It’s been a considerable amount of time since I last posted on this blog. Life has become incredibly busy and stressful since my last update. Work continues to demand most of my free time and the lack of balance has been having quite the impact on me. However, I am starting to put up some barriers with the office to ensure that I can get more and more free time.
Here’s a summary of what I have been doing to improve things:
- On weeks where I am required to be in-office all week, I am starting to leave my laptop at work.
- I have been volunteering less for tasks that are not a requirement of my job.
- I have cancelled any continued education opportunities that have been offered to me through the company.
- I am getting back on Keto and focusing on a balance of eating the right things and remaining active whenever I can.
- I am focusing on getting the correct amount of sleep each night.
I am becoming more accepting of the factors outside of my control. I am becoming less willing to sacrifice my personal time to get projects back on track when the factors getting them off track are things I have no control over. Instead, I communicate it upstream and I continue to put in the effort expected of me.
I am hoping by the end of the year my work/life balance will improve. We hired three new people on our team recently to help grow it out. Given the kind of work we do, it’s going to take at least six months for a new person to begin to meaningfully contribute. During this time, it also means the rest of us are going to lose some of our productivity spending time helping the new people get up to speed.
Once we have the new team members operating at 100%, I believe the schedules will work themselves out and things will be in a much healthier place. I do still have concerns, however, about our on-boarding process and our inability to invest in creating better training materials for new hires.
With all of that being said, I have put in a LOT of effort lately to improve my living conditions and to streamline certain aspects of my daily life.
Coffee
I made a couple of purchases that are already paying dividends for me. While I enjoy doing a pour-over from time to time, I need a fast way to make coffee in the mornings. Or rather, I needed a way to automate the process in the morning.
I ordered a Zojirushi brewer with a timer on it to begin the brewing process before I wake up. I have also ordered a Baratza Encore ESP to give me a fast way to grind the coffee beans with consistency. With this combination, I am able to prepare my coffee the night before and have fresh coffee for myself in the morning.
Lately I have been sticking to a few staples for my selection, but I plan to branch out a little bit as time and budget allows. My three favorites right now are as follows:
I haven’t been purchasing much from the local roaster mostly due to the difficulty of finding it with the work schedule I have. If I wake up early on a Saturday, there is a decent time I can head out and grab some. Otherwise, I usually have too much going on which prevents me from going out to pick some up.
Mental Health
Overall I think I am in a much better situation than I was one year ago. Work stress has definitely increased, but my ability to deal with it has also improved. In some ways I haven’t been able to proportionally adjust to it, but I am getting better with it.
My sobriety has been difficult as of late. There are a few different factors that are making it a bit difficult to keep the thoughts of drinking out of my head. I have, however, been spending more time focusing on it.
I have already had an open conversation with my parents about it. Being honest with myself, I don’t think the risk is as high as I imagine it from time to time. I take a lot of pride in watching the number of days sober continue to increase. Even in an emotional state, I think the chances of me actually relapsing are near zero. However, that doesn’t mean it won’t stress me out from time to time.
One thing I have done well for myself over the past month or so is actually taking the time to relax and de-stress. As I am writing this, I can feel the stress leave me. Getting my thoughts written out always helps me decompress from a stressful week. I have my morning coffee and am simply writing out whatever I want to write about. This in itself is helping with my mental health.
Dieting
Recently my dieting has suffered due to a number of factors. Most notably, work stress has made it difficult to have the strength to restrict my eating. During a particularly difficult work week, I ended up relapsing back into eating a lot of sweets.
I am not proud of that fact, but I am finally starting to address this. Upon doing some reflection at the start of the week, I realized it’s better for me to address it before the most stressful week of the calendar year at work rather than waiting for afterwards.
At the time of writing this I am 37.5 hours into a 72-hour fasting window. I am over halfway there and honestly feel good as a result. I am taking the necessary electrolytes to keep myself properly hydrated. I can go ahead and break the fast Sunday evening with a healthy Keto meal, though I will break the actual fast itself with something easy to digest.
Starting Monday I will be doing intermittent fasting alongside a strict Keto diet to not only get back on track with my weight loss, but to help with my overall stress levels.
My weight and the health issues I face as a result of it are certainly stressing me out. Getting out in front of this before being in-office for five straight days is going to actually help me out by a considerable margin. It does mean I cannot use eating as a coping mechanism, but I shouldn’t be doing that to begin with.
My focus starting on Monday is to make sure I get enough protein to maintain muscle health while eating enough fat to satiate. Nothing more, nothing less.
Exercise
In a similar boat to my lack of dieting, I haven’t been exercising all that much. When I am eating terribly, I don’t have the energy needed to actually physically exert myself. By switching up the dieting, I can guarantee I will be wanting to do some Beat Saber. I am going to leverage Beat Saber over the rest of the year as a way to get my cardio.
Outside of this, I plan to reintroduce something like Fitbod into my weekly routine. I need to do some body weight exercises, but I need to find ones that are going to be less of an impact on my lower back. I have had some lower back pain recently surface that is causing me some issues with general exercise.
I plan to see a doctor in the near future, but until then, I am focused on the activities that don’t make that problem worse. Cardio will be great for that.
Technology
Those around me know I have been having a lot of random computer issues lately. I have posted about it on the blog and on Discord. I may have solved most of them with a simple change.
It seems all of the weird stability issues I have been having for the past year may have been caused by a capture card going bad. Upon removing the capture card from my computer, my XMP profile is stable.
There is a decent chance the motherboard and RAM I replaced was perfectly fine, and it was the capture card causing the issues all along. Upon doing some research, this seems to be fairly common with this exact capture card.
I’ve replaced this with a USB-based capture card. It should function just fine and do what I need it to do. Having done some testing, I am performing just fine in Arcaea on the Nintendo Switch.
I’ve been following the recent developments in Intel’s struggle to maintain it’s composure with so much outside pressure. Many business and technology channels have been calling them out for the lack of stability in their flagship chips. While I was initially regretting the switch to AMD, having found the potential culprit of my issues to be something independent of the platform has made me come to appreciate it.
I am currently planning to keep this system for the next couple of years, but any concept of an upgrade is most likely going to be an AMD-based system rather than an Intel one.
Writing
I want to begin investing a bit more of my free time into my writing. I have some ideas on a few articles I want to write which will require ample research to do them right. One of them is regarding the consolidated nature of the current Internet.
Despite the growing nature of the Internet, it feels like the average web user is visiting fewer websites on average. Most people have a tendency to use a few different social media and news platforms and have a tendency to not branch out from there. It’s an observation I have made by seeing how my family uses the web and comparing against online discourse.
Obviously my observation isn’t true of everyone that uses the Internet. However, I am going to conduct some research into Search trends and what they mean to the average web user. I believe through this research, we can find that companies like Google and Meta have constructed their platforms to maintain a firm grasp of their users.
