December 2020 in Review

December 30, 2020

This month has been tough. I started what will hopefully be the last term of college for me. That’s great but it means putting a lot of hours into the classes I have left. And they’re not as easy to breeze through as earlier ones. I’m worried that I won’t finish on time.

Besides that it just doesn’t really feel like December. Christmas didn’t feel like Christmas. And mind you, I’m not one of those people that really loves Christmas. But if I wasn’t off work and there wasn’t a Christmas tree in our living room, I wouldn’t know that it was the holiday season.

The habits I started in November sort of tapered off like usual. But I’m back on the saddle with them as of now. I don’t think I’ll be trying to add any new habits in for a while. Instead, I’ll try to focus on really building the ones I set out to build last month. Reading also took a bit of a back seat as I dug into my first class for this term. I fell back into the familiar trap of “why am I reading this book when that book is so much better/more important/practical?” It’s a dumb way of thinking that leads to no books being read.

This month wasn’t all bad. I got a bunch of time off that I used to be weirdly productive yet unproductive at the same time. You might call it productive procrastination – you procrastinate doing the really important thing by doing another thing that’s also important. Well, maybe not important but not a waste of time either. Like building a Slack bot that sends you a random poem to read every day (that might be a post in and of itself).

I rekindled my interest in programming and electronics this month. Bought a multimeter and dug out my unused Arduino UNO. Haven’t actually done anything with either of those yet but they’re on my desk, staring at me. I’m excited to learn more about electronics.

All in all, not a terrible month. But that’s not saying much in the context of this year.

Goodbye December! Goodbye 2020! Hello to a hopefully better year!