Why this list?

Even with a stressful move across country during this pandemic, I’ve spent a significant amount of time optimizing and minimizing my life. Why? Mostly out of re-prioritization of what really matters. Relationships matter. Conversations about specific episodes on TV shows don’t really matter. Macroeconomics matters. Temper and perspective matters.

Here’s a slew of topics I’ve taken to heart and dove deep into as side expertise/hobbies since the beginning of the pandemic.

1. Cooking new dishes with less – It was fun doing a 3-month cooking challenge. A lot of great recipes and exploring the pantry. At the end of the day, creating low stress diverse meals with a proper mix of vegetables is more important. I loved experimenting with sauces.

2. Experimental cooking and recurring meal prep – I think I’ve gotten really good at cooking solid healthy meals for the week and making an event out of it.

3. Folding origami – New models and base techniques open up some creativity and channels. It was a good routine while Evie slept. Finding peace one fold at a time. 30 day folding challenge reflections.

4. DeFi Protocols Deep Dive – I’ve spoken at a lot of different hackathons and virtual conferences on this topic of how traditional finance is leveraging DeFi.

5. Exploring Productivity tools – Looked at using Userbit and Roam Research for improving my work output and creating a second brain with tagging

6. Figma model creation – To reduce cycles in our work load with the design team, I started drawing a lot of my slideware diagrams directly in Figma. It’s been a great learning experience of seeing all the templates and shortcuts

7. Publishing Figmas with Airtable backends with Bravo App – This was a fun side project in hooking up APIs with no code. It’s fast and easy to prototype actions rather than writing ambiguous user stories

8. Podcasting routine – Completed recording 30 life in lists of 30 podcast episodes with a fairly accelerated pace.

9. Reading scripts out loud with a good pace and flow – This was tricky, but I think my reading has gotten much better

10. Editing videos with Camtasia – While I don’t think I learned too many new tricks, I had a lot of content to edit and process for the podcast and conferences. I made a video for Vinessa’s 40th Birthday.

11. Editing audio clips and making macros with Audacity – This was a fun tool with a lot of features I could explore

12. Listening to tons of royalty free music for intros and outros – I even connected with some artists on SoundCloud that I thought would be contenders for matching my episode pace and tune

13. Canva design – I used this for creating my logos and making the Instagram posts for all my pieces.

14. Mindmapping on simplemind pro – It’s a great tool for separately representing these lists of 30 and easy to do directly on mobile.

15. Home improvement fixing and making furniture – I’ve constructed more furniture and random things than I thought was possible. This house needs things to fill up the space.

16. Home concerns to prep for winter – Being a new homeowner, I figured out how to winterize the home.

17. Filtering/reading news – With so much misinformation and pumping news for crypto, it’s important to not get swayed to make trades from these influencing accounts.

18. Economics in general – There are so many indicators I’ve paid attention to for general market and regional health. Things are not great.

19. Weekly Trading strategies with Derivatives market – It was good selling covered calls for a while before premiums shot up. It’s overall easy to make money in a bull market.

20. History of Spanish Flu Pandemic – Surprisingly accurate how history repeating is inevitable

21. Beer appreciation – Met some awesome dads here who brew beers. Going to eventually learn how to brew a beer, but I’ve been doing a lot of research and buying expensive collab $23 four packs.

22. Cocktail mixing – I haven’t done anything too fancy, but I think I know a few fun recipes. I’m currently drinking more beer, but early COVID days was cocktail making practice.

23. Jigsaw puzzle piece sniping – I am able to memorize missing pieces by their size and shape pretty quickly for some multi piece sniping.

24. Spelling bee puzzle – Vinessa and I have been doing this word puzzle book nightly and loving it.

25. Magic the Gathering strategies – The online Magic the Gathering mobile game came out only a few weeks ago, but I’ve been crushing it at gold level.

26. Optimizing my device usage and updates – I think I’ve spent more time making things autopilot with low overhead. I feel like I’m better using the tools around me to overall consume and create content

27. Strategies for entertaining Evie and convincing her to do things – I’ve had a lot of quality time just hanging out with Evie, which I love.

28. Guinea pig care – After becoming a guinea dad, I’ve learned quite a bit about caring for these boys. Even wrote a list of 30 about it.

29. Userbit tagging of qualitative data – I’m super impressed at the progress of the application and expansion of features.

30. Writing lists of 30 – I’ve written so many lists and found my flow in different apps.

~See Lemons Learn in the Pandemic

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Originally published on seelemons.com