Week-in-Review

Posted: February 22, 2026

Recurring commitments

Physical and Mental Health

Item	Completed?
Exercise x3/week; 30+ minutes.	✅

Research

Item	Completed?
x6 deep work sessions	❌
x1 instructive math/AI post/week	❌

• We were just one day shy of completing our deep work goals for this week. Thanks to some bespoke productivity software we recently developed, motivation and awareness of this aim were vastly improved. One area for improvement, however, lies in creating a better definition of what actually qualifies as a “session”; we will go ahead and make this an action item.

Relationships

Item	Completed?
Contact 2+ friends/day; plan 1+ excursion/month.	✅
Contact 2+ family members/day.	✅

• Very happy to report that we went from 0/2 last week to 2/2 social goals completed this week! Once again, having visual cues and persistent reminders of salient tasks is a game changer. If we hit these targets next week, we can consider amending the personal constitution to raise the difficulty level in this category.

Cultural participation

Item	Completed?
Visit 1+ new location in Austin.	❌

• And…this one totally slipped through the cracks. While we included cultural participation items in the Apple reminders app, notifications are often folded/batched together in a way that some entries are obscured. The easiest solution here is to add this goal to the weekly goals desktop app. That way, anytime we check off a completed, unrelated item, we’ll have a visual reminder to check out a new location in town during the week.

Service

Item	Completed?
Volunteer x1/month	✅

Previous action items

• 1. Call X; make appointment or plan a contingency as needed
• 2. Call Y; call Z to follow-up
• 3. Complete 80%+ of weekly goals
• 4. [EOD MON] Create a simple persistent goals widget for Mac; matrix of goals that a user checks off daily; post proof of working component to blog.

• 5. Go to \(\alpha\) on Friday night

Work completed

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Date	DOTW	Work Completed
02-15-26	Sunday	[RSR] PIML-QPE [LOG] MLP blog post [LOG] WIR
02-16-26	Monday	[RSR] PIML-QPE [LOG] Some correspondence
02-17-26	Tuesday	[RSR] PIML-QPE
02-18-26	Wednesday	[RSR] PIML-QPE
02-19-26	Thursday	[RSR] PIML-QPE
02-20-26	Friday	[RSR] PIML-QPE [LOG] Adulting
02-21-26	Saturday	[RSR] PIML-QPE [LOG] Travel logistics [LOG] Volunteering [LOG] Backpropagation blog post

Reflections

All in all, we made some pretty huge strides this week! Particularly with respect to daily goals, using some nifty swift widgets we were able to quantify progress and improve motivation across many different task-domains. Still, we were far from perfect. Goals for which we are lacking regular visual reminders or pre-existing habits tended to fall by the wayside. Let’s comb through this past week’s failures, starting with deep work.

1. Complete (x6) deep work sessions/week.
   • Currently, we are lacking a precise definition of what deep work even means. Once we arrive at a better idea of what a “session” is, we will also need to build out the software to keep us on track.
2. Upload (x1) AI/math blog post/week.
   • Two weeks ago we started work on our blog post on Friday and barely finished on Sunday. This past week, we began a draft on Saturday. Surprise, surprise…we didn’t finish on time. The good news is that simple arithmetic suggests that we can simply get going on Thursday and finish with time to spare. This seems like a reasonable theory at least, and as a result, we’ll set a weekly action item to that effect.
3. Visit 1+ new location in Austin/week.
   • As mentioned above, we are going to add this goal to our newly minted daily goal widget. Persistent visual reminders have worked wonders for us so far. If we still do not complete this task after next week, more dramatic interventions may be needed.
4. Go to \(\alpha\) on Friday night
   • Unlike (3) we simply avoided going to \(\alpha\) because it would be a new/slightly uncomfortable experience (i.e., this was a failure of avoidance). One thing we can try is to visit this location earlier in the week, for example, no later than Wednesday. This small act may reduce the cognitive friction required to attend \(\alpha\) later in the week.

Action items

• 1. [MON] Arrive at a precise definition of a “deep work session”; modify corresponding software; upload to blog.
  • We will experiment with a “living WIR” next week; rather than fill all this stuff out on a Sunday night we will append to the WIR day-by-day.
• 2. [MON] Complete back-propagation post; upload to website.
• 3. [TUE] Create staggered notifications for tasks like visit 1+ location; post to blog.
• 4. [WED] Visit (just make a quick drive past) \(\alpha\).
• 5. [THU] Begin work on next week’s math/AI post.
• 6. [SUN] Complete 8+ page manuscript for PIML-QPE (figures may be blank but must be CAPTIONED); post proof to blog.

Until next week 👋