Week 3: Picking up again

The third week picked up the pace a bit, the challenge was balancing it with other things in my life, as I’ve recently also picked up running. There were a few things I found myself doing that made it easier though.

Knowing what will be the first thing for tomorrow

This has worked nicely for me in the past as well, and it’s where I will deliberately leave something unfinished, so that I know what I will be working on the next day. This has the added benefit of making it easier to start doing it as you can just get straight into it.

Even the smallest things count

Back in my Week 1 I mentioned that “There is no minimum size for the commit, simple documentation changes are just fine”, and this has been a great hack for me, actually. I’ve found that even the smallest changes, like fixing a typo, or adding a comment, or even just a commit message, can be enough to get me into the flow of things, and then I can continue working on something else.

Having a list of things to do

Well this one is obvious, JIRA wouldn’t be such an expensive piece of software if having lists of things wasn’t a good productivity boost, but even for small private projects, I’ve found that having a prioritised list of things to do is a good way to keep myself on track and not get distracted by other things.

A lot of time spent on reading

This week I was also spending quite a bit of time investigating ChatGPT and other AI tools, there are a lot of legitimate usecases and I feel like we have only just started to comprehend what we can do with them, but for my self, just to start off, Open AI docs have been a pretty nice read. They’ve also recently unveiled their Code interpreter feature, which I’m looking forward to trying out. I’ve also been reading Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, which has been a pretty interesting read so far, it has heavy The Foundation vibes.