October 4, 2016: Me Day - Age 31

Wow, I've been doing these for five years now? Time flies, people grow, and goals progress.

Wake up and watch the sun rise.

Longboarded over to Cupid's Span and threw down a time-lapse of the sunrise as I practiced handstands, jammed to some favorite tunes, and ogled the sky.

Also caught the sunset before dinner in a floating island lighthouse as the sea lions beautifully belched.

Measure physical stats and take fitness pictures.

I did not, in fact, get totally ripped over the past year. I was making good progress for the first three months, and then I decided that with my increased startup boss workload and Max's erratic sleep patterns causing complete chaos in my nighttimes and mornings, something had to give, and that something was hitting the gym in the morning. So actually I just did bodyweight stuff at home and stayed almost the same measurements over the past year, until two months ago when I started lifting again now that Max is sleeping consistently once more, so now I'm putting on mass. Let's try this again. I can't promise that I won't decide that sleep or work is more important than the gym, but at least for now I'm making progress, so let's see where I get to next year.

Weight: 143.6 lbs +8.3 lbs
Body fat: 12.6% +1.7%
Chest: 33.25" +0.75"
Right arm: 11.25" +0.25"
Left arm: 11.00" +0.25"
Waist: 28" +1.25"
Hips: 35.25" +0.75"
Right leg: 20.75" +0.50"
Left leg: 20.50" +0.75"
Resting HR: 76 bpm +6bpm


Measure my max push-ups and pull-ups.

44 push-ups, +6: fast, strict, chin touching the ground..
17 pull-ups, +1: fast, no kipping, chin above bar.

Take a long walk.

I had hiked to the max in Golden Gate Park the day before, so I did a combo longboard ride plus walk in the morning, and it was great.

Read from a favorite book.

I reread Ender's Game while sitting in Yerba Buena Gardens and was thoroughly in its thrall. Now there's a book with some good examples of characters being strategic about their lives.

Get blood tests.

I ordered the same blood tests from last year from DirectLabs. Every single test was in the normal range. Boring is good. Don't have elevated iron this year, cholesterol is even better than last year, and Vitamin D isn't quite as good.

Count my possessions and get back down to 99.

Replaced/upgraded a lot more things than last year, while thinking about them less than ever. Loving the quality of life improvement from my new high-end wireless gaming headphones. Simplified my T-shirt selection process with more solid-color T-shirts from Uniqlo.

  • Added (or started counting) - 28

    1. Boxers
    2. Boxers
    3. Briefs
    4. Gym shorts
    5. Headphones
    6. Hoodie
    7. Jeans
    8. Jeans
    9. Mouse
    10. Mousepad
    11. Necklace
    12. Oculus Rift
    13. Pajamas
    14. Phone
    15. Pillow
    16. PlayStation 4
    17. Sandals
    18. Shoes
    19. T-shirt
    20. T-shirt
    21. T-shirt
    22. T-shirt
    23. T-shirt
    24. T-shirt
    25. T-shirt
    26. Wallet
    27. Water bottle
    28. Water bottle
  • Culled (or stopped counting) - 28

    1. Boxers
    2. Boxers
    3. Bracelet
    4. Brown pants
    5. Comforter
    6. Fork
    7. Hoodie
    8. Jeans
    9. Jeans
    10. Loose pen
    11. Nightstand
    12. Phone
    13. Pillow
    14. Polo shirt
    15. Shirt
    16. Shirt
    17. Slow cooker
    18. Soldering iron
    19. Spire
    20. Spoon
    21. Sweater
    22. T-shirt
    23. T-shirt
    24. Vibrams
    25. Voltmeter
    26. Wallet
    27. Water bottle
    28. iPad

Take stock of finances.

I increased my savings less than I expected because of even more aggressively investing profits in my businessess and trying to trade even more money for time.

(If you're me, you get to see finance stats here. Since you're not me, you see nothing.)

Do Quantified Mind testing.

Looks like Choice Reaction Time, Mental Rotation 2, Sorting, and Verbal Learning 2 are getting slightly better with age (well, more like practice) still, and Finger Tapping continues to decline with age (or maybe lack of practice, since I only had four data points this year: 30, 30 and 1 month, 30 and 11 months, and 31. Was just not doing it in between, but even with a probable lack of practice and aging, we see no decline (and in fact the last two data points on Finger Tapping were above the trendline, so any decline was in the first couple years.) So yeah, not mentally dead yet!

Call my family.

Good calls with Mom, Dad, and Bro. Lined up some visits, too.

Have a spectacular dinner with Chloe.

Chloe took me out to Forbes Island, which is apparently the world's only floating island? It has a lighthouse on top and an underwater restaurant on the bottom. We randomly saw some of her friends there. It was romantic, although I can see why they don't make more of these given the combination of eating food and swaying in the sea!

Reflect on the past year

I sat down with my journal and evaluated three areas: what went well, what didn't go well, and how my relationships are now. Summary: CEOing your growing, early-stage startup while parenting a toddler takes big, messy bites out of everything else. It was all I could to keep everything from backsliding too much while moving forward on career and family this year.

What went well? This past year, I:

  • Kept baby Max alive and happy
  • Grew CodeCombat from 4 to 13 people, leveling up my business skills many times over
  • Launched the Classroom version of CodeCombat and grew it into our main revenue source
  • Had many great times with Chloe in our third full year of marriage and first full year of parenting
  • Have gotten much better at the Boosted board due to my awesome waterfront commute
  • Am standing a lot more with the standing desk in the new office

What didn't go well?

  • I continued to not make progress on several ignored areas from last year: happiness tracking, rationality, Stoicism, fashion, health, hygiene, writing, music, hiking, Skritter, Chinese, my website, and friendships
  • Max's chaotic sleep and a demanding work schedule made me deprioritize the gym for most of the year, just working out at home (ineffectively), although I'm back in the gym now
  • It's become difficult to be productive at home with Max there; I'm way behind on all my personal goals and organization
  • I often feel like a lazy dad–it's not easy to give Max the opportunity to run around outside in this neighborhood, so we don't go outside as much as I'd expected we would
  • Sleep has gotten better, but is still not very good, since Max is not a great sleeper
  • Being a manager instead of a maker is not as much fun and is stressing me out

How are my relationships?

Not that great. Closer to George since we are making more time to regularly hang out, both to play video games and board games, and now recently hanging out with also Scott a bit more with the biweekly brobreks, so that's a bit better than last year. Of the other people I like to hang out with, I saw most only 0-2 times this year. For family, I did pretty good at refreshing everyone over the winter, and about to do the same thing again but with fewer people and only one trip out of us. Won't see bro or any Montana relatives, but will at least see Mom, Dad, Helen, and Chloe's parents.

Organize my files and computer desktop.

Check!

Add at least one tradition.

I didn't have time to do this, as the day got packed!

Destroy at least one habit.

For a while, I was reading tech news to keep current to help with understanding the space around fundraising, but I've decided I've had enough of that, so I unsusbcribed to all my sources of news apart from two focused about coding educational technology.