We often talk about work life balance, separating the two major parts of our lives. On some level, I agree with the philosophy, believe that work is work and life is life. But at least for me, what happens at work bleeds into my personal life, and vice versa.

When I have a shitty day at work, I feel despondent and mope around after hours and that impacts the mood for my wife and my daughter and my two dogs. In contrast, when I end the day on a good note, I tend to radiate with happiness.  For example, yesterday I was really pleased with the work that I produced (i.e. finished delivering a design for a new feature) and as a result, when I closed the lid of my laptop shut at 05:00 pm sharp (this is the time Elliott and I bathe together), my energy levels were high and I was able to stay completely mentally and emotionally — not just physically — present with my daughter during our night time routine.

Yesterday

Writing

• Posted a somewhat lengthy daily review

Best parts of my day

• Listening to my veterinarian deliver news (over the phone) that both of the puppies (they’ll always be puppies in my heart) are healthy. The the little bump in Metric’s ear was just a benign cyst that they simply popped.
• Eating a kick ass lunch: Jess whipped together an aesthetically pleasing lunch (equally tasty) consisting of a roasted cauliflower drizzled with pesto sauce and glazed pasta. All of this topped off with a blue berry pancake for a (lunch) dessert.
• Pushing my design document over the finish line. No major objections from the technical leadership team with moving forwards with the project that will need to launch by Q1 2021
• Watching an episode of “The Community” with Jess while eating dinner. Jess didn’t have to cut the dinner short since Elliott didn’t wake up so I consider that a little victory

Mental and Physical Health

• Yesterday was extremely busy at work so not going to knock myself for this but looking back, I should’ve taken just 5 minutes out of the day to run up and down the hill to get blood flowing through my body, which (surprise surprise) helps with mental health.

Graduate School

• Skimmed the first two research papers on memory virtualization published by VMWare
• Fixed a silly segfault in my memory_coordinator program. I had dynamically allocated memory on the heap (i.e. malloc system call) for my array of arrays but had incorrectly calculated the number of bytes, incorrectly passing in the wrong type when calling sizeof.

Work

• Edited by design document, incorporating numbers and figures from AWS Networking’s document that I had asked them to put together
• Presented my design document (for the second round) to the technical leadership team within my organization (i.e. Blackfoot)

Family

• Moved us an inch closer towards finalizing the home loan, collecting documents and proof (e.g. lease contract, monthly mortgages, property tax) to provide for the underwriter
• Took both puppies to the Vet to get checked up. Nothing major to report back: thank goodness.

Today

Song of the day

Discovered Hamzaa while listening to Spotify, the song showing up in my “Discover Weekly” playlist. I’ll definitely cover this song this song with my acoustic guitar.

Writing

• Publish notes on memory virtualization
• Publish daily review (this one that I’m writing right here)
• Publish the terminal output from the memory coordinator test cases and their expected outcomes

Organization

• Review OmniFocus’s forecast tab to get a sense of what meetings I have this week and any items that are due soon

Mental and Physical Health

• Throw on shoes and run up and down our hill for 5 minutes (seriously better than nothing)

Graduate School

• Continue with watching lectures on “Synchronization”
• Read papers that will influence memory coordinator design
• Write a quick prototype for my memory_coordiantor

Work

• Meetings and meetings and meetings (not a really fun day) of sprint planning, Asians@ planning and development meetings, interview debrief

Family

• Continuing packing the house with Jess. We’re a little more than 2 weeks away until we need to finish packing up the entire house and loading up the U-Haul
• Today’s aim is to fill up 2 more packing boxes (and label them using my new Brother label maker) and tag them with a unique ID (I’m trying out this new system that I called the “The Global Index” … will report back on this on a separate post)