Accoutability

Today was overall really good! Of course there’s always areas to improve. Technically, I wasn’t working every second of the day, but honestly working that hard isn’t very fun for your brain. Today was a very relaxed day AND I got a lot of stuff done. That’s honestly what I want every day to feel like–every day should not feel super stressed, even if it means that I’m doing a lot more. But in either case, it’s a whole lot better than last year, where I felt super stressed AND I wasn’t getting a lot of stuff done.

I added a new habit to my habitica app: “got through lecture without checking phone.” I have a bad habit of checking my phone, not for important stuff, but just for random, brain-numbing stuff (reading NFL news, etc.). I’m still allowing checking my phone for important things (jotting down habitica notes, replying to time sensitive texts, etc.), but having this new habit to check off at the end of every lecture is really helpful!

In general, habitica isn’t perfect but it’s helping me a lot in terms of breaking down huge todo tasks into smaller, more manageable things.

Productive Thought

You can learn something from any conversation with any person–it’s just that you can learn more and different things depending on the person (and some people make you learn hard lessons that you probably were happier without learning anyways).

This is why diversity within teams/groups is so important–the more diverse a group, the greater variety one can learn from each other. Essentially, you’re considering depth vs breadth in a lot of these scenarios, and in a merit-based only society, we focus a lot more on depth rather than breadth, even when adding breadth has a much higher marginal return.

Of course ideally we’d have both breadth and depth, but that’s not always possible, especially with how our current society is set up, and an optimizing method must be chosen accordingly.