branches

I'm going through my extensive list of playlists (a total of 127 playlists are saved in my account, the vast majority of them created and curated by myself) and I'm reflecting on the idea of letting go. I still have my first real playlist. I can see the dates that I added songs, and they stretch all the way back to October of 2019. One thing that I have noticed is that music, more than almost anything else, invokes my memories extremely well. I have a few playlists that I listened to with my o...

This is long overdue, but I can't go back in time to do this. Better do it now. Nice blog ;) Your writing is not shit, it's often profound and extremely enjoyable to read. Thank you! Small guestbook responses like these are extremely encouraging - very high ROI*. I stumbled across your blog as I pressed the listed link after submitting number 20 odd of my hundred. I read the last post of the person on the list who posted just before me. I too love the anonymity - I wonder if one day I w...

I feel like I am drifting. My life is spiralling through space-time, back and fourth through externally-induced habits, routines, decisions, successes, failues, tasks. Everything is a task. I've divided everything into meaningless little bits of dust that come together to form a whole that is, unfortunately, the sum of its parts. Everything is a task for me to complete, even things that I've taken on as 'fun side projects'. Life has four parts: completing these tasks, consuming things that I won...

After some soul-searching, I've come to two difficult conclusions. I want to be religious It would be very difficult for me to successfully convert I'm not sure if this is a very common mentality. I could go on and on about my personal reasons for 1, but I won't right now simply because I don't want to give an incomplete explanation. 2 is what I'm more concerned with, and it has to do with the ideas of conviction and faith. As anyone who has observed any mainstream religion has seen, convic...

Stupid activities will expand to waste as much time as possible if you let them. Don't let them. Spend your time on things that you want to spend your time on, after you finish the stupid shit in as little time as possible. Work with urgency. It is the little things that slip through the cracks that are dragging you down. If you have to call someone, set a time for it. If you have to clean, set an alarm. If you need to do laundry, do it before you start your work. Don't let your bad prioritizat...

I was highly productive but highly inefficient today. I spent pretty much six hours working and got a lot done - just not six hours' worth. I'm going to set intentions and focus timers, (after which I will take breaks) from now on, see if that increases my productivity. I should be spending a lot less time on stuff than I am right now. -branches ...

When I compare myself to others people (which I inevitably do), one common difference I've noticed between myself and them has been practiced skills. A lot of my friends, for example, have incredible art or chess skills. As I've written about before, learning these skills is mostly structured practice; while I do play music and sports, those two are my only high-practice skills, and both of those things don't really feel like 'practice' per se - I passed the point after which mundane practice t...

Tonight, I went for a one-and-a-half-hour walk. I focused on one thing: setting goals for the month of February. It was extremely successful! More on this in the future, there are a few goal-setting tricks that I discovered as I thought to myself. -branches ...

I read for two reasons: Enjoyment Learning I often feel like note-taking gets in the way of my reading. I need to maximize reading's two values simultaneously, not sacrifice one for the other. Today, I spent about half an hour reading an article from Foreign Affairs on the ongoing and future US/China "cold war." The reason it took me this long is that I was highlighting and annotating while I read - but more importantly, I spent a while after I read the article just summarizing the three i...

(short post tonight; I have two exams tomorrow and need to get to bed.) I had a conversation with my father tonight about how best to improve the world if you are in a position of wealth. An idea that I stumbled upon that I find interesting is that good compounds like interest - good done now will usually continue to ripple through time and cause more good to happen in the future, and those ripples increase based on the scale of the good. For example, building roads in underprivileged communit...

I am working hard, constantly, but getting nowhere. Despite my organizational efforts, my task management and knowledge management systems (among many others) have made no progress. I have poured hours and hours into research, trying new tools, downloading apps, listening to podcasts, and I am still working in the same disorganized way that I used to. My post from two days ago, Zettelkasten - 50 is an example of this. I have begun numerous projects upon which I have made little progress. I hate ...

As I enter the second half of my #100days challenge, I wanted to write a reflection on what I wrote back at Listed - 0. I am incredibly happy that I have gone with a pseudonymous blog over one connected to my real-life identity. I feel empowered, freed from self-censorship - and I don't even post anything personal here. The words that I wrote in my first post here sum it up: Essentially, I'm here because I need a place where I can write without pressure, constraint, or expectation. Pseudo...

I've been trying to learn the Zettelkasten note-taking system on and off for about a year now. Over the past few days, I've been reading the book How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens, and I keep getting 'insight' and 'explanation' but no examples of how to actually use the system. It is the same with most online tutorials; they love to give me info about the system but not tell me how to use it. One day, I swear. One day. (Halfway through the challenge!) -branches ...

I feel like there are so many systems with fundamentally bad basic incentives for the actors within the system, yet people blame surface-level problems for the results of these deep-rooted problems. U.S. Politics: Politicians' incentives push them to make them decisions get (re)elected and stay in office, not to run the country well, make compromises, or represent the will of the people. This is the problem with almost any democratic system, but it's still the root cause of a lot of the U.S.'s...

i’ve now written multiple drafts and one full, published post entirely using dictation software rather than typing (albeit with some edits to fix misinterpretation). It took me 20 minutes to write my previous post using only voice type, and that was without having my ideas fleshed out before hand. I’m not sure whether I type as quickly as I speak, but it is definitely nice being able to focus on my thoughts without having a clicking sound going on behind me. whether I will use this long-term r...

