Timeblock

Thinking

Got paged this morning and the problem hasn't gone away by itself yet, so I need to do a little exploration.

More Thinking

Had to interrupt my starting pomodoro due to bowels, which is unfortunate. But it is a step in a good direction as I have a history of not cancelling pomodoros for that. Hooray for being more strict. Stuff like this is why I put so many buffers in my timeblock now, anyways. I should easily make my 10 target (and may start working towards a 12 target, but we'll see).

But because work done during that interrupted pomodoro is still done, I have a lot of extra time for processing stuff now. I'd rather not lose another pomodoro, and I do have things I can do during this pomodoro that I've been putting off anyways.

It's interesting how things are falling into place again with my waking up early. I'm thinking aloud here in my diary log, and my work efficiency is increasing enough that I can probably start working on side stuff again. But I'm going to take things super slow this time and try to keep track of the health and sustainability of all the things I'm doing.

Anyways, time for code-work.

Timeblock

Thinking

Successfully woke up at 0500 with an alarm. I almost convinced myself to go back to sleep, but yesterday was a solid day (except for the extreme tiredness around 1730) and that convinced self-care me to at least try staying up.

I know from experience either I oversleep and my sleep schedule drifts or I wake up a bit drowsy and have to wait a bit to find out if I'm tired.

More thinking when I get to work.

More Thinking

So, I'm feeling a bit tired, but I haven't had coffee yet which may give me the boost I need to get my ten pomodoros. I am not so tired that I have no self-control, however. Overall, still happy I woke up at 0500. Hopefully, the fatigue today is just a consequence of being short on sleep yesterday. I'll be going to bed at 2100 everyday, and so hope to train my body to get an efficient 8 hours of sleep per day.

Potentially, I'll want to be in bed as early as 2045, to give my body the time it needs to fall asleep.

I'll play with it. The important thing is to wake up at 0500 everyday. Even at Quakecon (though there it'll be two hours later so I'll make it 0700).

At some point, I'm going to want to insert climbing back into my daily schedule. I momentarily considered it this morning, but I didn't want to be exhausted at work (especially since I'm catching up from my lack of productivity last week).

I'm thinking I'll try to go both Saturday and Sunday. After Quakecon, I'll try to reinsert it into my work days. I think ideally, to make my mornings consistent everyday, I'd like to get to the climbing gym everyday. Not necessarily climb everyday, mind you, but definitely get there, and maybe do my stretches that I should do everyday.

Timeblock

Thinking

I have finally stayed up as my phone woke me up. Not sure if this is a shock to my system moment or a rare moment of morning control. Of note, what woke me up was an OpsLead page and not my scheduled alarm. Waking up now also means running on 3 hours of sleep. Giving myself lots of buffer in case I need a nap. If things go well, however, I may be able to sleep as early as 2100 (watch Stranger things during the earlier buffer).

I'll do some more thinking when doing my organization pomodoro.

Additional Thinking

So, I can feel the fatigue catching up to me. I need to engage with my work like I engage with Overwatch (or videogames in general). Right now, I'm being pretty good about following the rules from yesterday.

Also, the experiment of no distractive elements until I have 10 pomodoros worked very well yesterday, and has stopped me from usual distractive habits a few times today already. I went to go to twitter, or a blog, or youtube quite a few times already and then said aloud to myself, "Not allowed to do that."

And so, given the pomodoro schedule, and my want to "do that", I'm doing my first pomodoro as scheduled.

I have also learned a bit about how one of my habit traps work. After a bit of work (a meeting, a pomodoro, etc.), I want some time to digest various information swirling in my head. However, this state of being is a cue for the "browse social media and/or youtube" routine, which never gives me the reward of a less cluttered mind. It keeps me in the state of "I want to digest various information swirling in my head", which keeps triggering the bad habit. Hence the loss of a day.

An incredibly insidious trap for me to fall into. I have found that with the pomodoro rule, I can more easily avoid this trap until much later into the day.

I'm going to try pretty hard today not to nap and hope to fall asleep around 2100 so I can wake up at 0500 again tomorrow. It is the ideal time for me to wake up, so it would be solid to build that habit now.

Timeblock

Thinking

I've been in a funk ever since my surgery and it's time to actively fight against it instead of waiting for it to go away naturally.

Now, in making this choice, there are some traps I need to avoid:

• I must mitigate my frustration and anger with myself
  • This actively interferes with accomplishing my goal
  • I can't fight myself, I need to work with myself
• I must take this as a chaotic process and expect inconsistent results
• I must experiment with what works and what doesn't

First experiment: no distractive elements until I have 10 pomodoros for the day (if it's a weekday, weekends can be cheat days for now, but they'll maybe get a similar rule that's more specific to the errands on a weekday).

Some other rules that have worked in the past that I have been lax on:

• All work is done in a pomodoro
• The purpose of the pomodoro is defined before starting the pomodoro
  • Switching to a different task requires cancelling and restarting the pomodoro
  • Distractions lasting longer than 10 seconds requires cancelling and restarting the pomodoro
• If a pomodoro ends and task is not complete, a new pomodoro must start before resuming work

That is all for now. More thinking later.

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Been a long time since I've actually made one of these on the weekend. The goal in the long run is to start my day with this again. Might want to update my setup, as currently it takes way too long to start up my computer and get to it.

I'm also doing a personal pomodoro for the first time since... March 3rd apparently.

Upgrading my computer is not going to be something I do for a while. I will follow my rule, and thus will need 30k in my computer index fund, else wait the 5 years since I built my recent computer last year. Which, basic arithmitic, would mean waiting until 2022. If I want to do it next year, then I need to double my savings so I can halve the wait time.

A lot has happened in the last ten days. Around the time of my 29th birthday (June 20th), I was mostly feeling pretty good, throat-wise. Still took sick days until last Friday.

On last Friday, my cousin came to Seattle for a visit. Over the weekend, we:

• ate at Sizzle Pie
• got some cinnamon buns at Cinnaholic
• went to the muesuem of pop culture (MoPop)
• rode the monorail
• watched Toy Story 4
• watched the first 21 episodes of season 3 of Attack on Titan

I have finished reading Blueprint for Revolution and also have read The Power of Habit. The book on habits should prove powerful going forward.

And now I'm listening to The Checklist Manifesto.

Not sure how useful it'll be. Right now it's just a lot of talking about how valuable checklists are, not the best way to use them. I'm already convinced on checklists. Though maybe I'm missing important context via listening and it'd be better to read it.

Anyways, time to time-block today.

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