2024-05-07 | 10:03:16 AM
Hey there. I woke up late. I was supposed to wake up around 8 am today lol. Anyways… I really have nothing to write about besides I’m still sleepy as shit since I slept kinda late last night thinking about a few things which I would like to keep private.
One thing I could say though, is that when you’ve lived with a mindset of just going through the motions, things get super duper hard when they start to become structured. And I know it’s just because I’d been comfortable (really?) living an unsturctured life that I’m having this struggle now. I just wanted to be honest about it.
I admire those who live with the proper structure in their lives. I admire them because I have once had a tight, rigid schedule which allowed for only a few moments of free time. It worked well, but by the end of implementing it in just one month, I became burntout. And at the end of the day, when I’d done all the things I were supposed to do, I always found myself craving for play, or time for myself. There were times I would sprinkle in an hour of playing a mobile video game called Mobile Legends, but after that, that’s it.
I wish I could show an image of my schedule back then, but it looked something like this:
My schedule before
- 5:00 : 7:00 AM | Wake up and morning routine
- 7:00 - 8:00 AM | Breakfast
- 8:00 - 12:00 NN | Study
- 12:00 NN - 12:30 PM | Nap
- 12:30 PM- 1:00 PM | Lunch
- 1:00 PM- 4:00 PM | Study
- 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM | Exercise/Run
- 6:00 - PM - 7:00 PM | Bath
- 8:00 PM - 9:00 PM | Read
- 9:00 PM- 5:00 PM | Sleep
As you could see, I barely had time to have fun anymore. Sometimes, instead of spending a complete 4 hours reveiwing in the morning, I would choose to take a break from, say, a problem set in Mathematics to play some mobile games. But even that felt like it wasn’t enough. I didn’t have enough fun playing, and I didn’t really know what else I could do with the one hour I had for myself. The only break time I really had for myself was when I ran (which I used to do at a memorial park a few blocks from our house). During the time that I ran or worked out, I made sure to be as productive as possible by listening to a podcast or something — usually The Daily Stoic, The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE), Stuff You Should Know, Ted Talks Daily, or The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. If I had to pick a favorite then, it would be JRE or The Daily Stoic, just because both of them are easy to digest and can serve as a relaxing background sound while I worked out.
I write this because I’d been trying to re-implement a sort of structure in my life, starting from the most important things such as having proper sleep and downtime. With the busy life I’d been leading the past few days, I’d always jump from one thing to another without having enough time for myself. I would always either spend too much time on a hobby, or not spend any time for it at all.
In Anthony Ongaro’s Identifying the Twitch That’s Keeping Us Distracted and Stagnant in Life, I got a refresher of how it is to live in the 21st century. Look at this AI summary from Readwise, to get an understanding of how I feel about my attention:
Transclude of Anthony-Ongaro,-Identifying-the-Twitch-That’s-Keeping-Us-Distracted-and-Stagnant-in-Life#^5c1011
[A]ttention is not owned but influenced by external factors.
Exactly. That’s why I’d been wanting to re-introduce the rigorous structure I once implemented in my life. I feel that, now more than ever, it’s fundamental for me to track my time and attention, as I would never get them back once they’re gone.
You know, it’s kind of ironic how I spent some of my time last night scrolling r/DigitalMinimalism, worriedly looking for something that could pacify my need for fixing my life. It was like a Twitch that I had to first get knowledge to get started on digital minimalism. Well, to be honest, I don’t know that much about digital minimalism at this point to actually go about my journey of aggressively cutting down the time I spend on the internet. However, I know enough about it to just get started. I don’t know complex information about it — the rules, the do’s and don’ts, this or that.
I’d read something about digital minimalism last night in the same subreddit. It said something like Cal Newport’s advice is to aggressively look for something to dedicate your time to, rather than just passively cut down on social media usage. Cal’s famous for not using social media at all, and I would want to do that also in the near future. Right now, I’m just away from my social media accounts, but soon I will delete them and focus on doing other, more important things.
For now, that’s all I could write. It’s already 11:03:00 AM and I have to start coding:
An image of my coding time block
2024-05-07 | 05:20:37 PM
Hey there. I have a little bit of a window to type, so I’m typing this. I just finished an important work task right after I got home a while ago. I just figured we don’t have classes for the entire week, so this can be the break that I have needed so much. I’ll see what good thing I can do this week. ❤️🔥
2024-05-07 | 07:12:54 PM
I’m in the middle of reading Outlive by Peter Attia and I can’t help but be afraid of all the things I’m reading. I’m doing a bunch of things with regard to health wrong, and I’m now waking up to the fact that I probably have fucked up most, if not all, of my life, when it comes to matters that pertain to my health. As a recovering smoker, I’m afraid of all things related to cancer. There’s a particularly painful line in the book that appeals to me really strongly:
Link to original
- Cancer doesn’t care how rich you are. Or who your surgeon is, really. If it wants to find a way to kill you, it will.
2024-05-07 | 07:45:42 PM
There’s a line in Outlive by Peter Attia where he describes himself as having worked for McKinsey & Company:
A quote from Outlive:
McKinsey originally hired me into their healthcare practice, but because of my quantitative background (I had studied applied math and mechanical engineering in college, planning to pursue a PhD in aerospace engineering), they moved me over to credit risk.
An hour into reading the book and this dude has been a surgeon (well, that ultimately didn’t turn out to be something he would pursue, but he at least trained for it by becoming a resident at Stanford!), someone who “…swum from Catalina to LA a few years earlier” and who did exactly that again, and now someone who studied applied math and mechanical engineering in college, who also happened to have planned on pursuing a PhD in aerospace engineering!
Peter Attia’s insane, lol. It says a lot about why I admire him so much. And the book also still haven’t mentioned anything about his interests in hunting! In sports, yes; there’s this line about him wanting to be a racer, but hunting — no! His personality branches out to multiple domains and I just freakin’ LOVE it! 😂
2024-05-07 | 08:25:27 PM
I’m thoroughly enjoying the book. However, it’s not the feel-good type of enjoy. It’s more like, “Shit, I need to know about this” type of enjoy. I should probably go do something else though. I’ve already been reading for what seems to be two hours. I also adjusted the time block I have for this.
I’ll go check out Toggl again. It’s an app that I found out before when I was trying to look for alternatives for Boosted in Android. I wanted to see a desktop version of that thing. If I ever get back to using something that tracks my time, like Toggl, I’ll most likely keep a log of the things I do here in my public journal… but we’ll see. 🩶
2024-05-07 | 10:30:07 PM
Alright! I finally got around to re-connecting with the Toggl app. It’s AMAZING. It’s one of those things that I’m actually really happy I went back to. It’s just like Boosted! Here’s how I spent my day today:
Open me! 🤓
Like I said in the entry above, I probably would start tracking my time again using this application. It’s such a powerful app that lets me know where my time is actually going. Soooo, yeah — I’ll give it a try tomorrow! I just fiddled with it today, but I don’t actually know how it would properly fit into my workflow, so we’ll see.