Hello! Starting a personal blog has always been something on my mind, but I’ve never found much genuine reason to start one apart from “eh, it’d be NICE to have one.” Today, however, I decided to start a daily blog with two essential components:

  • Accountability
  • Productive Thinking

The former will just be a quick log of how productive I was that day: ranging from work to school to general effort. This is because ever since junior year of high school, I have struggled with a worsening procrastination habit; this is going to be my latest attempt to combat it.

The latter is a more nuanced idea that I have been juggling for a while. Ever since I acquired a smartphone, I’ve noticed that my attention span has gone down greatly. Furthermore, I used to be forced to spend a lot of time with my thoughts–now I can simply turn to my phone for brainless consumption whenever. This will be my latest attempt to bring back productive thinking–time where my brain is free to creatively explore new ideas and thoughts. It is how I came up with this blog idea!

All in all, if I can follow through on this, it’ll help me keep track of my progression as a human being and make sure I’m staying happy :) and living out my full potential.

And without further ado, my first entry ever!

Accountability

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been struggling with staying focused throughout the entirety of the work day. I’ve been slowly chipping away at the things that I get distracted by, and thus, although today wasn’t perfect, I saw general improvement. Hopefully I can maintain this progression through the rest of the summer.

After work, I had a large moment of clarity where I managed to lay out a definitive plan to kick my procrastination habit. Today was honestly the most productive day I’ve had in a long while, and I hope to continue building upon the habits that I set for myself.

A quick list of productivity accomplishments I hit today:

  • Boston Commons
  • Gym
  • Done app
  • Fast turnaround times
  • Finished to-do list promptly
  • Lots of productive thinking
  • Started this blog!

Habits to build!

  • Interview preparation
  • Read
  • Finish to-do’s before leisure time
  • Reduce wasted turnaround time
  • Blog!!

Productive Thinking

As I mentioned earlier, I have never started a legitimate, long-term blog before. A big reason for that is my reluctance to do something if I cannot do it perfectly/to the best of my ability. This extends throughout my life and has helped me in many ways–I excel at a number of things. However, it also hinders me greatly–I don’t like starting homework assignments unless I can do them well in one sitting, I don’t start blogs/websites because I want my writing to be perfect, etc.

For this particular blog, the whole point is to have a maintainable habit that catalyzes positive changes in my life. To that end, I will strive to continually publish posts that are loosely proofread and minimally thought out, which my inner mind cringes at the thought of.

This, hopefully, will help shift my overall mentality in a positive direction. In recent years, I’ve been convincing myself that I’m focusing and thinking a lot about doing the “right” thing at any particular moment. However, the time I spend thinking of excuses why something is not worth my time is often simply just that, an excuse–it’s mostly my reluctance to be imperfect that causes me to lose out on these opportunities to grow.

I need to focus on not what to do, but just starting to do in the first place.

I’m sure that others struggle with this issue too, and I have a lot more to say on this subject. But alas, my inner perfectionist is screaming at me to go back and edit everything so that my thoughts are immaculately sculpted; speaking of which, have you checked out Paul Graham’s essays (he’s really good at explaining complex ideas in obvious ways)? However, that is not the point of this exercise–hopefully, over time, I will get used to just splurging my thoughts on a page without caring.

As this is my first entry, it will be much longer than most. Looking forward to better tomorrows!