Monthly Review: May 2015
5 Jun 2015
At the start of each month I do a review in my journal of my goals, habits, and experiments from the past month. In January 2015 I started publishing my monthly reviews on my blog instead of keeping them private. You can see them all in my monthly reviews category.
WHAT DID I COMPLETE THAT I AM PROUD OF IN MAY?
- Submitted my first iOS app to the App Store and had it approved.
- Wrote several blog posts for clients that ranged from 3,200 words to over 5,000 words.
- Created a new view in my Exist iOS app entirely with code (no Storyboard).
- Performed a Shakespeare scene I'd been working on in my acting course, which went really well.
WHAT GOALS DID I ATTEMPT IN MAY?
- Release Exist iOS app in the App Store: Nope. I did get the app approved by Apple's App Review team, but then spent the rest of the month getting my developer account switched to a company account. That's finally done, so I've just submitted another version of the app to App Review in the past week.
- Get ToRead app ready for beta testing: Nope. I didn't find any time to work on ToRead, but I've been using it a lot and have lots of ideas about improving it when I find some time.
WHAT 1 HABIT DID I FOCUS ON FOR MAY? (HOW DID THAT GO?)
Getting up early (before 8am). Ideally I'd like to be out of bed by 6 or 6:30am, but since I'm struggling so much with this habit I've been aiming for 8am to start with.
In May I got up before 8am 17/31 days. I had a good run in the first week with 6/7 days, but I still need to work on doing this regularly.
WHAT EXPERIMENTS DID I TRY?
- Switched to a saddle chair. I'd been getting a lot of back pain from sitting at my desk, so after gathering some research and suggestions I tested a Salli Sway saddle chair. I got quite a bit of saddle soreness initially, but that's completely gone now, and I don't get any back pain from the saddle chair. It's made sitting at my desk to work much more comfortable.
- Setting an alarm for 6:30am. Although my deadline for getting out of bed was 8am, in the past week I tried setting an alarm for 6:30am to see how it would affect me. I was surprised to find that after turning off the alarm and going back to sleep for 30-60 minutes, I was generally quite ready to get out of bed. For some reason this was easier than waking up at 7:45 and dragging myself up before 8am passed.
WHAT BOOKS DID I READ?
- The Runaway Jury, John Grisham
- A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
- The Chairs Are Where The People Go, Misha Glouberman
- My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante
HOW MUCH MONEY DID I SPEND?
$4,192
Biggest chunks: $1293 for rent, $942 for business expenses ($640 for my saddle chair, $99 for AppCode), $500 for a birthday gift (interstate flights), $484 on shopping ($433 on two pairs of Outlier pants—half of which was wasted because my tailor took them up a bit too much).
Goals for June
I WANT TO COMPLETE:
- Release my Exist iOS app on the App Store—finally!
- Spend Saturdays coding. I've pulled out of the acting course I was doing because I'm too busy to fit it in, so I want to set aside that class time to do some coding every week.
- Increase my freelance workload. I have a big (BIG) tax bill to pay because of an honest mistake I made during the last financial year, so I want to make a plan for increasing my income to cover that before June is over.
I WANT TO FOCUS ON THIS 1 HABIT:
- Getting up early. I'm finding it tough to keep up with all the work I have to do lately, and I think getting back into an early waking habit will help my productivity as well as my mood.
Image credit: BOSS FIGHT