I am close to reading 50 books for the half-year, and I am excited about the things I am building quietly. Recently, I invested in improving my environment design. I set up a walking pad near the television, I have a posture corrector in my chair, and I have an aluminum stand that makes sure my laptop’s screen stays at eye level when I do my work. It is amazing how these ridiculously small environmental changes make a huge difference to how I approach my daily grind.
Summer is about to end here in Manila and we are experiencing the occasional drizzles ushering in the June rainy season. But my fever for my newfound routine has been going along swimmingly. The walking pad I bought from Shopee has been a godsend; even on days I did not hit my 8 hours of sleep, I still manage to do a light physical activity to jumpstart my morning. Much of the brain fog has been reduced, my usage of my gadgets have been intentional, and nobody has been hijacking my attention on my inboxes lately.
Recently, I learned about the power of the ridiculously easy. I overcome every difficult day with a ridiculously easy task. I usually focus on just a single task. I treat that one task as the big to do. I make the task so laughably easy like brush my teeth, stand instead of lie down, leave the bedroom, go to the portico instead of sit in front of the TV, or do some 3 minutes of breath work and body scanning (when my monkey mind keeps me from sustaining a strong 20-minute meditation session).
Lately, I have been noticing a fluctuation in my productivity levels. Instead of fighting it, I began to try to understand it and work on it with a pinch of self-compassion and self-care. This month has been particularly challenging because I am in a career transition and I needed to meet both existing commitments and prepare for a new chapter at the same time. The simultaneous demands did require me to consolidate my entire life management system into a combination of a few technology tools: Cloud Storage for PARA system folder, Notion personal knowledge management system, and Monday boards for project tracking.
Dev Christmas Got Early for DataMom I applied for a Github for Education Developer Tools backpack four months ago when I went back to grad school. I wanted to check out some new developer tool offers out there and I found some pretty neat ones that I can use for my current and future projects as a data nerd. Last night, I learned that I was able to unlock the treasure chest and I was able to activate SEVEN cool free premium tools that I intend to use more frequently in the coming days.