I recently am working on a few complex articles, which are not ready to be published yet, not sure why but inspiration and time wise, it is complicated.
It was recently my blog 1st anniversary, and I realised I have only published about 10 % of what I wanted to do. ☺️ Here is a quick update.

Diet update, not so great to be honest

Bad, bad and bad

My objective on the first few months of the year was to finally relaunch the loss of weight after the difficult last two months of 2021. Between my birthday and the huge amount of food of Christmas in Zakopane, I did manage to not take more than 2/3 kilos on that dark times. I was looking at a small effort and a longer effort to finally break the plateau toward an overall minus 25 kilos since I started.
I didn’t not managed to reach this objective and it has been very rough on my self confidence. I never really managed to sleep well for the last few months, I spent more time than I wanted on work and less time that I wanted on studying. I was not happy during this Polish winter. I had seen this problem while I was living in Berlin, the winter is super hard, cold and dark, sun goes down at 3.30pm.
Instead I restarted to allow myself alcohol again and more sweets than I should have, and of course between the ups and down in my couple, at work, the tiredness and the stress from the War in Ukraine (which is right across the border..), I put on some weight. For the first time in a while, I was always accepting it, like oh it’s ok it’s just one kilos, two kilos etc. In the end I went exactly 7 kilos up from my floor weight of the beginning of November. BAD.

Of course it’s harder to be super diet-serious when you have the feeling that nuclear war will wipe us out the next week, which at some point was the feeling we had in Poland. But the influence this weight gain had on my self confidence is definitely a bad hit.
I stupidly tried to go to Keto + intermittent fasting for three weeks following Dr. Berg on YouTube thinking I could go straight into it and that I would be happy. WRONG.
The biggest problem is right under my eyes for a few months now, bad sleep, very bad sleep, I often don’t sleep before 4/5am and wake up at 8/9, which is roughly 4/5 hours of sleep per night, sometimes less.

How to sleep better ?

So how do we sleep better, well, if you had asked me a few years ago, I was quite of an insomniac I would have not know and answered, take a Xanax or something ? Well I tried and it’s bad, it’s bad because it’s not real sleep, you have headaches the following day and overall you feel bad. IMO, drugs should be only for emergencies, like if you don’t sleep at all a few nights in a row.

A bit less screens too in the evening, or at least TV screen only, not close to face OLED panels. Regarding OLED panels, I noticed one thing, I switched to an iPhone 13 mini in November, and since that exact month, my sleep has been bad… Is there a relationship between what people call PWM (◊pulse width-modulation) or screen flickering and bad sleep ? Probably, is it the only reason, probably not. Before that I was using an iPhone SE with a standard LCD panel.

It’s quite difficult in 2022 to not let yourself being captivated by your phone, especially when you want to have a little time after work, scrolling without thinking. I was thinking about it today, and chose to remove from my home-screen these infinity scrolling apps. What do we gain at infinity scrolling, what do we gain at looking at others filming their life ? Nothing, ok sometimes it’s funny but in the vast majority it is just a waist of time, and OMFG the times flies when you infinity scroll.

I am right now trying to go back to lighter dinners on the evening, I suppressed alcohol and I am working on using less screens and reading all the books I never finished. I will tell you how it worked out. 😇

2022 holiday season is coming

Holiday season is coming, everyone seems to be super excited about it, probably because of the last two years of Covid.
For the first time, the situation seems to be better in Europe and USA than the rest of the world. I am sure you have heard about the many difficulties travellers will face this summer because of the workers shortage in tourism.
The industry holds a fair share of responsability in this situation, they got rid asap of their staff when covid started, and given the little social protection those workers had, they had to find ways to survive and change careers.
Now that the situation is back to normal, tourism industry is crying for help, still proposing the shitty seasonal contracts they were always offering.

Flights prices have shy rocketed in Europe, and I can only pray that our tickets won’t be cancelled the last minute by EasyJet. It was the only flight available to go to Corsica for the weekend, and it would ruined everything. By the way if you travel in Europe, it’s sometimes worth to use national carriers because they must find you another way if the cancel the flight, not like low cost which will even not refund you most of the time…

Still freelancing and not ready to give up my freedom

I have had a amazing first half of the year working full time for a client in France. I discovered a company who care about their employees and the work- life balance, like no other before. Fun fact, an ex colleague of mine, from the time I was working in Germany has joined them recently as well. I feel almost jealous. 😅

It’s always difficult when you are having a blast on a mission to jump to another. I almost had the fear of change and I was not ready for a new environment of work. After a first difficult week, I realized I needed to adapt to a new environment and in the end I am feeling great too.

I also got a few fixed contract offers, but declined each time even though the salary was acceptable for Paris even. I just can’t handle yet coming back to a corporate office environment. I am sure it would go a lot better than ever before but I don’t think it is yet the time to go back.

What’s next & why isn’t it always amazing ?

I had a very precise target last year, it was to make sure I had the skills for a completely remote style of working, tech oriented. I would say I have a very logical approach to work, in the way that I will make sure to have all the skills and work towards being excellent in a field to be able to work everyday and feel at ease. I wouldn’t say I am more interested in a specific field, but more that I am following the trend in order to insure an income and a minimum of interest in my day to day jobs. I would never join a company or sign a contract for a product I don’t like, or I don’t believe in.

This question came back to my mind recently, since my last client is working on a product where I have only seen failure in the past. I believe more into their new BNPL (buy now pay later) products and payment business than the rest of the product. Sure Klarna which was a major actor of this business recently had to fire many employees, but I think BNPL is still a good business to go into in 2022. Not longer ago than last week Apple announced a payment facility product themselves, but this will probably only deploy in the US for now.

We can not always do what we really want even as Freelancers, some clients are more difficult that others, and some missions are not as great as others. I think it’s still important to have versatility in the missions.

Work is like relationships, there are ups and downs, and crisis are good because with it comes experience. I see difficulties as challenges, arguments are healthy, like my counsellor would say “It’s when we share nothing that there is something to say, reality is often unpleasant”.