Beeminder status update

I think I have taken about as much stuff to do as is reasonable. By back of an envelope calculations it would take me about 27 hours a week to do all the things I committed myself to, and in practical terms my mean time to derailment is now pretty stable near 25 days or so, rather than going into space.

Here's update by goal. As usual, from hardest to easiest:

Thing I'me really struggling with

Pomodoros of important things (goal - 7 pomodoros / week). That's one goal I've been really struggling with, and it's not really clear why. It's not lack of time - it takes literally 25 minutes a day to stay on course with this one . And it's not lack of clarity on what to do - by per-project list contains 44 things I could be pomodoroing right now.

There's something about shutting off everything else and focusing singlemindedly one one thing that's just hard. Also timers, they're annoying. I'll keep trying, hopefully I'll find some way for this to work.

Things that work about right

Blogging (goal - 3 posts / week). The blog could always be more active, but it's already more active than at any time since 2006-2007 (back when I was at university and had nearly infinite amounts of free time), so that's fine.

Exercise (goal - 3h / week). Time a week I spent exercising feels about right. I want to add more variety, and maybe increase intensity somewhat. Sadly there aren't really that many exercise games out there, I don't have much space for exercise equipment at home, it's too cold right now to do that outdoors, and I don't like gyms much due to their very low ratio of time actually spent exercising to total time spent, including commuting, changing clothes, and such.

Play Magic (goal - 10 games / week). I feel there isn't really that much more to discover in Standard. Meta more or less stabilized, none of the top decks are anything special, and the card pool is too small right now to do much creative brewing. I miss Birthing Pod. Anyway, it's probably time to explore some other formats like post-Jund Modern.

Open Source contributions (goal - 10 git commits / week). I didn't have any serious projects recently other than Skype exporter, but I've added a bunch of missing functionality to my existing utilities, wrote some tools for manipulating Magic decklists, and contributed better decklist importer to Cockatrice.

Online Education (goal - 3 lessons / week). This one has really good reason why it's not going any better. It's BT being steaming pile of shit. Recently I can't get anything better than 2mbit (of 20mbit I'm paying for), and that's literally not enough to even watch standard quality youtube videos without buffering issues. My alternatives here are various BT resellers with no guarantee of being any better, or moving to a different place where I could get something else. Fucking first world, huh? Ironically it would work OK with a 60 minute lecture in a single video, since I could simply let it fully buffer or download, then watch it in one block later, but all MOOCs just break the videos into tiny bits, and that does not buffer well. There are workarounds - not everything I want to learn is video-intense, or I could setup some video downloader. Or I could move to a place where ISPs don't suck. South Korea?

Things that into space

New Fun Things (goal - try 2 new things / week). Unsurprisingly that causes zero problems and I'm far exceeding this very modest goal. I put reviews of some of things I try on my Google+ if you're interested.

Books (goal - read 3 books / month). This also exceeds expectations, but for a different reason. There's just so much dead time during a week, and since I ran out of podcasts (recommendations welcome) I'm just listening to random audiobooks instead. It's also a good thing to do while doing low/medium intensity exercise. Either way - this is mostly happening in a time which would otherwise be wasted.