I’m still trying to find the balance between short, lean entries and coherent thoughts. This is less of an issue right now, but when I get busier during the school year, longer entries will be difficult to maintain. I’ll try shorter entries in the future–I think it’ll be a good exercise to try to express complex ideas in concise sentences.

Accountability

To be honest, there are still moments at work where I struggle to stay focused, but there’s been definite improvement overall. I’m finding my work engaging again, and the time I don’t spend working is normally on needed breaks/necessary tangents. Hopefully over time I can ease into needing less breaks, but I’m proud of my progress this week. There is always room to grow!

Deactivating Facebook has been doing wonders for my productivity as well–I find myself reflexively typing in “facebook.com” only to find myself logged out and remembering that I deactivated my account. It’s revealed a lot to myself about how ingrained some of my procrastination habits have been. I still have Instagram active, but deleting the phone app has made it so that I don’t check my feed nearly as often. Overall, I’m content with how my social media break has been going.

Another habit that I’ve been starting is to finish all my work before leisure time. This reminds me of the classic way of how parents would limit their children’s video game time: “Finish your homework and chores first!” I’ve long recognized that this was my biggest reason for procrastinating–once I start an activity, I will see through it to the end and enjoy the process. However, on most days, I’ll just stall as long as possible, which contributes to my poor sleeping schedule and presence of high stress, high workload days.

I also switched my interview prep and reading habits to daily instead of weekly–weekly goals were a good start at first, but I found that they weren’t doing the trick completely for me. My brain is still hardwired to desire short-term rewards, so I think the satisfaction of hitting daily rewards should help instill these habits that I wish to develop.

I’m also much happier these two days than I’ve been in a long time. Previously, my internal drive was “git gud,” which is primarily fueled by frustration and jealousy, admittedly very strong motivators. And I did “git gud,” but whenever I wasn’t perfect, I’d be angry at myself–coupled with my procrastination habit of the previous years and it’s not the greatest combo.

Yesterday and today though, my mentality has genuinely shifted towards “improve!” And, although before today, I convinced myself that had been my drive all along, once I’d let go of my previous drive did I finally realize what it feels like to be partially free of external expectations. In high school, I wrote several essays about how academic success is based relative to others, not oneself, and how that leads to inefficient development of potential. Hopefully I can start improving on that aspect as well!

Productive Thinking

Today, I spent some time after work sitting by the pond in Boston Commons. I’ve been doing that recently whenever the weather’s nice, and it’s a great time to take a break from screens and relax. While sitting there, I began my thinking exercise of simply letting my mind wander, and I did come up with several ideas that I may reference in future entries. However, with the warm sunlight hitting my cheeks, gentle breeze ruffling the pond, and an amazing guitar performer in the background, I found myself the happiest I’ve been in a long time. Which lead me to start thinking: why do I love being outdoors so much?

Now, a lot of the more obvious answers jump to mind: I love fishing, nature is pretty, and everybody likes nature so why wouldn’t I? But, arguably, fishing technically contains the same level of fun as good video games, designers pour their hearts into making room interiors beautiful, and humanity has been trying to fend off natural dangers since the dawn of civilization. Yet, no matter how many walls we construct and online apps we consume, the vast majority of people can still appreciate a good ol’ fashioned view from the peak of a mountain.

I can spend all day outlining every reason for why nature is enjoyable (I actually wrote my Common App essay on why I love fishing), but the reason I’m going to focus on today is: in the modern world where everything is carefully crafted to draw our attention, nature provides a uniquely refreshing break, exemplifying how people intrinsically desire a variety of experience.

To illustrate my point that people desire a variety of experiences, imagine your favorite books as a kid: perhaps it was Harry Potter. Maybe, you liked Harry Potter so much that you reread it over and over again. But, eventually, each read got less and less interesting, and you hopped to the next series. Harry Potter is not the greatest example because many people would swear their lives by it, but the logic still holds. Consider: switching up food orders at a restaurant, taking your morning jog in a new location, shopping for new clothes–not everybody loves change, but everybody hates the lack of it.

I spent most of high school and the first part of college cooped up in my room or school–yes, I loved nature more than the average person, but I also probably went outside less than the majority of people. I am acutely aware of everything accessible within the walls of my room–the internet makes it laughably trivial to consume content that is interesting, new, and unique. Everybody does some version of this, no matter where they are, whether it be seeking new projects at work, driving to new places in the city, or redesigning their wardrobe at retail stores.

One key element separates all of this from an experience in nature: one of them is man-made and the other is not. And, to clarify a common misconception, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with consuming lots of man-made stuff–a vast number of activities and locations are extremely well designed, and people are very interesting. In fact, one of my favorite things to do in the park is to just take in the vast diversity of people and actions going on around me (in a non-stalkerish way I promise). However, going back to my earlier point, nature offers a completely different experience, one with very little human influence. The intricate movements of a bird cannot be replicated by any website, the randomness of a breeze starkly contrasts with the schedule of an AC unit, and the indistinct rustling of squirrels breaks away from ordered shelves in a store.

Ironically, a world more dominated by human-made activities means that natural experiences become that much more rare and that much more precious.