This is going to be brief. First, because I don’t have anything deep and meaningful to say about habit, reward, and personal improvement this month. And second, because I was on call and up all weekend with a neverending stream of devops emergencies that had to be addressed, and I desperately need the sleep.

[As an aside, I’d like to say that there’s a point at which the pager transforms into a tool of the Elder Gods, acting purely out of spite, maliciously looking for an excuse – anything at all – just to wake you up one more time. NFS mount points spontaneously timing out, rsync jobs overwriting beautiful, perfect symlinks with old, evil ones, and all your attempts to gerry-rig fixes twisting into the foul tools of Yog Sothoth, coming back to bite you in the end. But I digress.]

Anyway, I just wanted to write up a quick set of learnings, and some modifications to The Rules.

This month, I finally bit off more than I could chew. It isn’t reasonable to try to do more than one thing per night – write a blog post, read a technical book, hop on the treadmill – and this month I finally committed to more than was long-term sustainable. So I’m going to take a couple steps back. I’m only going to commit to one technical chapter per week, and I’m going to downgrade from 50 pull ups per week to theraband shoulder exercises. Hopefully that will take a little pressure off, and help my rotator cuff.

That’s it – see you next month!

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