2024-05-10

2024-05-10 | 11:18:31 AM

Recently I came across a material of Cal Newport talking about how important it is for our minds to be in periods of intermittent solitude. It is important that we get to be alone with our thoughts. I can’t remember exactly when and where I heard him say that first. I’ve been cycling between materials (videos, podcasts, articles, etc.) wherein he’s present. Though I probably should’ve put that here in my dailies so I could accurately reference it as I please.

His point is this:

Regular moments of calm allow us to have a clear understanding of our thoughts. In the modern world, he says, (I’m paraphrasing so there are no quotation marks), we get bombarded by information that come from other minds. It’s never so much that we get the chance to reflect on the intricacies of our feelings, thoughts, emotions, and personal contexts It’s always he said this, he said that, like it’s a flurry of information we didn’t ask for at all. I used to write about this phenomenon in multiple journal entries. ^{1 2}

I would say I’m comfortable with my own thoughts. I’m comfortable sitting with them, examining them, and ruminating on them. I can mull over my thoughts and emotions for as long and as detailed as I like. This is why I have tons of writing in my journals³ in the first place. I would also like to add that I’ve observed myself thriving in environments like this public journal, where things are pretty much just all over the place. There’s no specific pathway I should follow, or that I should think of, or that I should consider, other than just capturing my thoughts. Surely, I tend to beat around the bush sometimes, especially when I’m trying to distill an idea. But that’s part of my thinking process. I tend to go circles around a context⁴ for me to understand what it actually is. I skirt the edges of the idea, and when I have properly exhausted the information from the perspectives given by the outer circle, only then could I move on to the more fundamental, inner levels of it.

Such is my thinking process: a messy, I-legitimately-do-not-know-what-the-fuck-this-is thing — like the scribbles of a child, except in the form of words. A sketch, if you will, to examine, understand, and contextualize the world.

2024-05-10 | 09:59:37 PM

Hi there. I just finished doing the tasks I’m supposed to be doing today. I quite like how time seems to easily pass when I’m in a state of deep focus. It’s been a while since I legitimately felt this way. It seems as though the past few weeks leading up to this has been me trying to just go through the motions of life. At this point, my life seems to feel as if it’s on pause. As if I’m on a break (which is kinda true since I had minimal workload this week, both in terms of my career and my academics). The other thing I still haven’t done today, though, is coding. I haven’t coded yet today, and that’s mainly because I did a few stuff for work and school. To add to that, I kinda crammed the latter. ⁵

I will be managing a work task tomorrow, Saturday. It’s not that hard, and it’s not one of those things that I should spend at least two days on. It’s pretty easy — I think I can finish it within four (4) hours. Other than that, I plan on coding for the rest of the weekend, and reading. Maybe I could finally get around to progress on Outlive by Peter Attia. It’s a pretty interesting book, as you probably could tell from this:

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.

Link to original

Speaking of time blocks. I feel like I’d been adjusting most of my time blocks recently to fit whichever looks more interesting to do. I try so hard to have structures in my life, yet I end up having to constantly re-adjust them. This is majorly because my interest gets stuck on one thing pretty easily, especially if it’s the first thing I do in the morning, when my attention’s usually at a 100%. If I compare my Toggl Track’s time entries with my Google Calendar’s time blocks, they seem extremely disparate. Here’s a perfect example:

An example of what I mean by the disparity of my time blocks between Toggl and Google Calendar:

Notice how my Toggl track’s time tracker is tracking this passion project, whereas my Reading time block’s supposed to have started since 10:00 PM? Well that’s because I found it more interesting to write down my thoughts now, rather than later.

And I know that for someone who has great admiration for the people in this list, it’s very ironic that I’m saying this. However, as I said, I aim to be unequivocally honest in my journal:

I just… want to be genuine.

Link to original

Anyway, I really want to code now ⁶

I might have to move my time block for reading tomorrow instead. We’ll see. It’s the weekend tomorrow anyway so I might spend a little more time for myself tonight and have fun reading. See ya! Here’s today’s dev log:

Footnotes

1. Case study 1: “And when OP said, “I also realized I don’t need to know about what others are doing all the time, especially people I don’t talk to daily or even at all in day-to-day life”, I felt that shit. I felt it like an annoying little itch in my soul has finally been scratched. I felt noticed.” ↩

2. Case study 2: “As you probably could pick up on my blog post regarding quitting social media, I cringe at the idea of broadcasting my life to the public. As if it’s something people need to know about! As if they need to know that I felt this way at this exact timestamp, that I meant to say this rather than that, that I ate fucking corn for breakfast, and that I liked Taylor Swift’s new album…” ↩

3. Yes, I have multiple journals. I call my personal journal Ian's Zettelkasten V2, and I also have another one called Ian's Zettelksaten, which I’d already ditched due to the overwhelming need to re-structure everything from a Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives or PARA Method to a more unstructured, free-flowing, rhizomatic way of note-taking. It’s ironic that I tried to use the PARA method alongside the Zettelkasten and digital gardening, which led me to an insurmountable amount of conditions to check before formally capturing an idea. How I see it is this: I was more worried about the structure upon which my notes rest — the sort of specifics, rather than the form of the ideas themselves. I talk more about this philosophy here. ↩

4. I’d noticed myself use this word a lot in this journal — context. What is it, and why do I bother with it? Here’s a quick explanation for it, though in coding and development terms: “…[T]hose are what I mentioned in the line above, where I talked about the developer’s notebook: [A]nything from bugs, unique features, shortcuts, interventions, best practices, and other, unique, contextual, and experience-based lessons…” If we extrapolate from this snippet, a core definition of a context could be simply an idea, thought, or concept that is used to build upon more contexts. It’s not necessarily a core idea, as in the body of a tree from which branches of ideas grow. Rather, it is a representation of the formal manifestation of an idea. It is the proof of something, a sort of identification in my public journal, if you will. A context can be anything, depending on its application. ↩

5. Every time something more important comes up, like a school assignment or a task at work, I immediately fidget and look for ways to comfort myself. In this context, what I mean by fidget is to self-soothe myself by procrastinating. My procrastination method of choice, unfortunately, is this public journal. Some days, procrastinating could be consuming Cal Newport’s content. 😅 ↩

6. Talk about spontaneity and my inability to follow time blocks. 😒 ↩