Week notes are common among many bloggers. To share and reflect on what you did throughout the week. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don’t really do that many interesting things throughout a given week, so a weekly cadence would be a bit much for me personally. But I still want to force myself to reflect on what I am doing, whether doing it makes sense and is in line with what I want to be doing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
These posts will be deeply personal and, quite frankly, probably not of interest to anyone else but me. Still, I want to put them out there. For posterity and accountability. To begin I will test out a monthly cadence. Over summer I will evaluate whether that’s too often and if these posts make any sense at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The formating is straightforward: A reflection on how I did and how I can improve in the coming month for every point of focus in my personal life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was a good month for writing. I sat down to write in a focused manner every single day throughout February. I try to make these sessions at least 30 minutes long. They usually end up being closer to an hour. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every single one of my writing sessions were in the early AM, except one. My two year old woke up early, so I had to spend the morning next to her trying to get her a few extra minutes of shut eye before the day started in earnest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don’t really track how much I write. (Note to self: A Python script that counts files and words and compiles some cool stats from my text files would be nice.<\/em>) But in terms of what I published on this blog, I ended up with 11 new posts in the past month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My main takeaway from this month as it relates to writing, is that I now believe my approach to establishing a daily writing habit is sustainable. Sure, there were some challenging days<\/a>. But overall, I’m enjoying the challenge and the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’m still entirely unfocused in my approach, in that I don’t impose any directions on what<\/em> I should write about. I just sit down and start writing. To the extent that I should start thinking about being more focused on output, it’s not something I am anywhere near ready to do. As of now, the act of writing itself is the goal. And even though I have some ideas about things I want<\/em> to write, I believe that if I just keep honing my writing, the day will come when I’m ready to start tackling those. Or not. And that’s fine, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the next month, I want to try to keep doing exactly what I did in February when it comes to writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kimberly pointed out<\/a> that problems of output are often problems of input. If you want to write well, you need to read. I want to spend an hour a day reading a book. Unsurprisingly, I failed miserably in February.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The excitement of working on this website became too tempting a distraction. Instead of reading, I spent many nights in front of my computer, improving the site. In addition to editing and publishing posts (which, to my detriment, I don’t really consider writing) I spent much time tweaking the site\u2019s design and functionality. Like setting up conditional blocks<\/a> and creating custom feeds<\/a>, modifying font sizes for accessibility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Oh, and putting together and setting up a dark mode. I need to write a post on that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reading took a hit as a result of this excitement around web development. And it did make me think: I thoroughly enjoy making and maintaining websites. How can I carve out more time for doing it?<\/p>\n\n\n\nReading<\/h2>\n\n\n\n