thanksgiving break

I’m officially all moved back to California. Honestly, moving out was less of a hassle than I thought it’d be, mostly because I just ended up tossing most of the stuff I had in storage (probably good to declutter). I haven’t been working very much during thanksgiving break, which is a strange thing to admit because shouldn’t breaks be for, idk, taking a break, instead of for catching back up on schoolwork? In any case, I’ll probably spend the rest of today and tomorrow working on the things I need to catch up on.

built keyboard

I did manage to find a day this break to spend building my new mechanical keyboard (65% layout, nk creams, tofu65 case, dz65 pcb, olivia keycaps, aluminum plates). I streamed the whole thing, and a lot of people showed up, so if you were one of those individuals, thank you! It was a lot of fun just chatting (it took a long time). If you have any questions regarding mechanical keyboards, feel free to hit me up! I have sunk a lot of money/time into this rabbit hole of a hobby at this point rip.

morning person

I’ve never really considered myself a morning person—even when I did have to wake up early for high school, I always considered myself as someone who was a lot more productive at night and hated waking up in the mornings. I read more recently (from James Clear) about how this kind of labelling of oneself is pretty damaging, because it sort of reinforces the type of behavior that causes the mindset in the first place.

In any case, I am planning to do a challenge (with my friend Eric) for the month of December where I try to wake up at 6:30AM every day. This is sort of necessary because I do have school operating on EST (so if I want to turn in assignments in a reasonable manner, I should probably have a schedule that matches). At the end of the challenge, hopefully I’ve brought our the morning person inside of me.

There are several benefits of becoming a morning person that I can foresee. The most obvious is having a regular sleep schedule is really beneficial in terms of overall mood, energy levels, productivity, etc. Sleep is really crucial, it’s something I’ve definitely neglected in the past, and is now something I’m trying to pay more attention to.

Another thing is that hopefully, in order to hit this goal, I’ll have to develop solid morning and nighttime routines. This will help in providing structure for my day and will also help put me in a more productive mindset (I have currently have really bad morning and nighttime routines where I just go on my phone for a really long time instead of doing important things).

Also, by shifting my work schedule to early in the morning, I will hopefully have done a major task or two by the time the afternoon slump hits. By starting my day off on a productive note, it should theoretically set the tone for the rest of the day. Furthermore, finishing things early is never really a bad thing because it saves a lot of stress (i.e. when you’re trying to cram deadlines).

new planner

If you’ve ever seen me carry a black moleskine planner in the past, I used it primarily as a todo list/to mark down important things so I wouldn’t forget. Over time, I’ve started to use online resources (committo3, motion) which kind of replaces a lot of the functionality of my planner, which honestly I don’t know how to feel about. It’s definitely really nice to have everything right there in a single source, that’s pretty much as free form as possible. I also liked the fact that the pages were specific to a date, so there was this pressure that if I didn’t use the planner every day, then I’d be wasting those pages.

In any case, I did get a new planner that is a lot more specific/sophisticated and much less general. I will see how it goes for the month of December at the very least.

I’ve seen multiple productivity journals that adopt a very similar strategy, except normally they have you create the outline yourself, whereas this has everything already printed in it already. I like having it look nice rather than me fuck up everything, and also I have a feeling that if I had to choose what to incorporate into my productivity journal, I would be less inclined to complete all of the tasks.

From what I can understand about the journal from my limited exposure to it so far, the bulk of the journal is this daily log. It doesn’t fill in the dates so if you miss a few days, you don’t waste any pages (both good and bad if you recall my earlier comment). It enforces a morning routine where you list 3 things that you’re grateful for, a positive affirmation, and then your todo list for the day, ranked by importance. The idea is that you must complete your most important tasks first, followed by the next tier of tasks and so on. This way, it helps prevent you from procrastinating on your most important/toughest tasks and helps boost your productivity for the day overall in the sense that normally you’ve already gotten your hardest stuff out of the way first thing in the morning. At the conclusion of the day, you note your wins for the day, which helps you recognize your accomplishments.

There are some other components to it as well—they have a pretty good system (S.M.A.R.T.) for you to detail your goals as well as sections for you to outline priorities/recaps for your month and week respectively. Overall, it’s a really high quality notebook, and hopefully if I stick at it over time, I’ll notice improvements.

pma

The term “positive mental attitude” is used in League a lot to describe a stream where an otherwise toxic streamer tries not to be toxic for a certain duration (PMA challenge). A lot harder than it sounds, but it’s an interesting idea. I think a year or two ago, if you told me that I were to do a daily planner where I had to write down 3 things to be grateful for, an affirmation, and a positive recap of my day, I would’ve been dubious about the effectiveness of this method. However, after reading more about it and learning more about myself/productivity tips on my own personal life, I do think there’s a lot of validity in these methods. It’s really easy to focus on the negative things in our life, and hopefully, by bring the positive things to the forefront of my consciousness, it’ll help my mental overall. I had a slight concern that if I get too happy, perhaps I’d be overly content and not work as hard, but the more I think about that, the more ridiculous that sounds.

There’s no downside to being happy :).