The beginning

105 days ago on June 7th, inspired by the legend lelouch, I started writing daily progress reports.

Inspired by @lelouchdaily, I’ll also get started with the ML grind/daily progress posting. I’ll do my best to stay consistent.

Also working on making myself redundant within my small company, so that’s also part of the progress.

Day 0 (yesterday) and day 1:
Yesterday:
- Found… pic.twitter.com/lwU1pZuEV8

— wolke 知識 (@CrystalWolke) June 7, 2024

This was the first step into getting more consistent with my work, building more in public (as much as all those NDAs allow me to) and to some degree hold myself accountable for the work I do.

Let’s take a step back and look at the numbers behind those 105 days.

The numbers

Total Time Worked: 759.5 hours (7.2h per day)

Total Days Worked: 105

Average Time Worked Per Day: 7.23 hours

Most Productive Day: 13.9hours

Least Productive Day: 0 hours

Administrative Work: 30 hours

Time spent learning: 106 hours (~1 hour per day)

Time for customer work: 580h (5.5h per day)

Time for side projects: 34.5 hours

Looking back at the progress

When I got started my main goal was to get into the whole ML space. I had a basic understanding of what ML was, but I didn’t know anything about the specifics of how it works. I quickly learned, that just trying to get a model working without understanding the fundamentals is like trying to build a house without knowing how to build a wall. Another goal was to make my own company more independent and to reduce the reliance on me.

Math/ML

-> Recommendation: Read You are probably not dumb by lelouch

That’s why I’ve decided to brush up on the basics, which in my case meant getting my math knowledge back up to speed. As I haven’t used advanced math for over 9 years by now, I had forgotten a LOT. Even the most basic concepts such as fractions. To get back in the game I decided to start simple and use a visual learning app. I also found a cool software called Mathacademy (Not sponsored, I just liked the software).

After a few days of daily use I was able to solve the basic linear algebra problems that I had forgotten. I slowly began to ramp up my game by progressing through the basic Math Foundation courses on Mathacademy.

As I’ve continued my work life got more in the way and I got less and less consistent with my learning. This is something where I need to get back in the game and organize my time better.

Work

During this time period I also switched jobs from a contractor position with a customer to a startup based on a software I developed myself over the course of the last 1.5 years. The change in pace was a bit rough, but overall I’m still happy with the decision and the outcome. This did not help my time management though…

Own Company

For my own company, we were able to get a few customer projects shipped out and completed. I also finally started the process of handing over projects to my team and step back from day-to-day operations. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, but I never really got to it, or may even have been afraid of it.

Side Projects

Life gets boring without side projects.

Since I enjoy building things, I also started working on a side project called “NiA”. Which should be a tool to help me use my time more effectively. Currently it is in a super early stage and I still struggle to find the time to work on it. Therefore more on that later.

I also started learning C, Rust and Zig which are amazing languages and I look forward to using them in my own projects.

The Future

Looking back at the last 105 days, I’m happy with the overall progress I made. However, there are areas where I can definitely improve:

• Time Management
• Procrastination
• Going to the gym regularly
• Eating healthy
• Getting enough sleep
• Consistency

So:

How can I get there ?

Out of the problems above, time management and staying consistent are the ones that will bring the biggest return.

Time Management

I already have a reasonably structured calendar with blocks for work and sleep. This is fine the way it is and sets a good “base schedule”. To improve the way I use my time, I thought about either doing a time goal per day (i.e. 1 hour of math) or set an accomplishable goal for each week that can also be broken down per day, which would allow for some flexibility, as there can always be unexpected things like an outage at a customer site.

Consistency

Consistency is something I always struggled with. I love doing interesting things, but I am also quickly bored and move on to the next shiny thing. While I am able to force myself to do work related things, it’s a bit harded when it comes to personal things.

One Idea I had in mind here is to setup some sort of gamification of my daily/weekly goals which could help by providing some sort of “instant reward” that should trigger the reward center in my brain. The issue here is that it’s not as easy when working solo to get that feedback loop going. Maybe adding a leaderboard or making a public kind of tool could help with that. This way even boring and mundane tasks could be easier to deal with.

An exammple of how this could look like is the following:

1. I have a task like “I will work out 3 days a week”
2. I want to go to the gym 3 days a week
3. I get a point for each day I go to the gym -> Maybe via geo-location or health-kit integration
4. I get a leaderboard that shows me how I rank against my friends/public/etc.
5. An achievement, point, credit, etc. is awarded for each day I go to the gym to trigger a dopamine hit.

This is a very high level idea and I’m sure there are many ways to implement it. Especially getting the integration going to avoid cheating the system could be a challenge.

I’ll update this section as I continue on this path.