Kasun Gamlath

Year 2025

Highlights

This year the most impactful thing (for me) is starting to play beach volleyball. It gave me an opportunity to start something from the beginning, work on it, and get decent at it. While some skills from beach tennis, like moving in the sand was transferable, it's a real struggle at the beginning.

Getting used to the ball, basics of serving, receiving, spiking and blocking had to be learned from the scratch. After 5 months (once per week) of play, I feel I'm decent at serving and receiving. But still struggling with spiking and blocking.

I noticed playing beach volleyball also made me more humble, and a better person in beach tennis court (now I'm more kind towards not so good beach tennis players, and not focused much on winning). I feel this will also make me a better photographer at beach volleyball because now I understand the game better.

Along with beach volleyball I kept playing beach tennis few times a week (to the point of having to wear a knee brace), and doing yoga once a week. I stopped running, mainly because I didn't have energy after a weekend play. There was a time I played during the whole weekend. While my average step count dropped to 13,059 per day (from 14,123 in 2024), resting heart rate improved to 57 (from 63 in 2024). Meaning the beach workouts improved the cardio fitness. I also tried to form a habit to go to gym regularly, but couldn't. Something to work on next year.

The office work was more or less same as previous year. I supported 4 sections per term on both terms. This year I supported new course, and assigned to handle a project on my own. I enjoyed working on the project, and learned quite a lot (Fair bit of it on how not to do it). In addition to supporting courses, I also helped to revamp a course by designing one week worth of content and reviewing the rest of content. My student feedback also kept improving.

For the masters - I completed 1 module, and started working on the capstone project (above plot is generated with projects code). The masters program is on track to finish by next April.

I restructured my budget to improve the spending. This has to be done because I keep overthinking when planning to buy something. Restructuring is done by making a category "other" and allocating 11% of total expenses to this monthly. All the expenses outside 1) eat-out 2) grocery 3) rent 4) utilities 5) transport comes from this portion. Also, the left-over balance from the previous months budget get added to this category. This money is to be spent guilt free.

I read 28 books this year. Photography was a bit slow until I bought the new camera near the end of year. I started collaborating (on Instagram) with the charity group which organizes the volleyball games, and it seemed to expand the reach of all my posts. And all my top viewed posts (first 4) are the collaborated posts.

I didn't get to travel as I planned at the beginning of the year because,

  1. Unplanned work during the summer break
  2. Bad weather in the winter break.

Another thing to work on next year.

Throughout the year my phone screen time was around 1h 30m. But I feel I started spending more time on laptop, consuming stuff (more than I should).

My average sleep duration is 7h 45m (up from 7h19m on 2024) with 11:30pm - 7:30am average bedtime.

Big Purchases