Time tracking is a popular productivity technique. Many people swear by it as the most effective intentionality tool. However, it never worked for me. It made things worse. Here, I explain the three reasons why it failed me.

Notwithstanding the Sud-European heatwave, I survived.

This is already a good result for July, per se. Hailstorms and high-speed winds scourged Northern Italy, while forest fires tormented Southern Italy. I, in the middle, only had to endure 45°C. If you look at this in perspective, it is not so bad.

However, surviving was not enough. While the world slowed down, burdened by the sluggish progression of an overheated July, I felt more in tune with myself.

Now that Arc is available without an invitation, many people will try it for the first time. Unfortunately, while I think it is a good browser, I still don’t trust it.

I am writing a series of posts about the development of a new blog theme. In this first post, I talk about the history of web design (in my experience) and the new best thing in town: CSS Grid.

June was fine. I wish I could express more positive sentiments, but that’s how I feel. It was, however, a big step forward compared to May. Not because I resolved anything (on the contrary, my frustrations grew stronger) but rather because I put a certain emotional scar tissue around my problems so that they interfere less with my intentions.

June was also the month in which I was supposed to get the new car I ordered back in January. But no. No luck. I must continue with my old garbage-car for a bit (if she doesn’t fail me first).

In the previous issue of the Changelog, I mentioned that May is my apathy month: a time when my motivation plummets, my mood darkens, and I become more introverted than usual.

Unfortunately, I was right. Over the past 30 days, I have felt myself slowly sliding to the bottom of my emotional pit. Moreover, my “preventive care trip” to Ferrara got canceled due to the extensive and destructive floods in the region, so I had no other option but to accept the sliding.

I was recently faced with the perplexing problem of making Spring and MongoDB serialize/deserialize a polymorphic class. Initially, it seemed like a simple task, but it proved to be more complicated than anticipated. Allow me to share my solution.

I stumbled upon an old screenshot of my favorite piece of software as a kid: Lotus Organizer. Therefore, I decided to share some old memories.

They say that to err is human, but to persist is diabolical. If that’s the case, then I must be the devil himself.

April has been grossly underwhelming; I had little motivation, energy, and found myself in a persistent state of low-level anxiety.

Unfortunately, this has dramatically impacted my ability to mentally organize my things. For example, I usually follow a seasonal schedule where I reevaluate the previous three months at the end of each quarter to see what worked and what didn’t, and plan for the next quarter. It’s kinda like having a “new year” every 12 weeks.

This damn month. It went fast. It went weird. It went backward but also kinda forward. So it went technically sideways, in the Cambridge Dictionary sense of “something went wrong or didn’t go as planned,” but also in the more precise feeling that I don’t know if I made any progress on anything or not.

With a quick statistical exploration of my diary, “kitchen” was the third most used word, followed only by “things” and “do.” I don’t need GPT-4. Even this stupidly simple stat nails the two main issues this month: finding it very hard to do anything and fighting with my damn kitchen.