branches

Maybe it's time to come back? ...

Preface: I hate to finish off the #100days challenge with a note of melancholy (pun intended) but this is, at its heart, a log of my thoughts. And this is how I'm feeling right now. Sometimes I just have to say that it'll be better tomorrow. Especially at nighttime, and especially when I am burned out. This is one of those nights. This always happens at the end of a long grind. (I think I'm much more suited to a quarter system, i.e. schedule with fall, winter, and spring courses, as well as a...

It's been a third of a year. Yet I don't really remember it. There's a delicate balance to be achieved between keeping myself sane with routines and making memories and remembering my own life. Too much routine, and time becomes a blur; too little and I become depressed. I am, after all, a creature of habit. The problem is that my life is passing me by, and I don't feel like I have anything to show for it. I guess that's why I take on so many projects and responsibilities - if I'm going to be i...

In the long run, I'm thinking that I care more about my own happiness than anything else. Having fun, hanging out with friends, focusing on myself. I care about knowledge, not because of some mysterious drive, but because it makes me happy to understand the world better. I try to socialize a lot, not because it makes me more intelligent, but because it makes me happy to be around others. I take walks in nature, usually, not because they make my focus deeper, but because the peace makes me happy...

I need to spend more time on myself. I think that's the only way I can make it through when I feel exhausted like I do right now. Social interaction is my fuel, I guess. -branches ...

I always hate waking up early the night before, since I want to stay up late. Once I'm up, though, I'm happy, and that carries on throughout the day. It is the opposite with waking up late; I'm happy at night, and then unhappy when I get up. There's got to be a happy medium, but I'm still trying to identify it. -branches ...

My feelings about my life vary during the day. In the mornings, I don't feel like doing anything; over lunch, I'm excited; in the evening, I'm content, and at night, I'm unhappy again. This is a cycle that I have to keep in mind whenever I want to complain about having too much to do, but it's also making it difficult for me to identify whether I am burned out or just suffering from nighttime blues. Regardless, I don't feel like doing anything most of the time. -branches ...

I got injured this week, and it's forcing me to learn to relax and slow down. I'm off of most of my responsibilities, and I've had to start stretching, rolling it out, etc. I've still gone to a few practices, just to show I'm committed, but I'm off my normal schedule in general But this has actually been a blessing in disguise. Having to stop using my lower body has meant I do setter exercises during volleyball practice; now I've been offered the position of setter on my volleyball team. Keepi...

I've been tracking my time for two weeks now, and I'm happy about it. Being able to see (semi-accurate) quantifications of how I actually spend my time is great! It's also very useful for me to think about how I could improve my habits. Changing my time habits is something that I think this will help a lot with. Being able to look and see that, 'well, over the past 14 days, I have racked up 13 hours of time spent in what I would call a 'wasted' way, such as looking at trends on twitter' is hop...

It frustrates me that my last week(ish) in the #100days challenge is coming at a bad time in terms of motivation for me. I have a break coming up, and 'm burning out on, well, doing things. #100days is fun stuff for me, but I'm finding myself without the motivation to actually get up and get it done. I'm constantly having to make up days. Maybe with habits it's better to let missed time go, right? I'm trying to minimize friction, and the knowledge that it will be a lot of work once I start wil...

Exactly what the title said. I had a very minimalist, pure gray-and-white phone setup for a few weeks. It was nice initially, but eventually made me want to stop using my phone. I've realized that, while useful in a lot of cases - such as a room organization philosophy - minimalism is actually not very friendly. I wouldn't want to spend my life in a modern, minimalist house, nor would I really want to use an app that was pure minimalism. I guess this is a good design philosophy: minimal doesn't...

I've got stuff constantly on my schedule, things that need to be completed, but none of it really feels fulfilling to me. I don't know why I do it - I guess it's fun - but all this stuff is just exhausting. I feel like I don't have any time to think - everything's just happening to me, and I'm just going along with it. -branches ...

It's a simple, obvious thing, but I find myself not doing it, a lot: setting a goal for what I want to get done before I start doing. For example, trying to figure out a notes system. Rather than setting out the things that I want the system to do, and then either researching or building my own system, I have just read and read and read about different systems, none of which are particularly helpful when I don't know what I'm trying to do with the system. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm ...

I've been feeling a lot more anger than normal this week. My expectations of the world - that things shouldn't suck - obviously show my immaturity, and these expectations are causing me problems, I guess. Everything just seems to be going so fucking wrong. Schedules aren't matching up, I'm having to make decisions I don't want to make, I'm being bogged down by meaningless bullshit, I'm not getting what I expected out of my school. Two of my classes are absolute shit, and every single thing the ...

I'm running out of steam in these last few days of daily writing. I'm still having thoughts, coming up with ideas in the same way - what's changed is the amount of time I have to write. I've had to make up for missed days twice just this week; though this is probably an unnaturally difficult week for me, I still don't feel like things are where they should be. I know it sounds stupid, but needing to add 15 minutes to the end of my night is sometimes just too much. This is something that I've don...

I've started giving myself incentives to get myself to do things I don't want to do, and as it turns out it's really effective! Each night I give myself some time to watch YouTube videos while I get ready for bed. It makes me excited to go to bed, and it makes me happy and helps me release the stress of the day. I've been in bed before 11 for the past three nights, once even before 10:30 because of it. That's something that was previously an extremely rare occurance! I've also scheduled in so...

