Yesterday wasn’t better than the day before. Maybe. I wrote that because I think that. But, it wasn’t terrible either. I’m still bad at making a plan for the day and sticking to it. I still find myself drifting to get that dopamine. And I still don’t have systems in place to have metrics for measuring any of this. For someone with time blindness and difficulty remembering 15 minutes ago, it’s bold idiotic to make claims without proper metrics.
Deleting apps from my phones helped but browsers are still an excellent gateway. So, I went with the nuclear option. YouTube and X are now blocked in my network for all my devices.
I’m however seeing something starting to happen, even this early. I’m starting to get bored and I fall into what I call “productive procrastination”. Stuff that are either intellectually stimulating (reading Hacker News, discovering new code bases) or chores (cleaning up e-mails, paying bills). The idea is if I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing, then I should at least do something worth doing.
A form of unproductive procrastination I often do is watching long form video essays. Keeping up with whatever norm defying thing the current U.S. administration did this week is extremely fun, it teaches me a lot about politics, how quickly societies can shift and the culture in the most important country on the planet. But that’s not vital to reach the next stage in my life. I should be doing the things I should be doing and I can reward myself with the fun of consuming outrage (from both sides!) afterwards. Note that I’m not an American, I just love politics and media, anything in the intersection of that, and U.S. politics is fun, I try to consume content from all mainstream parts of the political spectrum.
OK. Metrics. I need metrics. And some gamification? Something to try to keep track today is number of to-do’s completed. It requires me to write down all of the tasks so I can keep track. I know I should be writing them all down regardless, I’m failing that, so I need ways around it, hacks, to fix that. So expect a number in tomorrow’s post.
Number of to-do’s completed would be an extremely reducing metric for measuring work performance if it was a lead or an HR doing it for an employee. It can be easily gamed by chunking the work into smaller pieces. But in this case, it’s actually good if I’m motivated to chunk my work into more specific to-do’s. I should already be doing that but lack the motivation. Make number go up is such a simple metric.
These unorganised vomits of thoughts I dare to call blog posts might actually be helpful too. It really pushes me into doing a proper retrospectives.
Now, time to eat that one almond. That’s what I promised myself while typing this up. I’ll get to have one almond as a treat for finishing this. Ok, bye, see you tomorrow…