And thus another month is over - November was huge!

Just before writing this, I was:

Sleeping in 😴

This past month, I achieved:

• Going to WebDirections Summit and learning a fucktonne of stuff. The origins of some CSS flex properties, how to use WebAssembly in production today, a designers guide to voice-based interfaces, and how to create sustainable change in medium to large organisations.
• Made major inroads at work by pulling apart some legacy CSS for an upcoming project
• Learning about and putting into practice the basics of ITCSS, an awesome architecture for your CSS both old and new
• Cycled to work one day a week for two weeks this month
• Made some documentation improvements to our internal design system documentation
• Put together an Ikea bed (badly)
• Started a new DnD campaign with my friends
• Went on a foraging tour of Queens Park with the bf(!)
• Started two new books:
  • “The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck”
  • “Designing for the Real World”

This past month, I learned:

You can’t do everything. And by that I mean, you can probably do a lot, but you can’t do everything.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time this month listening to the Hurry Slowly podcast, which features a bunch of interesting folk talking about making their lives a little easier. Enjoying your experiences, and truly thriving in them, requires whitespace and taking some level of care in what you do.

It can be very easy to become distracted by social media, the 24/7 news cycle, the constant pinging of random apps on your phone. It is truly worthwhile to try sisconnecting from them and taking time on things you care about, or trying things that you may want to care about.

This learning was also inspired by a choice theme from “The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck”, which I’ve recently started reading. The theme goes that you only have a limited amount of time, so find the things that are worth giving a fuck about.

I spent a lot of my time at uni stuffing about and accepting every invitation to every event I could get invited to. Any social occasion, 1:1 or otherwise, was an automatic yes. It’s taken me the past two years to realise that this isn’t actually sustainable with a full time career. Well, at least one that you care about growing and thriving in.

Worse, I ended up being terrified during the small periods of alone time to myself, because they were so goddamn rare.

I’ve put some constraints on the events I will go to, saying no to those I don’t think I will particularly enjoy. And it hurt a bit at first, but I eventually grew to realise that it made me enjoy the things that I do go to that bit more.

I’m not just casually going to events for the sake of it - I’m going because I want to share in those experiences. And let’s face it - there’s only so many experiences that we have time for.

This past month, I got bored of:

Having panic attacks. Blech.

But that’s OK, because I enjoyed:

My first beach day of the summer!

Today, something that made me happy was:

I…honestly don’t know.

Today, something I could’ve done better was:

Not worried so much about the fact that I couldn’t get anything done in the morning due to the torrential downpour.

Tomorrow I’m going to:

Go out for brunch with a friend and have a generally chill Sunday.

In December, I’m looking forward to:

CHRISTMAS 🎄

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

Slowing down. A loooot.

One thing on my to-do list is:

Planning out some projects to test out the Google Assistant.

One happy photo from the past month is:

After this post, I’m going to:

Relax.