commits

I’m not sure which post you’ll see first, but I didn’t want to make my other blog post too long/unfocused so I guess I’m making two posts on the same day. This one is going to be a lot more recap/update heavy than the other post.

I didn’t mention this in the other post, but I’ve been trying something called “committo3” with some of my friends (some of you reading this are probably one of those friends). Essentially how it works is you write 3 things that you’re committed to completing for that given day––you can see what everyone else has written, and when people finish their commits, everyone gets an email. If you’re interested, let me know and I can add you to our group.

I’ve had some thoughts about it so far. First off, picking 3 things to commit to is really difficult. Initially, I picked things that I wanted to motivate myself into doing. However, every single time, I would end up not doing it.

I do want to build up the habit that if I put down the 3 things, I must complete it. If I don’t, I’ll bring in my other technique of the 2 day rule, where I can’t miss two days in a row of not completing things. However, to do that, I need to start the habit of having completable commits––more recently, after I finished the GRE, I’ve had easier commits. These normally are things that I would’ve completed without the use of committo3: psets, interviews, etc. However, my reasoning is that eventually I’ll develop a habit of finishing all 3 of these commits, and I’ll be able to add actually challenging commits.

planner

I haven’t been using my written planner often at all recently. This is due to a number of factors.

After my initial productivity craze at the start of quarantine, the beginning of my summer internship brought around the end of my productivity. This slump has continued til now, where many of my previous productivity habits have disappeared. However, I do feel like I’m accomplishing a good amount of stuff still, so it’s definitely not the end of the world. But, writing in my planner is definitely one of those habits that’s gone away––another obvious one is me not blogging regularly anymore.

Another big factor is my use of Motion. I started paying for Motion, which is this productivity chrome extension that honestly isn’t super useful. However, it’s relatively cheap and they’re constantly making modifications to the software, and some of the features are still useful (for example, I like being able to pull up my calendar anywhere).

I’m not sure how useful to-do lists are to me anymore––one of the main functions I used to use them for is to keep track of things that I might otherwise forget (eliminate the stress of possibly forgetting something important). But, Motion makes it a lot more convenient to jot down quick notes. Alternatively, I might create a to-do list, and then label it with a 1-4.

1 - Pressing, important

2 - Not Pressing, important

3 - Pressing, not important

4 - Not Pressing, not important

Then, if you do the things in order of 1,2,3,4, you theoretically should never be stressed since you shouldn’t have very many things that are in the 1 category (they will get filtered out in the #2 step).

Another benefit of to-do lists is to help with procrastination/organization––for me, I have trouble tackling huge projects. Instead, chunking it into my manageable sections sometimes allows me to fight off my procrastination. Also, forming to-do lists is a great way to break a cycle of procrastination with a really easy task. After 15 minutes of being productive, normally you enter a flow state that allows you to continue working.

All that being said, I’m still unsure whether or not I want to resume to-do lists.

design is hard but I want to get good at it

Some of you may know that I’ve always wanted to learn design and hobbies associated with it (photography is a good example). Very recently, I started watching some photography YouTuber named Peter McKinnon––I like his videos. I also ordered some mechanical keyboard parts, and I’m super excited for them to come.

I’m planning to stream the entire building process, which will be my first in many respects. I really want to get into content creation via this avenue––hopefully I can convert the stream into some usable footage for a video. I also want to see if I can use my keyboard to get some more practice with taking photos/editing photos.

I can be a perfectionist, and the difficult with design/photography/editing is that the “perfect” product is very much in your face. While I was learning stuff like coding/math, sometimes how much I sucked at it was very apparent and it hurt, but there were definitely ways to avoid thinking about it. With photography/design, it’s impossible to ignore since we live in a world where good design/photos constantly surround us.

I’m going to try to commit to learn something more design related, no matter how cringe I feel my work is. I think that this is similar to how I felt when I first started my blog, and now I’m a lot more comfortable with publishing imperfect writing. Ideally, this will be a similar process and will help me become more comfortable with, well, sucking at stuff––this definitely holds me back from trying to learn new things, so, as long as I keep making progress along this front, hopefully I will start learning more and more things that are out of my comfort zone.