I’ve got most of the pieces for an annual review: monthly reviews in visual and text form, my time records, and a recent flip-through of all of my sketches. I’d like to bring my ledger of income and expenses up to date, finish reading all of my blog posts, and draw a couple of yearly summaries (monthly events, differences between 2015 and 2016, analyses). I want to make the most of my computer time, so I should think about what I want from my annual review and how I can get that more efficiently.

Highlights of the year

A month-by-month list of highlights is good for reminding me of events and getting around the fogginess of memory. There’s so much to celebrate and appreciate. This also simplifies longer-term reviews, like the 10-year review I did when I turned 30.

Differences

What did I learn? What did I forget? It can be easier to see the differences when you compare across a longer time period. This can help me solidify growth, revisit things I’ve left behind, watch out for drifting, and choose what to focus on next year.

Patterns and trends

Taking a look at the data can sometimes turn up things I wouldn’t have guessed. Time, finances, and A-‘s data too – so much to explore! This might take a little longer, since it involves code.

Decision review

This is probably better broken up into separate posts, maybe even decoupled from my annual review.

What worked well? Why? How can we make things even better?

Good for continuous improvement. Might not go into as much depth as the decision reviews.

My overall goals are to:

• remember and celebrate the journey
• keep improving; remember what I’ve learned and revisit what I might have shelved
• make it easier for my future self (or other people reading my archive) to get an overview of the year
• maybe have conversations that grow out of the updates (notes on things I’ve tried, ideas for stuff that might help)

I’ll probably end up doing my annual review in chunks instead of waiting until it’s all done, since otherwise it might take me a few months.

It got a lot colder this week, so A- and I mostly stayed indoors. Not a bad time to stay close to home, anyway. W-‘s knee flared up again, so he spent a few days resting and icing it.

We did make a few trips out. We took A- for a routine checkup at the eye clinic in Sick Kids Hospital. Her right eye seems to be developing normally – 20/80 vision based on 7.1 on the Teller acuity test. It turns out that both W- and I have large optic nerves, so that might explain hers too. They gave us a prescription for safety glasses for A- to protect her vision as she becomes more mobile. I’ll probably get her a pair of Miraflex frames once the weather warms up.

A- got a little overtired while waiting at the hospital, but she recovered after a good nap in the afternoon. Between that and the gradual emergence of her first tooth, sleep has been a little irregular, with occasional late-night wakings and lots of nursing in bed. That’s okay, it’s just part of life. I’ve been able to write a lot on my phone, thanks to my new workflow with Google Tasks and Org Mode, so it’s easy enough to make use of all that time in bed.

When she’s not asleep or nursing, A- is curious and active. She clearly enjoys the somersaults that W- guides her through, and often tips her head back to signal that she wants another turn. She’s also getting better at signaling when she doesn’t want any more food. She’s probably trying to figure out how to shake her head for “no”, but at the moment, scrunching her eyes and nodding sharply will do.

I tried following up on some paperwork (T4 and T5 slips, my parents’ visa applications), but the government systems were down for scheduled maintenance. Next week, then. Paid myself dividends and reimbursed my company for my part of split expenses. I also filled my TFSA for the year, hooray!

I also fixed my !!evil plans Org Mode file so that it worked with the lexical scoping in Org 9. I changed the code that produced my graph to explicitly invoke Org Babel with parameters instead of trying to piggyback on the parameters passed in the original block. I also updated a few of the goals. I broke a few links in the process, but fortunately org-lint helped me quickly identify them.

A- and I video-chatted with my mom and with Kathy, with brief appearances by G* and A*. Also, It was J-‘s birthday, so we celebrated with some tarts that Y- bought.

Odd moment: Neko fell into the shallow bath I’d washed A- in, and had to be rescued by W-. The poor dear!

We reviewed our emergency preparations, moving food past their best-before dates to the pantry and restocking the bags with new snacks. We added diapers, wipes, and baby clothes, too. Good to prepare for winter storms or neighbourhood gas-leak evacuations!

Jen and E- dropped by with more clothes for A-. It was awesome to see E- toddling around. So independent! A- will get there some day.

I made shepherd’s pie for our lunch, and that worked out surprisingly well. W- spent an afternoon making lamb korma – so nice! – and some banchan too. The roast veg recipe from the science of cooking book was yummy, although I’m not sure about the value of using aluminum to steam the veg in the pan instead of washing another pot. Washing is easy enough, anyway.

What a full week! Next week: another conformer for A-, slightly warmer weather, more paperwork, and a return to consulting.

