This is very true. A lot of times in life we feel like we need to learn everything right now (keep up with the Jones’s so to speak). Sometimes it makes us take the little things in life for granted.

It’s better to do a little bit every day than try to take on everything all at once. I’ll take slow, steady progress over burnout any day.

I have almost completed the audiobook version of 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. I don't agree with everything he says but highly recommend his book because it turns the usual "time management" recommendations on their head. With respect to the "little bit every day" advice, he not only agrees with it, but puts a hard stop on it. His advice is to force yourself to stop when you've completed your 20-minute (or whatever small bit) chunk for the day. The reasoning is too complex to go into here, but he believes stopping will support an overall sustainability and avoid burnout.

And is that a penguin going down the long road ahead?

Michael that is indeed a penguin.

I often find that I have a hard time sticking to doing things in small chunks. Once I get rolling on a project, I tend to want to keep going until it's finished. For example, the developer lessons that I'm doing right now with the File Drop example, I just want to keep recording. I finish one video and I'm like, "I'm ready for the next one," but I have to remind myself that I've got other stuff I have to do as well, so...

When I was younger and had more stamina, I was one of those coders that would be up for 48 hours straight working on a new project (or playing the latest game).

Can't do that anymore.

Richard I am somewhat the opposite. I am easily distracted by "shiny objects" and also get restless if I spend a lot of time on one thing. My current daily goals are a list of 10 small chunks of projects. The chunks are typically 3-15 minutes in length. This is how I've read through the Bible, Quran, etc. I literally do one page turn per day. I'm cleaning up my computer files 1 file per day. Longer items are 1 Star Trek episode, or one part of one of your lessons (e.g. 8.01) per day. Even with that size, I'm not always successful. Despite being retired, my life is full of "mundane" activities (e.g. walking the dog twice a day) that make a time-based routine impossible. The mundane activities are still mostly my choice, so I am not complaining.

It is ironic to me that I had thought retirement would give me the time to do everything I wanted... I love being retired-- definitely not bored-- just wish I had the focus of which you write.

I only have that kind of focus on things I'm incredibly passionate about - which is why I love what I do for "work" every day. I don't consider it work. I love waking up in the morning and thinking about what project can I work on today? Whether it's a video, a programming project, something on the website, or even a Captain's Log article. If it doesn't excite me, I don't do it.

Well... except taxes. That's coming up and I loathe doing those. But that's another story...

Ahh taxes... that time of year.  As an accountant, I understand fully.  And NOTE... the IRS begins accepting returns on Tuesday, the 27th.  

Lisa oh, no, I'm definitely an April 14th tax preparer. LOL.

Mea culpa, Richard... it's actually Monday the 26th.  But no worries, you're in good company, a good 20-25% of taxpayers wait until the last minute to file.  

Well, part of my problem is that I don't keep good records ALL YEAR LONG because I just rely on my bank and credit card statements to do the tracking for me. Then, the last week before taxes are due, I scramble to log into all my bank and credit card sites, download statements, then import everything into Excel and categorize it all. It's time consuming

I've never built a really solid Access database for it because I've told myself for the past thirty-some years of running a business: "It's only one day a year, I can deal with it." But some years it invariably ends up being 2 or 3 days. LOL

But now that I've got this new aggregator going and it's automatically pulling transactions and balances from about 90% of my accounts, this is going to be a huge time-saver when tax season rolls around in 2027. Most of the data from 2026 will already be sitting there waiting for me, and I'll only have to log into a couple of places for the final statements.

I'm honestly pretty excited about this new stuff I've been working on. And you can pretty much guarantee that between now and April I'll be building a pretty cool database (that I'll share) to automate most of this.

So... one more year for me of doing it manually for the 2025 data.