Iteration 2 — Adding Weekly Retrospective
For anyone reading this — sorry in advance. Mostly these articles are being used as a means to jump start the practice of actually writing regularly, and somewhat poorly at that.
I’ve determined that my life is at somewhat of an impasse — I am content in my career choice and don’t really have any regrets regarding how I have spent my time with family and friends, and really love how my personal pursuits have played out (going from semi elite Ironman triathlete to a passion for all things bike). But I guess I am a greedy human being who feels like there should be a little more to MY story, and I think I have hit upon a recipe to get me there and keep me feeling like I am moving toward SOMETHING (more on that something later).
In an effort to jump start this ‘mid-life renaissance’ I’ve decided to introduce a weekly personal retro, that I conduct on Sundays. The idea is to plan the upcoming week’s activities with the aim of sticking to a few vaguish goals to improve in areas that I want to focus on. I’ll pull from a ‘backlog’ of tasks and set up a weekly checklist, and then go get er done. And of course the following week I will look back on what worked, and what didn’t, what I did well, etc… This post is one of my final tasks for the week.
This format worked really well for me when I was training for Ironman racing. I never really followed any fancy training schedule, instead I would plan each week around a simple progression model (based on time) from the following week, usually either adding 10% more time, or 2 hours (whichever was more), and then distributing it to each sport. In this go around I have a few more areas I want to keep progressing in, and I definitely do not feel the need to ladder up the amount of time I spend doing these activities. Here are my areas of focus:
- Intellectual Curiosity (IC)
- Work/Career (WC)
- Family and Friends (FF)
- Recreation and Fitness (RF)
- Social Causes (SC)
- Efficiency (E)
Here are last weeks planned activities, with the areas they impact in parentheses:
- Perform/practice test driven Kata daily, I picked string calculator (IC, WC)
- Bike building — order the Park Tools Blue Book of Bike Repair, easy I know (RF)
- Write a publication article about this structure (WC, IC, SC?)
- Create ‘Golden Master’ tests for clock application at work (WC)
- Hike with wife (RF, FF)
- Cook a good meal (FF)
- Play 1 hour ‘World of Warcraft Classic’ (RF)
- Read Chapters 21,22,23 in Bob Martin’s ‘Clean Architect’
Happy to report I completed all but ‘Cook a Good Meal’, but I plan to do that tonight. What was missing? Planned time with my daughter, but she is a busy 8th grader who just started back to school and she is also in the final weeks of rehearsal for a play, so she wasn’t all that available. I’ll make it up this week. This week was pretty easy to complete, but I designed it that way on purpose. I want to build momentum and planning too much all at once might have discouraged me and taken away the sense of satisfaction of completing my goals. And going back to World of Warcraft might be a bad idea…
Here is the plan for next week:
- Read chapters 23–27 in Clean Architect
- Roman Numerals TDD Kata daily
- Add clock to auto build pipeline, along with test output
- Donate to Bahamas hurricane relief
- Hike with wife
- Research and get savings/ investment account for daughter started
- Data/ business process modeling practice, research questions and try to nail down how to get better at this
- Write a post on data modeling research
- Go to .net user group meeting
- Find !something! to do with daughter
WISH ME LUCK :)
