Just before writing this, I was:

Listening to an episode of HTTP 203. I am not usually a big fan of this podcast, and haven’t been regularly listening to it, but it’s been quite good tonight listening some musings on WASM and async/await.

This past month, I achieved:

  • Going on my first solo overseas trip!
  • Celebrating my mum’s 50th birthday

Honestly a fairly quiet month :)

This past month, I learned:

This month, I learnt so much that I’m cheating and having two sections.

Procrastination + time blindness

A lot about how my procrastination habits that plagued me through university have kept on through to my current (personal) life.

This culminated in two key events this past month:

  • Being late for the train from Barcelona to Paris
  • Being late for a friend’s event which I really should not have been late for

My anxiety tends to lead me to overburden my spare time and delude myself into thinking I can do more than I actually can in a given period of time. It also makes me underestimate how long any given task takes.

I’m going to pay a lot more attention to how this time-blindness influences my judgement, and adjust appropriately such that my tardiness is less of an issue.

Solo travel + me = 😭

Turns out that travelling solo had the opposite effect I thought it would. I ended up disliking most moments that I spent alone, and it left me incredibly unenthusiastic about travelling anywhere really. There were some mornings that I didn’t want to leave my AirBnB.

This is at odds with what I expected; usually I really enjoy the pockets of time that I get to spend wandering around a place of my own accord. But having to do this 24/7 I found was rather exhausting and demoralising.

Perhaps if I go on a longer trip with more time to rest in between tours, I might enjoy it more, but for now I’m going to give up on solo travel.

This past month, I got bored of:

Social media. I’ve basically stopped feeling the need to reply to people urgently on Slack / Facebook / Twitter. If someone needs me, they can text me or call me. If they don’t have the means to do that, they probably don’t warrant my immediate attention.

I also stopped really checking Facebook, Twitter or Instagram in any serious way beyond checking my notifications and leaving. Since I don’t have the Facebook app (and generally don’t have the Twitter app downloaded either), it’s only when I’m truly left with nothing to do that I end up checking news feeds.

Unsurprisingly, since everyone has taken to social media completely and made it a part of their daily (or hourly) routine to check various internet based social channels, it has led to some awkward conversations with the people in my life who are unimpressed with my lack of presence on social media. “Did you see my tweet / Facebook post / Instagram pic?” from my family and friends is usually met with a “Uh, sorry, no”.

But hey, if it means I can spend more meaningful time with the people I AM seeing (including them!), I don’t really care. Show me that photo - but take the time to show me and explain why it was meaningful to you, rather than asking me if I’ve seen your content on some social media app. Because I probably haven’t.

But that’s OK, because I enjoyed:

Amazing sunsets and parks!

Today, something that made me happy was:

The concept of feeling better sometime soon.

Today, something I could’ve done better was:

Better communication when I was leaving work briefly to go for an appointment. I’m really bad at doing that - I end up really awkwardly saying goodbye or just leaving quietly.

Tomorrow I’m going to:

🚀 Finish shipping a minor feature that we’ve been hard at work on.

In October, I’m looking forward to:

  • 🎉 A bunch of different birthdays and events!
  • 👬 One of my close friends coming to Sydney to visit
  • 🛠 Getting back into a small side project of some description
  • ☀️ Spring weather vibes
  • 🇮🇹 The Italian festa
  • 🧘 More yoga practice - maybe even going to a Thursday night class

In October, I’m going to make the positive change of:

Reading more; it’s been on the backburner but I really enjoyed taking time out while on holidays and just reading. I want to do more of it.

One thing on my to-do list is:

Getting the film photos developed from my holiday.

One happy photo from the past month is:

A sunset taken on a tram line at the periphery of Paris proper - somewhere I’d been wanting to go since I first started planning my trip back there.

After this post I’m going to:

Go play some guitar probably.