[7/3] 2026 Goal Progress

Health

The Big 3 are properly back

Made it to the gym again this week. Did the Big 3 once more.

Last time it was lighter weights for higher reps, but this week I pushed a bit harder. Bench press: straight into 50kg × 10 for 2 sets, then 60kg as far as I could go, and one last set back at 50kg.

Deadlifts started at 70kg, and with 80kg mixed in I did 4 sets of 10 total. I really nailed the knack for bracing my core. The load lands right in the middle of my back now, which is great.

Squats too — once I can brace properly, I actually feel the load. I've stopped compensating with my lower back. My whole body feels nicely muscled up every day.

Sleep and weight

Sleep averaged about 6.5 hours. I managed to stretch it about 10 minutes longer than last week.

My weight is creeping up little by little, and the muscle is coming on nicely. My daily rhythm is business as usual.

That said, my bedtime is honestly a mess. There's just too much on Netflix I want to watch — conspiracy-theory stuff, the Epstein documentary — so lately I've been going to bed around 1am. Still, I'm getting a solid 6–7 hours every night. Mornings just get a little less functional, that's all.

Still haven't quit smoking

On drinking: I don't really drink in the first place, so I've concluded there's nothing to "quit."

The problem is smoking. Still haven't managed it. That's the challenge. Quitting does make me gain a bit of weight, but I can cover that with training, so it's fine. I want to chip away at it bit by bit.

Work

The guy who pushes automation is doing automatable things every day

Work was steady, heads-down as usual. But precisely because things were slow, my brain kept going "wait, couldn't this be automated?"

Here I am, pushing automation as a matter of course every day, and yet I'm the one doing automatable tasks daily. So the move is to empty my head, actually pay attention to what I'm doing and my own actions, and take notes. Slowly jot down what specifically I did, and if I keep improving those notes, I can hand parts of it off to AI.

By zeroing out work with that lens, I think I contributed a lot to automating the level of tasks I've been doing all along. I definitely want to push this into the company too.

The new headache AI creates: ops and maintenance

On the flip side, there's a challenge I've been feeling lately.

When you use a lot of AI, your little ideas take shape instantly. And a lot of them are genuinely useful. But precisely because they're useful, you have to maintain them. And that carries cost.

The busier someone is, the more they have a habit of piling on context, and in the end those things get left to rot. And once they're neglected, even the gratitude they generated gets forgotten by the next day. So you have to keep providing. Normal, general service operations end up being necessary even for micro-projects. That's a bit of a challenge.

I know that if you give AI instructions, it'll move. But somehow you can't quite get yourself there. How to solve that "human bottleneck" — that's the interesting part, so I want to keep looking into it.

On using polite language with AI

This is probably common among people who use AI a ton, but AI does what you tell it, and even without spelling out the background, it picks up on your intent and interprets it for you. I get the feeling that, going forward, more and more people will start treating humans with that same energy.

To compress the context you feed in, you give terse instructions. It's not a big difference, but instead of "could you please handle this," you go "do it" — as input it's the same, and the AI behaves the same either way. And on top of that, over the course of a day, most people are talking to AI far more than to actual humans.

Then you carry that same brain into a meeting with a person. I don't think many people can really switch gears there. If you walk into a meeting right after snapping "hey, quit messing around, you idiot" at your AI, well, you're going to look at that person with the same head — "man, they're slow on the uptake" — and honestly, I feel like it makes your personality worse.

So here's what I do: I make a point of showing AI proper respect. I say "thank you," and I always speak politely. Since I use voice input, the moment abusive words like "do it" come out of my own mouth, that's already negative energy, isn't it? So I keep it proper, the same way I'd talk to a person — "Ah, thanks for that, but hey, what I actually want you to do is this" — treating it genuinely like a human subordinate. That's what I try to stay conscious of.

Money

Investing is recovering a bit

No big moves in saving or investing. That said, my US stock portfolio has recovered a little, it feels like. Once it turns positive again, I'm thinking I might just sell it off once more.

The small amount of Bitcoin I hold has ticked up a bit, too.

As for moving abroad, no real progress.

Duolingo, finally past the halfway mark of a year

My Duolingo streak hit 183 days as of today. Finally past the halfway point of a year, it feels like.

My resistance to English is slowly fading, too. Reading everything in English is a bit of a slog, so there's usually a summary up top, right? I skim that, and then I watch people actually using it on YouTube. That's roughly how I go about it.

Closing

I've got surgery coming up the week after next. So next week I want to make it a week of just continuing the things I can do. Go to the gym, actually write this blog, do my work steadily without wrecking my health. And I'd like to go out for a gimlet.

On the work side, I want to keep bringing the automation mindset into the company and level up to more upstream work.