September is here, time to review my stats for August, 2017.

Books

List of books read this month

This is my personal record of books read in one single month. 7 freaking books. 😱

Let’s start with two small books I read. Cesar Millan’s Guide to Audiobooks for Dogs and Cesar Millan’s Guide to Bringing Home a Shelter Dog. These two books were free on Audible for Dogs, so I decided to give them a try. They are ordinary books but I would recommend for dog lovers. :)

Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity is one of the best books I read on leadership. There’s no magic here, just deal with people in the right way. Give sincere feedback, expect sincere feedback, understand their career paths and let them go if the job is not good for them (and vice-versa). I recommend every boss to read it. Seriously.

Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box is a book that helps you to think about your attitude before judging people. Not amazing, but it’s a good one.

The Destroyer of Worlds was a recommendation from Amir and until now none of his recommendations disappointed, so I decided to try it. The content is really amazing! A lot of context about the political and moral problems of the atomic bombs. I really recommend to listen to it if you like the subject. The descriptions of the Japanese of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are really hard to listen though. It’s not a book, but you will consider that as a book as soon as you listen to it.

My Favorite Universe is a great book to introduce people to science. Neil deGrasse Tyson has the ability to show complicated stuff in an uncomplicated way. The example of density with the cream on his hot chocolate is really nice.

Rendezvous with Rama is one of those books I was not expecting to like but turns out to be one of the best books I read in the genre. The way Arthur C. Clarke describes Rama and how everything works there is really amazing. Totally recommended.

Articles

As usual, I’m using that same export file from Pocket and the same script to calculate the amount of articles I read:

var uls=document.body.getElementsByTagName("ul");
for(var i=0; i<uls.length; i++) {
    console.log(uls[i].children.length)
}
1157
883

It means I have 1157 articles Unread and 883 articles Read. Comparing with my results from the last month (1044 unread and 777 read), I got around 10% more unread articles and 12% more read articles.

It increased the percentages of read and unread because it took some time to generate the numbers. Anyways, the problem persists, I usually don’t read the articles I mark to read. Looks like Pocket is my new app for bookmarks… Yay! :(

I’m using it to mark all the articles I read throughout the month, so it’s not that useless but I will have to reconsider the idea of reading all articles I have there. Maybe start producing instead of consuming, which is one trend I’ve been seeing a lot nowadays.

Coding

Here goes the charts from Wakatime since the last post.

Hours of coding on Wakatime this month

As usual, it’s kind of the average with one outlier. This average of 3-4 hours coding always bugs me.

Languages used during this month on Wakatime

I don’t know why markdown always takes the lead (after bash), but Python is coming as it should.

Editors used during this month on Wakatime

Nothing new to editors. I still use Vim, but Emacs is the leader by far.

Speaking

This was an ordinary month regarding presentations, but still following what I had defined for my goal:

Burn down chart for my presentations

The goal was reached this month! I will try to keep the same rhythm and maybe speak in different countries. :)

Completed tasks

This is the amount of tasks completed on Todoist.

Amount of tasks completed this month

534 tasks completed this month (20 less than last month).

I still have plans to create a better way to extract data from my Todoist account, just need some spare time. Not so easy these days.

Podcasts

Here is my Podcast Addict stats:

Amount of time spent listening to Podcasts this month

1 day and 16 hours of podcast time, almost 1 day less than last month. This is a trend I’ve been following, when I read (or listen to) more books I consume less podcasts. :)

I decided to keep a list of the Podcasts and their times as well.

Amount of time spent listening to Podcasts, ordered by title

Just remember that this is an “all time list” and I’m tracking time instead of episode which makes short podcasts to not appear as “most listened” ones. I listen to CBN podcasts almost every day, but they are just some minutes long.

Hours working

Here is the data from my time tracking software, Toggl:

Hours working using Toggl

The above chart is just for my freelance and full-time job. It’s really hard to work as a freelancer now, my full-time job is taking all my energy, so most part of it is dedicated to it.

Here is the difference between shallow and deep work regarding my full-time job:

Deep vs Shallow work

It was less deep work than last month (13 hours less) but it’s good to know I’m still spending around 1/3 of my time in Deep Work state. I’m also tracking time in meetings, it was almost one day in meetings this month. I did not track every single meeting because it would be too much work, but it was basically related to:

  • 1-1 meeting
  • Weekly status (30 min each)
  • Meeting with other members of the team
  • Useful meetings with other teams and thirty parties

I hate useless meetings but all of these were useful and needed. :)

There is another chart for my personal projects:

Hours working on personal projects using Toggl

Even less than last month, it makes me sad :(.

