I tend to not put much stock in making in new years' resolutions. However, I find the new year, or in this case almost a month and a half after the new year, to be a lovely opportunity for quiet reflection.

To my never-ending chagrin, while I can think and reason quickly, or maybe because I can think and reason quickly, my brain's L1 cache is limited, and I'm forgetful, mistake-prone, and easily confuse myself if I cannot immediately and systematically externalize thoughts onto paper or an org file for later retrieval. I probably often confuse others my thoughts, either to our entertainment or my embarrassment, depending on the person in question.

In mid-late 2025, myself and another developer shipped a project that was not especially large, but contained, according to developers and managers with long tenure at this company, the most complex set of features built here yet. The project was not ran in a way that was accommodating to my brain and workflow, and I burned out pretty hard. Requirements were mostly word-of-mouth, and any documentation or specs lived in .docx files whose contents changed in subtle but important ways every few days and were only available via direct message. I had to come up with a band-aid for a critical component that everyone involved forgot about and never wrote down the weekend before the release as well (and cook dinner for friends that weekend).

The way I do work best is by doing exactly one thing at a time, which is frustratingly difficult for my own mind to do, on top of difficulty in finding solace from deadlines and other people in order to attend to one and only one thing. My own personal life is full of half-finished projects, books, blog posts, and games.

So, I decided in late 2025 that I need to do one thing at a time and better systematize my life for my mental and physical health, the quality of my outputs, and because it's a lot more fun to do things when I'm disciplined enough to focus on them. Streamlining my org-mode workflows for record-keeping at work, since no one else will if I don't, setting up a more pleasurable development environment (I mainly work on .NET Framework projects on Windows 11, so there's only so much I can do in that arena), and making a big to-do list for all my personal projects and goals and prioritizing them and noting where parallelization is possible, was the primary preoccupation of my January. I learned from that experience that organizing is one of my favorite things!

I used to meditate a lot too, and I'm getting back into it. Chronic pain makes it a little harder now, but it's still probably helping.

Last week, I experienced a day where I didn't do one thing a time due to requests from other developers for help (i.e. fixing people's git logs looking like things they didn't immediately expect), responding to customer service tickets that yes, the aforementioned project is working to spec, and interrogations from product managers about desires for changes in poorly-defined areas of said system, and dealing with a critical bug from another project I helped ship that was reintroduced in the testing environment 3 days before a big release. It was maybe the least fun day of my life at this job. I cried.

It was a low point for me, and I've yet to recover, but otherwise, I enjoy my new modus operandi of doing exactly one thing at a time and accompanying gentle relaxation and quiet, unhurried focus. I think it's easy for me to become overwhelmed by deadlines, expectations, hierarchies, and others requesting my attention, but much like programming defensively, maybe I need to allocate time defensively and jealously guard it against people who would, without ill intent, have me do more than one thing at a time.

HRT has made me more sensitive to caffeine, and I've been lowering my caffeine intake significantly, and I've had periods where I've completely stopped drinking caffeine and loved it. I enjoyed this little read: https://blog.avas.space/caffeine-conclusion/ and after some failed attempts, I think I'll stop drinking caffeine for a month and report back with how I feel.