It was a wonderful experience for my very first learning project. It’s a very low bar for a lazy university student just trying scrap by with minimal effort, but still - what a productive month it has been. The goal was to take an intro to webdev course and finish the last two Circuit Analysis courses by MIT in edX. It sucks that I didn’t have enough time to finish the 3rd and final Circuit Analysis course. Now was it an unrealistic goal in the first place? Perhaps, maybe… yes. I had to make many compromises to finish in time such as not doing the webdev projects, and having to skip out on the optional work in the Circuit course.
I learnt quite a number of things while I did the course. Graphs and milestones definitely stick out the most. I wish I could make my own money somehow for a practical Beeminder account. I don’t even have a credit card. A google sheet however, made and tweaked (while procrastinating of course) to fit my needs, was more than enough to give a decent visual display of my progress.
As you can see, not one day goes by where I don’t fight with Resistance, especially the first 2 thirds of the graph. Later on I started adding grey blocks and red text to indicate I was off path. This was immensely helpful, but ultimately useless if I didn’t follow it. If I had made penalties per week for not achieving my milestone, I think it would have brought out a better chance of success. Alas, I didn’t do that and naively thought a penalty for not completing the project as a whole was enough. Beeminder definitely knows whats up in this regard.
Moving forward, for my next 30 day project - starting this May actually, I’ll take researching for a solid plan more seriously. For now though, I just want to unwind, relax, and reboot. A complete overhaul of my habits will be made to forget about the old environment I lost my April challenge in. I’ll be succeeding this time around.