Shame and embarrassment, an instinct to not want to go against the grain… if I think about it, they are more of an enemy than a friend. Theoretically, their development makes sense. Collective thinking is one of humanity's important traits; instinctively following the path of others, the path of the pack, should put decisions in the hands of leaders and/or The judgment of the group as a whole. Rather than doing that, however, these traits seem to simply apply social pressure on individuals not ...

Rather than write some thoughts down, I want to get some work done on my reorganization. Using the meta-questions from #45, I'm going to start putting things into action. (I'm writing in some form, so I'd say it counts toward #100days.) Sorry if it's boring. How will I ___ effectively? Decide what tasks to do I'm going to have a running list, an inbox of sorts, which stores every single assignment, step in a project, etc. - must be concrete, quantifiable achievements in order to be added, o...

I'm really having trouble prioritizing my personal projects. I work hard on my schoolwork, but then I don't feel like doing anything other than lying down and doing nothing. I don't know when I'm supposed to fit these things, but I guess I'll figure it out sometime. Dedicated, scheduled time seems to be the answer. ...

Maybe getting things organized how I want them is simply a matter of asking and answering the right questions. Complex systems evolve from simple ones that work, and what's simpler than answering a question? Here are the questions that make up most of the stuff I'm trying to organize: How will I ___ (effectively)? Decide what tasks to do Distribute my time Organize my calendar Ensure that my bedroom is orderly Ensure that my phone doesnt get cluttered Secure and protect my data Organize an...

As I've aged, I’ve constantly gone through community after community. Each time I 'grow into' a new place and leave behind the one before, I look back on myself and the people in that community and wonder how I was ever a part of it. In my mind, I've matured; now, that old community is for immature people (like my younger self). Take for example /r/PCMasterRace (and the whole of Reddit, I guess, but that's for another time). I went through a period about a year ago in which I thought myself mor...

Staying up late talking with my friends makes me realize how much I value conversation with them. I constantly forget what a toll the coronavirus has taken on me socially, and reconnecting - even virtually - reminds me, every time; I usually end up talking for 5+ hours in the meeting. It's a refreshing feeling, even though my eyes can end up dry. -branches ...

It's an extremely weird feeling to see my content indexed, to have it show up in search results. My personal blog is the second result for my name on DuckDuckGo. On Google, it's very different - results are almost entirely profiles for high school sports players in the midwest - but one day I think it'll get there. The same thing goes for this blog, though it needs more specific search terms; it's a lot less likely to be found by accident. I am currently the second and fifth results on DDG a...

I'm thinking about starting a daily work section of the blog. Other people on this site have done this (you'll notice it if you look around listed.to, there are some great blogs here) and I think it is a pretty good idea. I think it would look something like this: What I did today Worked on $project project task one project task two Spent time learning $thing time spent/resources used Uncategorized goals/tasks spent x minutes on community building during quarantine Other activitie...

It turns out that I can work significantly faster than I realized. Work that would have taken me potentially four hours under normal circumstances took me two earlier today, and all I needed to do was focus. Putting my phone onto Do Not Disturb, with a special timer app that penalizes me for exiting, and buckling down for 1h 50m was enough to finish more than I expected. I'm excited. If I work at this rate for 45 minutes per night, what could I get done? An hour? Two? If I am focused on a go...

I'm trying to figure out my goals for the longer-term - a year, two years, etc. I'm having a more difficult time than I expected, though, since I'm not sure what I would find fulfilling. I'm imagining myself looking back on 2021 and thinking about what I did, imagining that I'd accomplished various things and gauging my own reactions to them. The problem here is that I don't know what I'll be like in a year. In the same way that you can't just make a learning plan for a subject you don't know ...

Today was an extremely unproductive day. I did the bare minimum amount of work, and did it at 11pm. I did my jobs, got through events, but in general it sucked. Hopefully I'll learn from the experience. I have a big project in the works, one that I'll surely be explaining in depth sometime soon on this blog. Until then, I'm going to bed. -branches ...

Like many others across the country, I really enjoyed seeing Amanda Gorman recite at the Biden-Harris inauguration ceremony. She showed some awesome (as in inspiring awe) poetic ability. The spoken word style that she used - with varying rhythm and rhyme structure, plenty of wordplay, motion, and an intent to convey a message - was familiar to me, as I've had the chance to try out performing in spoken word events before. Now, being 'appreciated' and 'applauded is very different from being able t...

I honestly don't have the energy (or the time) to write a post I can be proud of right now (but I have written some ideas for future posts) so instead I'll just write down some disconnected thoughts. Nevermind, my head is empty. It's interesting how I will often just lose the capacity to think when I sit down to write, yet when I try to empty my mind to meditate I suddenly get a burst of activity. Irritating, too. See you tomorrow. -branches ...

As I am used to small social circles (schools, sports teams, and local communities), it is always a strange thing when my close friends mention other friends that I don't know, especially when they're making plans. Though of course I know it, confronting the fact that these people that I know so well have friends other than me is never a pleasant experience. I feel like this is caused by some other, larger characteristic of humans. While I'm not sure what it is, I could take a guess: humans ha...

One thing that I can never have enough of is ideas. I come up with what I think of as a 'cool idea' on an almost-daily basis, and since I have a Notes shortcut in my Control Center, I usually just open my phone, write it down, and then that's it. I created a Shortcut to export these notes in a single textfile, in bullet point format, with the intention of sorting through them and categorizing them for future use (e.g. when i'm looking for a project to finally help myself learn JS). This didn't...