Blog posts

• Weekly review: Week ending December 30, 2016
• 2017-01-02 Emacs News
• Planning for safety glasses

Sketches

• Journal
  • 2016-12-31b Week ending 2016-12-30 #journal #weekly
  • 2016-12-31c Saturday #daily #journal
  • 2017-01-01a Sunday #daily #journal
  • 2017-01-02a Monday #daily #journal
  • 2017-01-03a Tuesday #daily #journal
  • 2017-01-04b Wednesday #daily #journal
  • 2017-01-05a Thursday #daily #journal
  • 2017-01-06a Friday #daily #journal
  • 2017-01-04a December 2016 #monthly #review
• 2017-01-03b Thoughts on sketches from 2016 #journaling #review
• 2016-12-31a What do I like in terms of business #experiment #business

Focus areas and time review

• Business (0.1h – 0%)
  • Earn (0.0h – 0% of Business)
  • Build (0.1h – 100% of Business)
    • ☑ See if I can downscale my Linode
    • ☑ Write the business a personal cheque and deposit it
    • ☑ Pay myself dividends
    • ☐ Issue T4
    • ☐ Issue T5
  • Connect (0.0h – 0% of Business)
• Relationships (2.1h – 1%)
  • ☑ File photos of borrowed clothes
  • ☑ Follow-up at eye clinic
  • ☑ Follow up on visa
• Discretionary – Productive (3.7h – 2%)
  • Drawing (2.0h)
    • ☑ Review month
  • Emacs (1.2h)
    • ☐ [#A] Do another Emacs News review
    • ☑ Org effort filtering
    • ☑ Fix evil plans
    • ☑ Help with table issue
  • Coding (0.0h)
  • Sewing (0.0h)
  • Writing (0.1h)
  • ☐ Rebalance CAD to US
  • ☑ Move money to TFSA
• Discretionary – Play (1.3h – 0%)
• Personal routines (10.9h – 6%)
• Unpaid work (80.0h – 47%)
  • Childcare (76.1h – 45% of total)
• Sleep (69.9h – 41% – average of 10.0 per day)

I’ve been doing annual reviews a few times a year: my birthday in August, the new year in January, and experiment-related reflections in February. It’s a little excessive, perhaps. My weekly and monthly reviews make it easy enough to summarize events over 12 months, so it’s not that much more effort to do a new review with a slight offset.

The experiment review has different guide questions, so that’s useful. The birthday and new year reviews have a lot of overlap, though. What happened? How am I different? What did I learn? What did I forget and want to relearn? What worked well? What do I want to focus on next? What could make this even better? The two reviews cover the same ground, especially since I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions. I like the birthday review because it’s anchored on things that are meaningful to me, and paced according to my life.

The new year review would probably be better suited to reflecting on external influences, since that’s synchronized with other people’s reviews, but external events don’t seem to matter that much to me when I reflect on my year.

People often use the Christmas/New Year break to send out family updates and pictures. Both my family and W-‘s family like taking family pictures, so we’re covered there. I feel somewhat odd about the idea of announcing things on behalf of W- or A-, or getting W- to contribute. I’m more comfortable capturing the changes in my own life, noting the occasional highlight from theirs – but with my individual voice, not a collective We. I think of it more for personal note-taking and celebration (and maybe the occasional acquaintance catching up through my archives) rather than pushing updates to a list of people whom I think should hear about our year. Opt-in is more comfortable for me than opt-out. I’m probably making it more complicated than it needs to be, but I wonder if there’s a thought in here that’s worth untangling…

I wonder how I mentally chunk my memories. Do I think of them in terms of ages: my 20s, etc.? Do I think in terms of calendar years? Years come to mind more easily than ages do when I think about milestones such as coming to Canada. So maybe that’s an argument for keeping the new year review…

There’s also the benefit of being able to send people a link to a tidy summary when they wish me a happy new year, although that happens more around birthdays anyway.

Hmm. I guess I’ll try to squeeze another annual review in this month, and then I can reconsider the question in August. More writing is good, anyway.

Over several nursing sessions, I flipped through all 750+ of my sketches from 2016 on my phone. It was a quick and wonderful overview of the past year. It’s amazing to see how much ground we’d covered one day at a time.

Taking 5-10 minutes at night to draw a visual journal worked out well. It was my second year with daily/weekly/monthly sketches, and my workflow held up to the demands of caring for a newborn. Some nights I fell asleep before A- let me sneak away, but the text notes I jotted throughout the day helped me reconstruct events even after several nights. I really liked having a record not just of what happened, but also what I was thinking about, and the little moments that would have been hard to capture in a picture. When we were dealing with lots of uncertainty, thinking out loud helped me untangle my thoughts and feel like things were manageable. Looking back over the past year, I think I like the person I was and the person I’ve grown to be.

I didn’t have much time or energy to dress up my sketches or go beyond a simple style. It was nice to see the sketches I spent some time colouring for presentation, though, and the drawing practice I occasionally indulged in. My copies of characters from the books I read to A- reminded me of those stories, and rough sketches of her (mostly sleeping, since that was the only time I could draw from life) made me smile. I think I’d like to make more time for drawing, not just capturing thoughts.

