The penultimate week before work

Last week I posted about the new guitar I picked up for kiddo #2 — as suspected she leads such a busy life she hadn’t had a chance to practice. How does an 8 year old have such a busy schedule? A mystery for another time.

This week I have continued making my way through Getting Things Done, just completing chapter 7 centred around organising your tasks and generating sub-lists categorised by projects. I’ve decided to use Excel to house my lists of tasks — I have an Office 365 subscription which is about $99 a year. My friend Luke also mentioned Notion.so (referenced by Ali Abdaal, a productivity specialist). I’m happy to try out new tools but I know that if I start down that route at the beginning, being a nerd, I’ll just end up playing with the tech instead of actually moving forward with the concepts in the book. Another reason I decided to stick with Excel is that it lowers the barrier to entry for CRUD operations. Not only is the central list saved on my OneDrive synced to the cloud but I can access it from my phone. As it turns out the phone Excel app has a super nice view for interacting with lists. That’s not to say I didn’t end up fiddling with it a bit by generating an alternate view with some filters and sorting applied — I had to stop myself once again as I was getting carried away with presentation without fully forming the data collection. hehe

Also this week I heard news of my aunt passing at the age of 81 — it wasn’t related to Covid. These events are always sad news and I took some time to reflect on my interactions with her over the years. She was good fun and it’s nice to see the family rallying around to help out and catch up with my uncle and cousins. Mortality is something that has crossed my mind more often than not as the children have been growing up, and it seems like you have less time as you get older than when you were a kid. This has been one of the motivating factors behind my drive to take more control of my time, life, and general productivity.

On a happier note, at home we’ve been revisiting some of the movies of my childhood. In the states the storms are a lot more interesting than those in the UK — thunder and lightning, very very frightening. So I pulled out Twister to watch with the kids and they loved it. The CGI was a bit ropey in places but it still held up remarkably well. That was followed by the first two Indiana Jones movies. I was expecting to be awoken overnight with the kiddos having nightmares following the face-melting scene in Raiders and the heart-wrenched-from-chest scene in Temple of Doom, but the subsequent nights went without issue. These kids are resilient. I know the face melting affected me for a while when I watched it as a kid! For our Friday movie night we whipped out the s’mores and popcorn and settled in to watch Netflix’s The Mitchells vs the Machines — super fun for both adults and kids. You could definitely see the similarities in style with Into the Spider-Verse, another great movie.

And finally, my replica Eames lounge chair arrived. This thing is going to get a decent workout with the backlog of productivity books I have to get through. It took about an hour or so to put together and I’m pretty pleased with the results considering it was a tenth of the price of an original!