Welcome to my week 1 retrospective!
Unlike other content that I hope to put on this site, these are written primarily for me.
Therefore I don’t intend to put a lot of effort into polishing them nor do I plan on actively pushing for anyone
to read them.
However, in the interest of making this sabbatical as public as possible I will post them here, and
if you are the type of person that finds the weekly progress and process around the sabbatical interesting,
please continue!
Goals
Here is my self-graded goal report card for week 1.
| # |
Goal |
Grade |
| 1 |
Define a rough shape of the day-to-day structure of the sabbatical |
B+ |
| 2 |
Log time consistently and log at least 40 hours of time |
A |
| 3 |
Write at least one journal/blog entry and figure out where to journal |
A- |
| 4 |
Ship something |
A- |
- Overall I’m feeling good about my day-to-day for only having done this for a week, though definitely have stuff to iron out, for example my schedule, time logging buckets and writing plans. I also now suspect that this goal was a bit misguided since I think the notion of a “standard” day in the sabbatical may not be useful.
- Nailed this. More below.
- I did write about one and a half blogs, though I haven’t finished editing them so they aren’t published yet.
- I shipped coryzue.com, though I haven’t promoted it at all yet.
Overall thoughts
Overall these are good grades!
I’m happy with how the first week went, although the possibly-too-good grades have me reflecting that perhaps I should be setting loftier goals.
For now, I’ll continue to set achievable targets, but may aim to get more ambitious as time goes on.
Time
I’m using toggl to track all of my time.
It’s really great, and makes pretty reports for me for free!
Here’s how my time broke down this week.
My week 1 time breakdown
As you can see I’m sticking to a pretty close approximation of what I consider to be standard working hours
(8-10 hours during the week + a few on weekends).
I spent 30 hours specifically on the sabbatical, and another 12 on what I’m tagging as “day to day life”
which includes things like errands and email.
Within the sabbatical the most time (about 20 hours) went towards building this website -
which probably took longer than it should have because I was learning a bunch of new tech.
The rest fell into smaller buckets of planning, learning (reading), and writing.
Overall, I’d say this was a disappointingly admin-heavy week for me due to catching up from traveling
the previous two weeks and sorting out some time-sensitive things (like the power at our home getting turned off!).
One of my goals for next week is to log much less time (< 5 hours) to day to day life.
Life
It was a good week outside of work. I ran three times, surfed once, hiked Table Mountain, and saw a concert in Kirstenbosch.
Here’s a picture of a squirrel I took in the Company Garden’s on Saturday.
That’s all for now!
If you enjoyed reading this or have any feedback on what you think I should change about this format I’d love to hear from you
in the comments below or contact me.