Life

The first parts of this series were about getting more done while at work as well as making it easier to switch from work into leisure mode. Both have a rather bottom-up feeling to them. In contrast, this post will be top-down: investigating my scheduling habits and trying to get them to a point where they actually protect myself from over-scheduling too much work. My Scheduling Habits thus far After years or trying different todo and task applications, I’ve settled upon a rather simplistic approach: simple markdown todo lists versioned through git. Mostly I use this for reminders, things that I need to do for work and, leisure activities such as reminding me to go do some yoga. ...

While the initial experiment focused upon productivity, the main goal of this series is to improve my work/life balance. Getting more productive should just allow me to switch from work to leisure earlier. Currently I have access to my university office, so I have a nice geographical separation between Work/“The Office” and “Everything Else”. So basically I want to keep work at the Office and leisure (mostly) outside of it: getting out of the office to recover while keeping distractions out of the office to let me get out of it faster. This is primarily about the office space, my coworkers are actually part of my recovery activities such as climbing. If I wouldn’t have access to the university office anymore I would have to get some shared office space. ...

Last winter I was lucky to enroll in the so-far best lecture of my PhD studies: From Surviving to Thriving: Crafting your good personal Life by the great Geraldine Fitzpatrick. The course was about stress, mindfullnes, crafting, productivity.. nothing mind-blowing nor rocket science but comprehensive, accessible, and charmingly presented. Recently I read Do Nothing which I thoroughly enjoyed. Maybe it’s time to experiment with my time (or rather life) management.. My Background Just to give a bit of context: I am 41 and by now am back in Academia doing a PhD about the intersection of computer security and machine learning while I freelance as pen-tester and doing commercial security training workshops/talks, mostly about secure development and/or web security. ...

Given that I’ve spent more time in my flat (hello, COVID-19) I also spent more time looking at my book shelf.. and wasn’t too happy with it: in hindsight, some of the books I’ve read are way to pretentious and the books I remember as life-changing were mostly read on my kindle anyways. Speaking of Kindles, my first kindle (must be bought around 2008 in the United States) was stored between the books.. with a quite bulging lithium ion battery.. good thing I did that cleanup. ...

2019 was a year in which I expanded my comfort zone and forced myself to face some fears. I haven’t always been victorious, there’s enough to face next year. I see progress and hope; I do not feel trapped in my situation but rather see a comfy base from which I can explore further. I shed some possessions, mostly donated them or gave them away to friends. This calms my mind tremendously. There’s a song by “Down like Silver” that contains the fitting lines: “everything I own, owns me now”. ...

After 15 or so years I’m finally closing down my own company (it was a small one-person vehicle, in Austrian Einzelpersonenunternehmen or EPU). How so? I’ve been self-employed since I’ve started to study at university. Mostly I did software engineering for various research projects at AIT. There was a short side-project (a failed startup that I created with friends of mine), after that more web development with other friends of mine. Slowly some changes happened, I’ve got down towards security/penetration-testing six or seven years ago. Five years ago I got an part-time employment at the research center, mostly for two EU research projects. my work time got more and more split between pen-testing and research stuff. ...

Most of you (and there are a couple of thousands of you) come for my tech-posts, but it seems that some of you get lost reading my non-techie posts too. Time to add on of those, it’s been a while.. I breathe books, they give my brain constant input to thrive on. Recently I went through my goodreads list of reread-good-books to check what influences me and started to reread some of them. Result: I removed some of the books as I had no clue why they were on there. In a flash of practical minimalism I started to think about those books that move(d) me, the result is this list: ...

There’s power in switching mental models. In my work, switching from “there might be a vulnerability in this software” to “i just haven’t found the vulnerability” was a game changer for me. I get nervous prior to presentations; one switch that helped me was that instead of thinking “my goal is to look bright” I try to remember that my goal is to teach the audience something and it doesn’t matter who stupid I look as long as they gain something from me. ...

This year was good work- and health-wise, but bad when it comes to money and relationships. Financially the stock market drop hurt, emotionally getting dumped was painful. For 2019, I plan to keep and improve my healthy 2018 habits: enjoy life as non-smoker, keep on bouldering (6a+ - 6c with a rare sent 7a in-between), finally finish a full Bikram yoga sequence and maybe meditate more often. In addition, I’d like to improve my sleep. This might lead to less screen time in the evening, more Kindle reading and maybe a slight drop in my caffeine consumption. Another thing that worries me is that many of my best stories start with “when we were out drinking..”. After quitting to smoke, it might be time to work on this area too. ...

This year seems to bring a lot of changes: I’ve switched employers after staying on/off at a research center or the last twelve years. When I started there, I was doing cool network coding for the SECOQC quantum key distribution network, it somehow felt as being a part of some bigger undertaking that finally let to something. My work had a tenable outcome, this compensated for the long hours and poor pay. Colleagues were (and have been until the end) good friends and oftentimes mentors. ...