I’ve recently read Deep Work by Cal Newport and decided to try out the idea of mid-term planning. The main point is that planning for periods of 3-4 months is better than annual, which can feel too distant, or monthly, that are too short to achieve significant progress. I have read multiple times about planning making your life better and eventually Cal convinced me to give it a shot.

Does it actually work though?

To be completely honest, I’m still in doubt. We can agree on the fact that it can give a certain direction and keep you on the path, safe from running randomly towards every other butterfly with more interesting coloring. This will reap rewards inversely proportional with how disciplined you are as a person.

My goals for the previous three months (they might look too general, but I had a few bullet points on how to accomplish each) were:

  1. A deep dive in web security and DevSecOps, with the goal of conducting a workshop in my company - What I did: I read almost everything from OWASP (even fixed a dozen or so typos in their docs), I played with some intentionally vulnerable apps and had meetings with my teams at work where we planned for all the areas where security improvements could be made (most of them are live). The only thing I didn’t get to do was to hold the workshop, as it was postponed.
  2. Get better at Go - What I did: some of the challenges from codecrafters, learning along the way about the inner workings of git, DNS and bittorrent. In addition, I read the 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them book and wrote some production code in Go on a friend’s project (AWS CDK and Lambda).
  3. Switch to nixOS - a bit of a shame I can no longer do the Arch flex, but hey, I can still do the Neovim one (and this is here to stay)

So, did the action of writing these down three months ago influence the outcome? Again, I don’t have a clue. It’s easy to look back and think of what’s happened in a cause and effect manner, but my guess is that is an oversimplification of a complex system we can’t truly grasp.

What’s next?

As the following months appear to be more congested than usual, I’ll keep it simple. For the next four months, I will:

  • dive into awk, sed and jq. I have used (Ctrl-C V) them before but didn’t deeply understand what I was doing. As a person that mostly lives in the terminal and approves of the master your tools philosophy, more knowledge on these will have a noticeable impact in the way I solve problems. Plan is to start from RTFM, play a bit and perhaps write a post about them.
  • write a compiler in Go for a toy language or for some of Lua, as it is likely the next language I’m going to learn anyway
  • keep up with the habit of reading one technical book per month

In the end, it might not even matter having proof that doing mid-term planning helps. Since it takes so little time to do it, there’s virtually no downside and arguably a lot to gain.

I’ll see you in the next episode of the saga.