Young Hands Club

This is a review of my week prior to beginning training at younghands under diana_coman. diana_coman has already given me a considerable amount of guidance including having me make a todo list and a post outlining what my interests are.

The TODO list is reposted here:

TODO By 10/14 12:00 AM

Recurring Tasks:

Spanish Review (1hr / day)
Saltmines (5hr / day, only weekdays)
Exercise (1hr / day)

Blogging:

Setup ztkfg.com on heathen hosting (3-10 hrs)
My Interests Blog Post (9-15 hours)
Seoul and Tokyo Blog Posts (2.5 hours each)

CR Preparation:

Make Reading List + Order any books not in bookstores from reading list (1 hr)
Make Clothes List (Acquire clothes later) (30min)
Research how to obtain a generator (1 hr)
Obtain/decide on any additional hardware I may need from CR (45 min)
Schedule time to say goodbye to local meatwot (?)
Contact ticos making sure internet etc. is in order (30 min)
Do research on purchasing a car (?)

1. [ ]Spanish Review – 1hr/day
   On the flight back from Japan I cleared my backlog of 650 vocabulary cards i had accumulated from not studying during the trip. Then I did my regular vocab routine each day, but I skipped studying Saturday Oct 12th. I have been not doing full hours, and instead just completing the vocab cards for the day and stopping early after about 40 mins. I need to use those last 20 mins to do studying other than vocabulary.
2. [ ]Saltmines – 5hr/weekday
   I ghosted this. I book my own hours and work on my own time. Per my contract I am supposed to do 10-20/hours per week. On Thursday I worked for 4 hours total but I was distracted and not productive so I only logged for two. And I didn’t log any on Friday.
3. [x] Exercise 1hr/day
   Played tennis with mom. I was sick with a cold on Saturday so I didn’t do anything that day nor will I do anything today, but I am satisfied with this goal. I could be eating healthier though, my coffees should be blacker.
4. [x] Setup ztkfg.com on heathen hosting (3-10 hrs)
   This was successful although I need to treat digitalocean as a temporary home. I have not tested how fast my images are being served but through my experience of loading my pic posts vs loading trilema pic posts i have a feeling my travel posts are loading at a snails pace compared to the speed at which they should be loading.
5. [x] My Interests Blog Post (9-15 hours)
   I completed this but it was done very slowly and poorly. The first problem is that I didn’t understand the reason for what I was doing, which was to give an idea to diana_coman of how she could give me direction. I should have clarified what the purpose was immediately instead of having the question as a footnote in my post. The second reason it went poorly is because laying out my interests let me see how little i have cultivated them, and thus i got defensive. This became manifest with my pretentious title. My defensiveness also caused me to waste a bunch of time trying to improve the wording of my post. It may have been better just listing those six interests and making bullet points of my past, skipping the “why”, and asking for help with future goals instead of half haphazardly guessing at what i should do. This would have made my post take well less time and it would have been more useful.
6. [ ]Seoul and Tokyo Blog Posts (2.5 hours each)
   I completed my Seoul post, and uploaded pics for my Kyoto post, but have not even begun my Tokyo post. Uploading pictures takes time. I have to name all of the pictures and rotate some of them. I installed mogrify on my webserver, which lets me rotate quickly with mogrify -rotate -90 /path/to/img . That seemed like a good choice. I need a macro to expand /path/to/img to a full img tag to include lots of pictures in my post faster.
7. [ ] Make Reading List + Order any books not in bookstores from reading list (1 hr)
   Skipping this. It is something I can certainly do when I get to Costa Rica and I already have a stack of books there to keep me occupied while I obtain new ones.
8. [x] Make Clothes List (Acquire clothes later) (30min)
9. [ ] Research how to obtain a generator (1 hr)
   Contacted someone, he said I would probably need to go to San Jose. This is a pain I would rather avoid so I still need to see if I can find something between Liberia and where I’m going to be living. This is a bit of a high priority since I’m arriving at the grand finale of the rainy season. There are usually strong winds that occur when the rainy season is over, and if they are already blowing than perhaps I can de-prioritize this since that means I will be much safer from power outages.
10. [ ] Obtain/decide on any additional hardware I may need from CR (45 min)
    This is left undone. At the very least, I need to get a desk with an ergonomic keyboard and an adjustable monitor. But i plan to do this in CR since it is too much of a hassle to travel with. I have a few laptops I’m bringing. Two are doomed to stay toliet boxes, one has the potential to be a work machine but its specs are not great. It may be good to look for consulting in #a for this.
11. [x] Schedule time to say goodbye to local meatwot (?)
12. [x]Contact ticos making sure internet etc. is in order (30 min)
13. [ ]Do research on purchasing a car (?)
    I reached out to some people but I do not yet have someone to rent from / purchase a car. I have nfi what I’m doing regarding this. I barely know how to drive, I’ve never owned a car while living in Tamarindo and I never drove a car while living in the city.

Overall my level of focus and accomplishments were abysmal. It’s possible this is because of incorrigible behavior inherit to myself, but I think/hope that is a cop out. Here are the distractions that caused me to lose focus and how i plan to fix them:

1. Jetlag and catching a cold – not much I could do about this, one thing i believe i manage well is my sleep schedule. anyways i’m feeling better.
2. Leaving my phone on while working – this is stupid on many levels. I plan to build a box in the entryway of my apartment in CR that will be sound proof and have charging cables. I will leave my phone in this box when i’m home, and ask guests to put the phone in the box as well.
3. Working on a tolietbox instead of a proper work station with whitelisted ips – it’s hard to admit that i’m not above being distracted by goolag’s youtube and other sites. blacklisting them is playing whack-a-mole, i need to block all by default and whitelist sites instead.