure I don’t get too far behind. With this post I’ll be back on track to hit my scheduled time next post.

The biggest struggle here has been getting topics to write about. The idea was to always have a month’s worth of ideas stocked up so this wouldn’t happen. Problem is that I do have a bunch of ideas, I just can’t write about them yet because they are for things I haven’t done yet, but plan to do once I have time. I was relying a lot of having more games and other media to review for most of my posts, and I just haven’t had time to complete much during the last month. A lot of that is my fault for choosing movies and other brainless things over games and books, but you can only do so much when you leave for work at 8am and get back home around 9pm because you have to eat out every night. Not to mention the flying and focusing on getting a new apartment ready to live in.

Needless to say, I can’t wait to get back to some form of normalcy around here. That will help make topics easier to come up with since I will have time to wander, physically and mentally.

Listen to 200 New Albums

As of day 50, I have listened to 12 albums. So 6% of the way there, though almost 14% of the way through the year. That’s not too bad. I don’t have a full list of specific albums to listen to, but I do have a list of artists that I want to visit and see what I’ve missed over the years.

So far all the listening has been done at work. As it turns out, the new workspace is much more chaotic and full of disruptions than any team I had at Amazon, so putting the headphones on has been a must. That being said, I haven’t fully removed all other forms of distraction from my phone yet, so I am still spending more time on there than I should during breaks. I have also been spending a lot of time listening to my own music, which is cutting into time for other new stuff. I’m sure that will eventually lessen once the new album is not so new.

None of the albums I’ve listened to yet have stood out as particularly great (aside from my own band’s, of course!), but I now know some more music from artists I already like.

Make a Focusing/Quitting Habit

I’m not entirely sure where I am with this to be honest. I can say that during this move I haven’t been good at focusing on certain things, but doing okay in others.

What I have been doing well is keeping the daily tracker of what I spent my time on. At least, as far as keeping track of whether I focused on the game, book, and audiobook I should be doing, that’s been going well. I decided to track those three things because they take up distinct parts of the day. Games only happen during normal after-work time. Books only happen during the hour leading up to sleeping. And audiobooks only happen during my commute. For the interested, my percentages for each of those are: 20%, 58%, and 69%, respectively, the goal being 75% over the course of the year.

Where I’m not sure if my system is working properly is that for days where I know I didn’t have any time or ability to do a focus task, I just counted it as N/A, but every other day where I had even the slimmest chance to do one of those things, I would count it against me if I didn’t do it, even if I didn’t actually get distracted from it. So, for example, I don’t count weekends against audiobooks because I’m not commuting, and I don’t count not playing a game against me if I don’t have the game with me, like when I was packing up things in Seattle to move. But otherwise, if I didn’t play the game, but I was spending the time calling or emailing people about moving, or I was writing one of these posts, it would still go against me. I haven’t been doing a good job of tracking those other things, so I should probably start doing that or at least assess if I truly missed my focus task because I got distracted with something lesser than.

Either way, I’m doing okay on books and audiobooks given the system I have been using. Games are in really bad shape though, I just haven’t played anything in almost a month, basically since I started my job. And most of those days are counted against me because I technically had an hour or two at home where I could’ve done it. Some of those days are valid because I would just watch a video instead, but many of them I had other important things to do, I just don’t remember which days they were at this point. Going forward I will make it a point to put the lack of playing in perspective since I shouldn’t penalize myself for doing something more important.

On the quitting side of things, I haven’t felt the need to drop anything yet, but the audiobook I’m currently working on might be the first one. I’m about 3 hours in and I’m not a fan of the characters or the writing. I will give it the 5 hours I said I would, but if it doesn’t improve significantly by then, I won’t have any problem dropping it and picking up something else.

Looks like I ended up having quite a bit to report on. I’m planning to do this again after 100 days, so shortly into April, and see if things have improved by then. After that it’ll just be at the end of each quarter, so end of June, September, and finally the full year assessment. So look forward to those I guess.