I’ve been working on simplifying my life and improving on my mental state over the last year or so. I’m now at the stage where I think I’ve gotten into a decent routine with diet and excercise. My next step [now that the rigors of buying the house and planning the wedding are over] is to broaden my programming horizons by learning a radically different programming language from my comfort zone, Python and C# respectively, while not harming my personal life or work habits.
It turns out that I can add an hour or two to my day by (i) leaving home earlier and thus avoiding traffic (ii) reading blogs less (iii) unsubscribing from most of the Microsoft internal mailing lists I was on and (iv) scheduling meetings so they are clumped together instead of having three meetings with 30 minutes in between each one thus burning up an hour of my time mentally twiddling my thumbs and checking email.
So far I’ve installed IronPython and python-mode. I’ve also started reading Dive into Python and have gotten as far as Chapter 3. I’d just like to thank folks like Mark Pilgrim, Jim Hugunin and Barry Warsaw who are gifting programmers with such wonderful resources. Right now I’m still trying to wrap my mind around Everything is An Object
Everything in Python is an object, and almost everything has attributes and methods.
This is so important that I'm going to repeat it in case you missed it the first few times: everything in Python is an object. Strings are objects. Lists are objects. Functions are objects. Even modules are objects.
All functions have a built-in attribute __doc__, which returns the doc string defined in the function's source code. The sys module is an object which has (among other things) an attribute called path. And so forth.
So far this is already an enjoyable experience for someone who has mostly been programming in Javascript (not object oriented, dynamic but weakly typed) and C# (statically typed, no REPL) for the past few years.
Once I’m done reading Dive into Python, my plan is to integrate Sam Ruby’s MeMeme 2.0 into RSS Bandit. That way even though I’ve stopped reading blogs regularly, I don’t end up finding out days later that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 were released because it wasn’t on TechMeme or programming.reddit.
Optimizing your life by writing code is fun. I guess this is what they call life hacking. 
Now playing: The Clash - Rock The Casbah