Week 05, 2026

Reading & Listening

Nello Biedermann - Lazar (continued) Still reading Lazar, and it continues to hold my attention. As I mentioned in Week 04, Biedermann’s modern voice applied to a historical setting creates something genuinely compelling. Unfortunately, this week left little time for reading, so progress was slow.

Ali Abdaal - Feel-Good Productivity (Audiobook) Listened to this during a longer car trip. Abdaal’s core idea is that productivity should be driven by positive energy rather than discipline and guilt. One concept that stuck with me: energy vampires, people, habits, or commitments that drain your energy without giving anything back. Identifying and eliminating these is a surprisingly practical framework.

That said, I’m noticing a pattern with audiobooks on long drives: the ideas feel compelling in the moment, but retention is low. With Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity in Week 02, I had a focused listening session and came away with clear takeaways. This time, the content washed over me more than it sank in. I think Feel-Good Productivity deserves a proper read, sitting down with the book, taking notes. The difference between passive and active consumption matters.

Thoughts

January Retrospective: The Plan vs. Reality

Looking back at January, my first instinct is that I didn’t accomplish what I set out to do. I had two unread books sitting on the shelf that I planned to finish. I wanted to develop several blog post ideas. Neither happened as planned.

But then I look at what actually happened: I read and listened to more books than expected, just different ones. I started rewriting my ESP32-HUB75 project in C++, a decision that grew naturally from the ESP-IDF discovery in Week 04. The blog post ideas didn’t materialize, but this journal became a consistent habit instead.

This connects to something Newport wrote about in Slow Productivity: working at a natural pace means accepting that your trajectory won’t always match your plan. And it echoes the “Done > Perfect” principle from Week 01. Shipping something, even if it’s not what you originally planned, beats a perfect plan that never executes.

The takeaway: plan loosely, react flexibly. The most interesting things I worked on this month weren’t on any list. They emerged from curiosity and opportunity. Maybe that’s the better planning strategy: create conditions for interesting work to happen, rather than prescribing exactly what that work should be.