Lots and lots and lots of reading last week. Yay! Also, more talking to people. This week: meetings, another Emacs Chat episode, and more.

Blog posts

• Weekly review: Week ending July 11, 2014
• What are people looking for when they talk about their challenges?
• Monthly review: June 2014
• Designing Help and Support: Skype
• Quiet days
• Hacklab open houses and connecting through cooking

Link round-up

• HeartMath Considered Incoherent: Fascinating analysis.
• Using Themed Work Weeks instead of Themed Work Days: Sprints tend to work well for me too, although I generally don't decide the theme far in advance.
• Is it Ok to Be Happily Retired?: Sometimes I feel self-conscious about this experiment while other people around me work hard or struggle to find work. I'm getting better at giving myself permission to learn stuff, though, and I enjoy using some of my time to help out.
• The Problem with Asking for Advice: I like the test of thinking about whether you're going to change your behaviour based on the input. This also reminds me of why I push back on a lot of poll/survey questions with the meta-question: “What are we going to do about the answers?”

Focus areas and time review

• Business (23.8h – 14%)
  • ☐ Earn: E1: 2.5-3.5 days of consulting
  • Earn (17.4h – 73% of Business)
  • Build (0.5h – 2% of Business)
    • Drawing (0.0h)
    • Delegation (0.0h)
    • Packaging (0.0h)
    • Paperwork (0.5h)
  • Connect (5.8h – 24% of Business)
• Relationships (5.0h – 2%)
  • ☑ Have coffee with Nadia
  • ☑ Host party
  • ☐ Discuss F
  • ☐ Have coffee with Andrew
• Discretionary – Productive (24.8h – 14%)
  • ☑ Fix website
  • Emacs (1.2h – 0% of all)
    • ☐ Record chat with Harry Schwartz
  • Writing (4.5h)
    • ☑ What are people looking for when they talk about challenges?
    • ☑ Quiet days
    • ☑ Don't worry about your tools in the beginning: Avoiding premature optimization
    • ☑ Books about applying advice to your life
• Discretionary – Play (7.7h – 4%)
• Personal routines (31.1h – 18%)
• Unpaid work (9.3h – 5%)
• Sleep (66.4h – 39% – average of 9.5 per day)