Focusing on one thing and keeping a notebook
Two things happened:
- I started using a notebook
- I started focusing on one thing per day
Notebooks in 2023?
Yes, I started using a tiny notebook and a pen.
I use it to:
- Analyze my thought process from a bird’s eye: it prevents me from going to long into useless rabbit holes. Very fast, I developped an ability to course correct and to be more rational
- Keep a TO-DO list; instead of remembering something I have to do in 10 minutes, I note it, and forget it. This allows me to be more focused
- Keep information to refer back to it later. This works especially well for information that is not really hard knowledge (which can be kept on my computer for me to reference it in 6 months)
- A bit of journaling. What worked, what didn’t worked, what I could try to feel better.
This was really one of the biggest technique for me to improve my thinking, and my life too.
One thing per day
I started doing exactly one thing per day — I don’t care about all the other tiny tasks.
This is how I usuallly act, but by taking a job and having a company on the side, my attention became fragmented, which dramatically prevents learning.
Now, I acknowledge that I can only do one big thing per day; and then, I do it.
Beeminder handles the “minimally viable human being” aspect. It forces me to answer my texts and my mail. I wish that it forced me to do some of my Todoist tasks, but I guess that it’s something I’ll create later on
I feel more satisifed at the end of the day, because I actually learned a lot of things, instead of just pushing buttons. I am building real things and doing exactly what I want to do with my life. It’s actually quite fun to do my job when I’m not splitting my attention!
So, this is definitely another cheat-code: picking one thing, and not caring 1 iota about the rest!
Sleep fixing
Taking magnesium helps a lot
YouTube addiction
(I usually end up watching one YouTube video, then two, then I spend 3 hours on my phone and feel like shit afterwards)
Since my work is interesting when not doing task-switching, I actually don’t feel the urge to watch YouTube so much. So, this was fixed by making work look interesting.
Meditation
I am getting better at it; I can definitely feel a change in state.
I usually launch a timer and go for it. When I feel bored, I look up my watch. I do between 15 and 20 minutes each time, which is above my daily goal of 5 minutes.
I hope that all the amazing benefits I read about are true! I know that I’m a bit less tense in my body because I sometimes remember: “hey, why am I so tense? There is no physical danger, so no reason to be tense”. And then I un-tense
Next steps
- making my happiness tricks into a Beeminder goal (i.e. writing what made me happy and what made me unhappy on a paper journal every day)
- picking one thing to focus on and doing only that, some days
- creating a goal to do one Todoist task (and then I’ll probably just crunch a few more just for fun — the idea is just to not let them rot like they are right now)
Anyway, sorry for the long post as per usual. I hope that it’ll inspire some people.
27 Dec
I’ll now post one message per month, and edit it when I want to add stuff, to avoid spamming the forum
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Today, I created 3 new goals:
- schedule: try scheduling some time on my calendar. I want to start small by scheduling focus work and sleep times. This would already be a big win
- ungrateful: a goal about writing everything that made me feel bad / prevented me from being happy
- fixeye: eye drops I need to put to fix an eye issue. Need to do it before my travel in mid january.