Here's a follow-up to my New Year's resolutions rant six months ago:

( https://devrant.com/rants/1117379/... )

I've completed (or made significant strides in) 5 of my 7 resolutions:

1) Rid and keep my like free of toxic people.  This includes parents.

I have had a serious conversation with everyone who made my life worse and whom I wanted to keep around, outlining my issues with them and my expectations should they want to remain in my life.  I happily cut out everyone who refused to change their behavior, including my parents.  My life is quieter now, and much nicer.

3) Take care of myself for a change!

I've started this, but with work, a monster, etc. it's been almost prohibitively difficult.  Minimal lasting progress despite considerable effort.  I will make more time for it and make it happen. (I was down 12 pounds at one point! Though this isn't just about weight.)

4) Stop putting up with things I don't have to.

If I don't like something optional, snip snip!
I no longer wait patiently (fuming) for slow-moving people.  If something prevents me from being productive or going about my day, I no longer let it.  Carpe diem; calcitrare culus! I have been much more productive and energetic because of this.

5) Actually enjoy things I enjoy.

Okay, this one is very difficult.  Whenever I'm not working, I feel like I'm wasting my time.  However, I have made a conceited effort every day to take time off and do something that sounds fun.  Sometimes that's more work, but usually it's music, a game, a book, exercise, or bed.   I'm still working on actually enjoying my time away from work, however, but I'm making progress!

7) Finish de-googling my life.

I no longer use a gmail account (except a work-provided account), nor do I use any of their services unless absolutely necessary (and I do so through TOR).  My phone still has Google Play Services; however, I'm working on finding a replacement that I can @Root.  (Suggestions welcome!)

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The two resolutions I haven't yet addressed:

2) Find a well-paying job that isn't also toxic.

My job has gotten less toxic of late, with the boss actually listening and everyone writing up feature requests (with co-sponsors) instead of just dumping them in my lap.  I perform an effort analysis on them, and everyone discusses them as a team to determine which actually deserve development time.  This is tens of times better than before.  I also no longer have to be at the office.  In fact, I haven't been there in months -- and don't even remember the alarm codes haha.  I may also be getting another developer, though I suspect this is actually a lie.

6) Finally buy a harp. I've wanted one since I was 3 ffs.

I haven't done any research yet on which harp(s) I should buy.  Also, I have no idea where I would keep it, so I may defer this until we move, or just get a tiny one (lap-sized and cute!) to practice on. Probably both!

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It's been six moths, and I'm happy with my progress. 😄

!rant !dev

So, following up my last rant.
https://devrant.com/rants/2433162

I quit on Friday, this is what I said to my bosses.

"In the last week I had, 2 panic attacks, and I have 2 theories for this, one is that I have underlying psychological problems, the other theory is that we are under an impossible task, I choose to say now that I have to quit because I have psychological issues, but if you are willing to hear my other theory, that involves saying that meeting the deadline is not viable, then I can tell you that, so do want to listen that part?.

Bosses: No, we heard enough, we are going to have your contract terminated in order, and we will let you know when you can come and pick your paycheck."

So, that's them. Now about me and how I re-discovered GTD, or more precisely how I organized my whole weekend using taskwarrior with GTD, and why I think is going to be useful as a freelancer.

Before I feel good about telling you about my weekend I have to tell you a few things about myself.

I am a very impulsive person, I have a lot of energy in short surges, so I have to be able to maximize my activity when I'm in a surge, and I have to maximize my rest when I am not.

That's hard to do, it requires a balanced lifestyle, I am also very prone to being neurotic, and overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that I want to do.

And on top of that, when I am resting, I have surges of things that I want to have, do, or implement, it could be software related, as "Doing an app that will be the Uber of home services", to house improvements like, "I have to fix that leaking roof", and all the sort of stuff that happens in between hardware and software. That surge of consciousness doesn't allow me to have the proper rest that I need before I engage with activities again.

Because of this I have a very cyclic rhythm, with whole weeks burning my energy into doing stuff, and weeks resting doing very little and thinking too much.

Now about my weekend. Friday night I was browsing the web, and a thought came to my head. "The way you use your terminal, says a lot about your personality", and I got curious, so I searched for, "Show me your terminal", and found a post in dev.to to see all kind of nice terminal setups, from the very minimalist to very feature rich oh-my-zsh themes with plugins for git, aws and what not. One of these pictures really got my attention, a guy had set up his terminal to show him, how many task has he done in the day, and how many cups of coffee has he had.

So by investigating how he set up his terminal to show in the prompt the number of successfully completed tasks in the day, I found out that he was using taskwarrior, he was also kind enough to share the source code of his prompt setup, which I bookmarked to later incorporate that into my oh-my-zsh config.

After reading about taskwarrior, I also got a reference to GTD, I don't remember if this was one of those thoughts that I have and follow immediately, or if I read something that led me to a YouTube video summarizing GTD.

In the end, after watching that GTD video, I decided to give it a try to organize my life, and help me find a remote job, keep my house in order, plan my social activities as "hang out with friends", "visit mom and dad", and give the proper amount of attention to my GF, with whom I am deeply in love, and willing to spend the remaining of my years with her.

So my fist task was.

task add Ask for GF's parents blessing.

Which of course I have no intention of doing right now, but is one of the things that I will eventually have to do.

Then it started, I started adding tasks, and things to do, and go through the whole Capture phase of GTD.

Now it is a good time to write a small summary of what I think GTD is.

GTD is a life habit of organizing your life in todo-lists. And it was a very specific core method, that in the video summary that I watched was called CPR.

Capture, Process and Review.

Capture:
When you capture you just add your tasks to a bucket list.
So I took a notebook and started writing down everything that I wanted to have done. I also started to capture ideas as they came up to me, I did this by writing a telegram saved message in my phone, or directly adding it as a task in TW.

Process:
I read my telegram messages and put them into my task warrior list, then I started to organize my tasks into projects, breaking down every task that was not an atomic unit.
* And different projects started to emerge from this. One of them was project:Housekeeping.

And here's my screenshot of what I did this weekend, also the number of projects that I have, and all the things that I have to do in order to have what I think would be a very balanced, fun, and productive life.

You'll be able to see in the screenshot, that there's a blocked task, yes, tw allows you to organize dependencies too, so one task is delegated, and blocked by the delegation task.