Last week, though it was similar in schedule to pretty much every other routine week I've had, was a lot more fun than others. It's because I had something coming up to look forward to. I went up to the mountains for the weekend and skiied(if that's how you spell it) for a total of 13 hours! During the whole week leading up to the event, I was excited, which made my week a lot better. I think if I apply that philosophy of giving myself things to look forward to elsewhere, I can get significant q...

I can't decide the purpose of books in my world. Do I read for learning only? Do I read for enjoyment? These questions will dictate the way that I treat reading. Taking notes slows me down significantly; if I'm reading for efficiency, that's bad and I need to improve my system, but if I'm reading for learning and enjoyment, it doesn't really matter that I go slowly. The main problem with trying to maximise for enjoyment and learning is that I run out of 'book inertia' - I get tired of reading t...

A teacher once posed the question, "is it your actions or your thoughts that dictate who you are?" I would immediately respond with an emphatic "thoughts!", envisioning a situation in which a 'good' person is forced - literally forced - to do bad things. Obviously the answer is more complex than that, but it took me a long time to realize that and I'm sure there are many things I'll continue to discover. He wouldn't pose a question that has an obvious answer; it's not fun that way. Thoughts ...

After listening to a few podcasts, I've been turned onto the idea of taking notes during conversations - aka "quick jots." (that's a name I've just invented because it sounds fun and fits the idea.) I wouldn't be taking notes during, well, normal conversations, since that would be impractical and wouldn't have a lot of use; rather, I'd be jotting things down during more 'intellectual' conversations. Maybe I could imagine it as a sort of meeting notes-type thing, though it would definitely be a ...

It is a habit of mine to compare myself with others. It is an especially unfortunate one when I combine it with my ambition. I really, really like being good at things. I am a generalist by nature, and I strive for high-quality results in everything I do; writing, music, math, standardized tests, sports, and on, and on. And I am pretty good at most of them, I'd say - the problem comes along when others are better than me at those things. I feel simultaneously secure and fragile in my ego. On...

My day themes for now are: Sunday: Building day (my yearly theme is building) Monday: Math day Tuesday: ??? Wednesday: Family day (Friendsday?) (spending quality time with family) Thursday: ??? Friday: Projects Day (catching up on projects) Saturday: Reflection + Planning day (looking forwards and backwards, also quantified self, check-in on projects) I'm still working on Tuesday and Thursday. I'm pretty busy those days so I don't know if I need to do them. Honestly not sure what I'm doi...

I'm going to give a TEDx Talk! I'm going to change the content of and rewrite my let's change how we think about teaching ""essay" from two months ago. Luckily the talk that I give has to be short, so I can focus on the content rather than the form that it comes in. -branches ...

A friend and I set up a mediaWiki instance on his server today. We're calling it a 'collaborative thinking space': a place for info, thoughts, concepts, and facts we talk about during our conversations. We don't have any rules on it yet - we don't think we'll need them - so it'll be interesting to see where this goes. Will a uniform format emerge? Will we make an index? How will we approach the writing? Will connections be like a decentralized network or a distributed one? I'm also generally ex...

I'm thinking 'year of building'. I feel like I have a chance this year to create frameworks and bases for my future life, since I'm still half-quarantined and have some spare time on my hands. "building" things, like skills, habits, techniques, and even relationships I think is a good focus. Once I have this base for myself, I'll be able to focus on the things that matter, not the things that I don't want to focus on. *(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I don't blame you. Here's an e...

Humans really like categorization. I see it everywhere in my life, on such a scale that it's practically unnoticeable. And for good reason, too: humans need it to process the world in all of its complexity. The sheer volume of information in the form of sensory input along with thoughts swirling around our conscious and unconscious minds makes it so that we are forced to heavily compartamentalize and categorization; without doing these things, it would be impossible to focus on any one thing at ...

TL;DR I sectioned off different parts of my room in order to increase focus and help organization. I put masking tape all over my room today. "Why?" is a reasonable question to ask, especially when I deliberately give no context for a lackluster comedic effect. The reasoning comes from various different sources: "Spaceship You" by video creator and podcaster CGP Grey, Deep Work by Cal Newport, some articles I read online, the Cortex Podcast (also from CGP Grey), and also my own mind... but ba...

I'm not religious in the way that the term is normally used; I don't follow any mainstream religion, dedicate myself to some higher entity or so on. (this one may have inferred from reading past posts.) I've seen, however, the way that things that wouldn't be necessarily defined as religion can easily take on the role of one. Take, for example, conspiracy theoricists: some people are willing to commit insane acts (such as bring a rifle to a pizzaria thinking that there is child trafficking in th...

(Uh oh, [potential identifier]!) One thing that I've realized in my ever-continuing quest for knowledge is that there are many different types of information, some that I want to keep, some that should be discarded. For example, most news is not stuff that I want to keep tucked away for future use, whereas understanding I gain from reading books is. Also, I've discovered that talking to people about my ideas forces me to develop them, as does writing them down. This is not a very unique discov...

(Here's that post I've talked about for 60 days. A bit anticlimactic, no?) To be honest, I'm not 100% sure. I've liked the single-tab feel, but it's a little bit annoying. It has multiple UX improvements (e.g. more useful share options, search bar improvements) but also some UI and customizability things that I'm not that happy about. It may just be that I'm so used to Safari I don't like anything else. Focus feels, well, more focused, but it has multiple limitations that frustrate me ever-...