Still, it was so useful to have a tool for making sense of my fragmented thoughts. There was so much to figure out about parenting, time, uncertainty, anxiety, boundaries, philosophy, plans…
I found it easy to go through my sketches and remember what it was like at that point in time. Sometimes I wasn’t sure what a cryptic note on my sketch meant, especially if I didn’t cover it in my weekly review, but that’s okay.

I’m looking forward to continuing this habit in 2017. I’ve been experimenting with jotting down sketch ideas on my phone, so I can move more of the thinking out of my limited computer time. I’d like to make sure I play with more formats than just lists, though, since the nonlinearity of drawing can support thinking in a different way compared to writing. It would be nice to mix in more non-journal sketches, and more actual sketches and drawing exercises too. Maybe a daily cycle, to prompt me to expand…

I still haven’t finished my yearly review, but having all those weekly and monthly sketches sure made the process easier. Onward!

• Org Mode:
  • How I view my google calendar agenda in Emacs
  • Using Emacs – 26 – Google Calendar, Org Agenda (Reddit)
  • What do I want from my Org Mode files?
  • Resurrecting and refreshing MobileOrg for iOS
  • Anyone got any good advanced org-mode resources? Blog recommendations
  • Find stuff in org-mode anywhere – emacsql, org-db
  • Org Mode survey for programmers interested in collaboration (Reddit)
• Coding:
  • Fixing smartparens-strict-mode and hungry-delete-mode conflict
  • Magit v2.10 released
  • How to send lines of code from text file to python shell in spacemacs ?
• Emacs Lisp:
  • Notes on how to change fonts in emacs without using m-x customize (Reddit)
  • Elisp Text Processing Idioms
  • No Obvious Way To Do It Properly
  • use-package-always-demand & daemon Emacs
• Emacs development:
  • :blank: character class now matches Unicode whitespace
  • More work on skipping unexec
• Other:
  • Getting Started With Emacs
  • Capturing Gcal for Display in Emacs
  • camcorder.el – Creating Animated Gifs & Videos for Spacemacs
  • Emacs & Foot pedals
  • Emacimize your keyboard – keyboard wishlist
  • emacs+markdown (1:14), emacs+tex (2:13), emacs+python (1:15)
  • Scoring elfeed articles
  • emacspeak: Fun With TTS (Voxin) And Ladspa
• New packages:
  • eshell-fixed-prompt: Restrict eshell to a single fixed prompt
  • flycheck-flawfinder: Integrate flawfinder with flycheck
  • github-theme: The GitHub color theme.
  • guix: Interface for GNU Guix
  • helm-etags-plus: Another Etags helm.el interface
  • info-buffer: Display info topics on separate buffers
  • launch-mode: Major mode for launch-formatted text
  • perspeen: An package for multi-workspace
  • russian-holidays: Russian holidays for the calendar
  • untitled-new-buffer: Open untitled new buffer like other text editors.

Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, /r/orgmode, /r/spacemacs, Hacker News, planet.emacsen.org, Youtube, the changes to the Emacs NEWS file, and emacs-devel.

Past Emacs News round-ups

I can write on my phone while nursing, which is probably a far better occupation for my mind instead of scrolling through Facebook or Reddit for the nth time. It’s not my ideal writing setup – I can see around a paragraph or two on the screen at a time, and I don’t have the outlining/linking/figuring-out tools I’m used to on my computer – but it gets me writing in full sentences instead of just jotting down lists. I can capture more thoughts this way, and I don’t have to stay up late to get through my drawing backlog.

It’s important to me to be able to flesh out thoughts a little despite the interruptions of life with a baby. With a place to store these half-finished thoughts, I can make some progress. I’m not trying to write a great novel (or that Emacs book I planned a long time ago) – just exploring thoughts and questions and ideas, and storing hooks for associative memories.

A- nurses a lot, which we’re okay with. More sustenance and comfort for her, and our lives are flexible enough to accommodate it. I focus on her when she wants interaction, and I keep my phone handy for when she seems to be nursing to sleep. It’s a practice I could probably help her get out of, but things are also fine the way they are. I’ll probably let her take the lead on this one, at least for now.

What do I want to think about during these moments?

• For the present: task lists, decisions, questions, research
• For weekly and monthly reviews: highlights, memories
• For future Sacha: sketches of daily life, thoughts, things I’m learning
• For other people: things I figured out the hard way; counter-intuitive or alternative experiences; ideas and thoughts
• For family and friends: stories

There are lots of things I can think through and write about, even in small chunks and without tools for structure. I’ll experiment with writing about and posting more of them. After all, my blog started with a few years of random snippets and thoughts. I don’t mind spending a few more years writing about mundane things and incomplete thoughts that might not be of much interest to other people, just in case it might be of interest to my future self. I’ve already set up categories and filtered mailing lists, so people can choose what to read. I can write more for myself, and enjoy what serendipitous conversations come my way. :)