Deciding to Learn

Throughout my career to this point I had enough knowledge of technical topics to hold my own when talking to engineers. My background in computer engineering, big data, and basic scripting in Python helped me to communicate ideas effectively to anyone at any technical level. As I transitioned into a leadership role at Action, I found myself needing to spend an inordinate amount of time building to keep my technical skills sharp and stay on top of technical issues. I started to lose the time to simply explore new topics for the sake of exploring. I still felt like I was in an early enough stage of my career that growth potential should be the ultimate deciding factor in my career decisions. Growth was why I joined Google and Action in the first place, and at 28 I wanted to optimize for the future. With how quickly I decided to leave Action, I didn't have another job lined up and I was planning on taking a few months to decide what to do next. I had jumped head first into my previous career decisions and I wanted this to be different.

While I took time to reflect, I decided to upskill myself. I was extremely curious about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning due to my time at Google and in analytics. I was already using a lot of the underlying technologies (Python, Pandas), I just needed a bit of direction on how and when to use different techniques and algorithms. I decided to take a bootcamp at SimpliLearn through CalTech, and I've written about that experience in another piece that you can find in the navigation bar on my website.

I was also curious about Blockchain after the bull markets of 2021-2022 and figured I'd have the time to learn smart contract programming as well. And hey, if the bull markets continued I'd have a very desirable skill. I've written more about my experience at the Metana Web3 Bootcamp in a separate piece that you can find in the navigation bar on my website.

Tracking my Time

What I was most concerned about at this time was how I was spending my time and how I was taking advantage of my time without a day job. Taking courses is great for learning, but I wanted to make sure that I didn't lose focus and start to spend more time running errands and consuming content rather than working and learning. Without a job, it can also be quite easy to lose a sense of purpose. I wanted to make sure I was still enjoying myself and not being too hard on myself for not being employed. After listening to a Tim Ferriss podcast episode with Stephen Wolfram, I decided to create my own personal tracking system.

The idea for my system is quite simple, and while the complexity of the tracking has grown the overall goal has not changed. I score each day on a scale of -2 to 2, and track how all of the other metrics that I track (which I will get into in later parts of this document) correlate to this "satisfaction" metric. The -2 to 2 gives me only 5 options to score each day, which makes sure that I don't overthink what my score should be at the end of each day. I try to create a normally distributed bell-curve with my daily scores with an average of 0 over time, but I definitely skew a bit positive with my daily scoring.

I learned a lot about myself, and I hope to learn even more as I improve my self-tracking system over time. For instance, I have found that the best way to score a higher than average score is for that day to be a weekend day where I don't have to work! Shocker I know... Some other interesting things that I didn't know are that I have a slightly above average score on days where I workout, and doing an activity outside is actually more beneficial than doing something social or meeting up with friends. I'm sure I'll learn things as I continue this project over time, but I'm so grateful that I had this tool as I was searching for jobs over the summer of 2023.

Daily Journal

Key Technologies

• Airtable

Description

My first iteration of my personal tracker was a single Airtable base with an input form. The base kept track of information for a single day, including how many hours I spent being creative, notes on what I did that day, and a score from -2 to 2 on how I liked that day. I also started to keep track of specific events that I did on that day, like walking Winnie in the morning or the afternoon, cooking dinner, or what projects I worked on that day. This first iteration was great for getting me in the habit of keeping track of things, and periodically reviewing my progress. I set up Airtable automations to remind me to write in my digital journal every night, and to review my scores on a bi-weekly basis.

I quickly realized that I loved trying to find patterns in my daily scores and the events I did on a given day. I wanted to have a better understanding of how I was spending my time working or being creative as well. I set a goal for myself that I needed to have 1,500 creative hours in the first year of the project, and added a tracker to show my pacing against that goal. Creative hours in the beginning were mostly hours spent watching instructional videos on AI/ML and writing Web3 proof-of-concept applications, but also spilled into efforts like building this tracker and teaching at the Coder School.

Having this journal was very important later on in my work break as I graduated from my bootcamp programs, and looking back on my work break time the most important things I learned about myself were very much drawn from the insights I gained from looking back on my thoughts over this formative year.

Creative Hours Tracker

Key Technologies

• Airtable

Description

As I got deeper into building applications using AI/ML and Blockchain, and simultaneously decided to start building this website, I needed a better way to start tracking what I was spending my time working on. By this point I knew that Blockchain was not going to be my future career path, although I did like building the applications much more than watching YouTube videos about ML algorithms. To better understand how I was splitting my time between courses and personal projects/passions I began to track my daily creative hours using a separate Airtable base that was linked to each day in my journal.

In the beginning I simply tracked when I started working on something, what that something was (i.e. the project or course I was spending my time on) and what the nature of that work was, whether it be watching a video, coding, writing, etc. This eventually evolved into keeping track of how I spend my time in 3 different areas: learning, teaching, and building. I’ll get into the reasoning behind this split in another post. The goal is to be pacing towards 2000 combined hours between each of those 3 categories in a 365 day period, 1500 for building and 500 combined for the other 2. This is definitely a stretch goal but feels like I should be pushing myself like this at this age.

The nice part about this new data set I was collecting is that it connects perfectly into my existing journal project. I plan to add New connections to my journal in the future well so that I can get a holistic view on how my work affects my overall state of being from a data driven perspective and not just anecdotal evidence.

Media Consumption Tracker

Key Technologies

• Airtable

Description

The other activity I spent a lot of my time doing was working on things around the apartment and walking our dog Winnie. With my commitment to learning I started to get really into podcasts about all sorts of new subjects I was learning about. I really waited to make sure I was actually spending my time with informative content rather than just sports or other ephemeral content, so I started to track this time spent much like my creative hours. I didn't have a goal for this tracking though, rather I was just curious how the numbers would look compared to my other tracking.

(WORK IN PROGRESS)