Popular culture doesn’t seem to value hard work and grit: what’s glamorized is either effortless excellence (really, just the image of effortless excellence—ask these paragons and you’ll find all of them put in the work) and intentional ineptitude. Favoring effortless excellence isn’t necessarily too bad, though if you ask and get a straight answer out of these paragons, you’ll find that all of them have put in the work.

I’m getting in right at the buzzer here, so no thoughts about the month.

Goal Tracking

• 🟢 Get 1% faster. I hit PRs in both of my time trials! I managed 10.73 for the 100m and 21.85 for the 200m. I’m so close to hitting my goal of being 1% faster (10.69 in the 100m and 21.73 in the 200m), and it’s still pretty early in the year.
• 🟢 50% less discretionary spending. My March discretionary spending was 87% lower than my average monthly spend in 2020. Looking good!
• 🔴One hour of solitary free time a day. I did manage my sub-goal from last month of keeping track of my free time. Unfortunately, outside of weekends, I’ve managed a single hour of free time (maybe two, if you include the hour I’m writing this post in).
• 🟢 Twice-weekly live conversations with friends. 4/4 again! I remain surprised at how this goal has gone—maybe I should have been more ambitious.

I think I’m a fairly productive person—I thought it’d be interesting to categorize some of my work-style habits as following the conventional wisdom around productivity or not.

At Ladder, our approach to observability and monitoring has matured a lot over the three years I’ve been part of the team. One distinction that we’ve started to draw is the difference between infrastructure and business monitoring. To explore that distinction and how a company’s monitoring systems might evolve over time, let’s consider the hypothetical company Stairway, a hot new insurtech focusing on longevity insurance.

I’ve competed in track events since 2006, and I thought it’d be fun to look back and see how I’ve progressed since then. All times are FAT unless otherwise noted.