Now, year end edition

Thinking aboutI've been doing the Elements of Focus course from Shawn Blanc, and it's been really good. Lots of titbits on how to set tomorrow-me up for a productive day, and making today more useful. Day 15 made me think of the Cynefin Complexity model (it's really hard to Google something when you don't know how to spell it). Cynefin is about work that falls into one of four states: obvious, complicated, complex, and chaotic

Also pondering, how do you keep a team integrated together when they're in three offices spread over two states? I'd like to go out to our furthest office to do interviews, would cycling people through the remote offices help or hinder progress and integration.

CraftI knit cotton/hemp yarn too tightly and gave myself tendinitis, I can't knit that particular yarn again, it's going in the trade tab of my Ravelry stash. The elbow is improving, but it's been over a month since I knit anything.

Continuing with my daily sketch habit and approaching the halfway mark on my sketchbook. There's a definite progression from the start to now, I'm playing more with shading and smudged lines, and there's a lot more stuff drawn from real life instead of memory.

Karate and fitnessOn the downhill slope towards a black belt test. Working on getting the full set of 120 techniques and 13 kata into my head, then bringing them up to black belt standard. There are no "woman black belts" at Tracy's Karate, there are only black belts. I have to be good and I have to be ready. I'll be sparring anything up to 12 fights in a row after my techniques and kata, black belt tests are at least 2 hours long.

Lesson learned: don't work out on an empty stomach. Went to the gym before breakfast and burned out early in my workout. I've managed a plank of 1m 8s and a wall sit of 1m 18s, but both were done before the hard part of the workout, which is three rounds of squat thrusts, lunges with 15lb weights, single arm kettlebell swings (20 lb) and rows (15lb).

ReadingStill ploughing through "Watching the English" by Kate Fox at a slow pace, I'm over the halfway mark now. Working through "Louder than Words" by Todd Henry, I'm blocked on the mentor exercise as I'm still on vacation. "One Moment Meditation" is another slow read. Maybe I need some fiction so I can read something and be done without pauses or homework assignments.

Picked up and read Oliver Burkeman's book "The Antidote - Happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking." It's definitely a British book, ("behaviour" is spelled correctly) and one that makes a lot of sense to me. The link between Stoicism and cognitive behavioural therapy was a surprise that explains why reading "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelis felt like coming home.