Here is my data from RescueTime:

Goal of productive hours on RescueTime

It’s sad but I missed my goal for this month. Looks like it was pretty close (99%):

Details of my goal of productive hours on RescueTime

BTW, my goal is 3h using only productive apps, the idea is to improve the usage of these. Here are the big offensors:

Offesors of my goal of productive hours on RescueTime

Yeah, communication and Scheduling. I really want to spend less time in Twist. It’s the source of all conversations at Doist, but it’s up to us to not make communication overwhelming. I’m still working to have the balance between comunication and real work. Time to improve this. :)

Physical activity

I’m using my Mi band data to calculate my average steps:

Activity data for this month by Mi-Fit app

According to this data, I can conclude that I had a daily average of 6.6k steps (207/31). It was almost 50k less steps than last month. I was not feeling good some days so I had to skip the gym, maybe this is the cause of that.

And these are my steps each day:

Amount of steps for this month

My max distance was 9.2km:

Travelled distance this month

My weight is stable:

My weight for this month

And here is some data on my current weight:

Data on my weight for this month

MiFit app interface for sleep data changed a little bit but here is my data for this month:

Amount of sleep for this month

A bit more average sleeping (7h32m for the last month) and more deep sleeping for this month \o/ (last month was 1h32). It’s probably not related (at least not in particular) to the change of bands (Mi band -> Mi band 2), because I’m using it for two months now and my deep sleeping improved for the second month.

Here is my stats comparing to the whole Mi band user base:

Stats about my sleep data

Not so good, I think. 😅

TV Shows

According to tvshowtime I watched 24 episodes this month.

TV shows watched this month according to tvshowtime

It’s a combination of Westworld (recommended, BTW), The defenders, The crown, and Game of Thrones.

Note that I had some delay to get this screenshot and there are some numbers from September already (blue arrow). With that said, I think I spent around 24 hours watching TV this month.

Words written and errors

I’m using Grammarly to improve my English and track the amount of words and errors when I’m writting. Unfortunately, they only send weekly emails, but I will try to keep this metric for a while.

My stats for this month:

  • 69493 words written (51018 last month)
  • 1881 corrections made (1272 last month)
  • 13925 unique words (10332 last month)

The numbers keep rising because all of my work conversations are in English, that’s nice. I had more than 20% more words written , around 30% more unique words, but also more than 34% more corrections made.

Locations

This time I have one additional city in the list because I traveled to bebedouro to speak at interdevops. It also helped to increase the list of places visited by 9.

General view of my locations data

Here is the time spend in vehicles:

Location time and distance

I know I spent 9 hours traveling to speak at interdevops and 3 hours to speak at Catho, so 12 from these 14 hours are related to my presentations. Pretty good. Just want to say it again: Remote work FTW!

And as always, the funny metric:

Kms to the moon

Hope to reach the moon some day.

Expenses

My expenses for this month:

Expenses by category this month

This chart represents all my income for this month. The number is not wrong, I did not receive any money this month. The problem I described last month and the month before it is not solved yet, for this reason, there’s no money coming yet. :(

My expenses are normal again but I’m not paying anything, my wife is paying all of our bills until my situation gets back to normal. I’m kinda stressed with this situation but it’s great to have someone to rely on when things like these happen. ❤️

Well, thanks to the volatile economy in Brazil, my total savings increased by 1.9% and I did not add any money to it (because I’m not receiving anything…). Now I reached 74.23% of my goal.

Time to write this blog post

Some people are asking me about how much time it take to collect all the data and write the blog post, so I decided to add this metric.

It took 3 hours and 52 minutes to write this post

1 hour more than last month, I need to improve it for next month.

Conclusion

Excluding the fact of not being able to receive my payment because of bureaucracy that has nothing to do with what I do, this month was good. I’m integrated to the team and getting used to the code and the team way of work.

It’s really nice to work on products you love and also see people using it and giving nice feedback. I was missing that for a long time. :)

The next step is try to improve my productivity for the next month. Let’s see how it goes.