[10/9] 2026 Goal Progress

The usual round of writing up progress on the goals I declared. This week my therapist told me, point blank, to cut the cigarettes down.

Health

No home training, so no gym either

I ended up not doing any home training this week. I did stretch.

The home training is the prep work for going to the gym, so with that not happening, the gym didn't happen either.

I did at least walk every day, more or less.

And my meals have been decent too — nothing weird going in. I space out a little less than I did.

Waking up at night to pee, like an old man

Sleep was fairly long, I think. At least 7 hours a night, and no staying up late.

The thing is, I woke up needing the bathroom in the middle of the night about twice this week — very old-man behavior. Lesson: go before bed.

Quitting smoking: my therapist warned me about chronic vocal cord damage

The smoking isn't going well.

I brought it up with my therapist, and he said if I don't seriously cut the count down, I could end up losing my voice, or doing chronic damage to my vocal cords — so I really need to make a serious effort to smoke less.

So I want to get deliberate about cutting the count and the frequency.

The problem is the time-lock box I bought has fallen out of use. So the plan is to put it somewhere visible and keep the IQOS unit and the cartridges in it at all times. Starting today.

Work

Lots of implementation tasks, but AI let me run them in parallel

There were a lot of implementation tasks this week, but using AI I could push them forward in parallel, fast.

The things I had to actually think about, the sudden inbound questions and inquiries — I ran even those through AI in parallel, and got through a serious volume. That felt good.

The level of everyone internally has gone way up

The mindset and the behavior of people here has leveled up a lot.

We've got an engineer building his own double from scratch, and a PM taking the retrospective frameworks floating around out there — project retrospective frameworks — rolling them out as an internal product and getting them to a genuinely high-quality state.

A lot of people are growing, and it's turned into a really good organization.

AI employees are at the point where I can bring people in

I've got several AI employees going, and the internal rollout is moving, with the next step and the step after that coming into view.

So bringing people in gradually and building something big looks doable.

Automation is moving too. The stuff where a human doesn't really need to be involved is mostly automated away. There's a bit left, but it's the kind of thing that fires once a month or once every six months.

Leaving only the places where a human absolutely has to make the decision, and automating everything else — that state is coming together, in small steps.

The problem: the bottleneck got better in quality, but there's a lot of it

The thing giving me trouble is still the human bottleneck.

Though what's left is only the parts where the human bottleneck is actually necessary. The quality of the bottleneck has gone up, which I think is a good thing as an end state. No real problem with it.

That said, the volume is a lot, and that part I do feel as a problem.

The problem: locking down security

The other one is security.

There's terrifying news coming out basically every day, so I need to take inventory of what security looks like if we're the ones doing it, and work through the defenses one by one, carefully.

We've already done a fair amount, but if you dig, hackers will find genuinely tiny holes, so proper lockdown is something I have to get to.

What's actually bugging me: I smoke while waiting on the AI

And the real problem is I smoke during the AI's wait time.

If I were firing off instructions constantly I probably wouldn't, but clattering away nonstop is tiring too.

Anyway — this is just an excuse.

Money

Figuring out where the profit-taking money goes next

I'm reconsidering where to put the money from the profit-taking I did recently.

There's one more position that's up a decent amount, so I've got a sell order in and I'm waiting on it.

The situation isn't great, so it might be a cancel-the-order-for-now kind of thing. At least things are moving.

Savings, income, the bot

Nothing new on savings, nothing new on income.

The crypto trading bot is still losing, slowly.

Duolingo at 281 days

Duolingo is at 281 days.

No plans to move abroad right now.

Other

3D-printed a Halloween mask

Halloween is coming up, so I'd been making a mask of a character my kid likes out of cardboard.

Then I thought, couldn't I just 3D print this? — tried it, and the quality came out pretty good. Painting it and adding color over the weekend sounds like fun.

And my kid was genuinely thrilled, so I hope that's the kind of thing that leaves a good mark on his life.

Wrapping up

Next week, above all, I want to actually do the strength training at home.

I also want to make something with the 3D printer, and since work should settle down, take another look at things from a higher vantage point.

And there's the family app I've been building. I want to get it to a state where it's genuinely useful for my own household first.