☀️ A Journal on Beecoming Happy

sheik · November 2, 2023, 12:17am

Anniversary

It’s been one year since I joined the forum, apparently.

I can say it was a good choice!

Beeminder and this forum definitely changed the course of my life by a lot

Next steps for happiness

having a really good savings plan (currently, it’s invested in a weird fund from my bank which is not really performing )
cleaning my room again
doing my beeminder goals in advance instead of day to day, at 3am
going to sleep earlier, instead of procrastinating it
having clear rules of “amount of hours of work per day”

Beeminder provided these to me at some point, but the pressure was too big and ended up giving up.

I think the first step would be to do my Beeminder takss in advance

I wish there was a metaminder way to do that? Maybe urgency load is what I need? I’ll do this tonight.

EDIT: done for the urgency load. I’m currently at 82. I will do my last beemergency of the day, and then, take the emergency load, and put a goal to reduce it 10%. That would be a great start

sheik · November 2, 2023, 11:09pm

Urgency load

My urgency load goal works!

I did multiple goals in advance

It looks like I did right to create it.

I feel like I’m on top of (Beeminder) things (let’s forget the fact I didn’t work on $dayjob today…)

Cleaning stuff and syncing myself back to the sun

I washed some clothes and started cleaning up my room.

I will take some melatonin and try to catch some zzz early tonight

I want tomorrow to be a “day as usual”. Yes, today, I didn’t do as much as I wanted and couldn’t work on $dayjob. I’m tempted to work now, but it’s midnight. Better go to sleep, eat the loss, sync myself back for to a good rythm.

sheik · November 3, 2023, 8:17pm

Working on dayjob

I am not working enough on my $dayjob, and it will become hard to justify.

“why didn’t you work on day X and Y, and why is your invoice so low this month?”

I will return to starting a FocusMate session early. I totally forgot about it…

Now that I remember, my routine was:

Wake up
Do FocusMate
Eat
Work

And I was pretty happy. It’s crazy how fast I forgot!

EDIT: scheduled sessions for next week. I’ll be getting back on track for real!

sheik · November 8, 2023, 2:10am

Back on track

Wake me up!

I started waking up earlier, with a FocusMate session.

My rule is: once the session starts, I have to work on $dayjob

I switched from 50m (incomfortable) to 25m (ok?) today, I’m wondering how it’ll turn out

Sometimes, I have this incredible focus power when waking up.
But I direct it at random stuff. Well, I’m doing it right now, by posting on the forum rather than going outside to take a first walk

Walking in the morning

Taking a small walk around the block in the morning.

This really helps setting the tone for the day.

I also don’t feel this dread in the night: “I didn’t go out today…”

Making tomorrow interesting

I realized yesterday night that “tomorrow is not interesting”.

That’s true. There is nothing super interesting in today’s work.

So I procrastinate…

So, let me take 5 minutes to find stuff that are interesting about today’s work:

$nightjob: I will work on a prototype website. I should allocate at least 2 hours in order to get something off the ground for real

EDIT 1 day after - found a way to make my days interesting

At $nightjob, we miss marketing. A LOT.
And I notice that I am more productive days where I have video calls. It boosts me up. That must be the social effect.

So, I will try to schedule calls with potential customers, send texts to leads, check up with existing customers…

This will both improve our revenue, and make my days more interesting… Until it gets boring.

I also need to expand my network by a lot. I don’t have engineering school / marketing school to do that for me. It’s not about knowledge, but about relationships, and I have not that much.

sheik · November 19, 2023, 1:55am

Relationships

Here’s a small post about relationships and happiness.
And me discovering what is honesty.

relationships… are a key to happiness

These days, I’m integrating more and more the concept that relationships are one of the big keys to happiness.

(I talk a lot about the long-running Harvard study of happiness; here is a video that sums it up very wel)

The two main keys are:

physical health
quality relationships

relationships… need honesty

I was feeling really down for a few months for something silly. I was just in love with this person, but it didn’t really get reprocicated in the same way. I thought she was semi-rejecting me, which is really weird.

So… I was feeling down, and I started expressing my feelings a bit more with this person. And I noticed that I felt better. “I feel really extremely bad… I have feelings… I should do something about this… one small step… I feel better? one bigger step… I feel really better? wow!”

This is the day that I figured out that I’m not really an honest person.
When I feel jealous, I act like I’m not. When I feel sad, I act like I’m just tired.
That kind of stuff.

I sometimes get complaints from friends that tell me that they don’t know what I’m thinking. I brushed it off.

But now, I realize that

a) I hide what I think extremely well from my peers and
b) this is a really, really, bad habit for my relationships and my mental health

So… being really honest is not really a nice-to-have… It’s more like it’s the most important thing ever.

so, why no honest?

I have the impression that this is a “strategy” that I picked up somewhere when stuff got wrong in my life, and then, I kept repeating. And I never really adapted. Of course, the best would’ve been to never pick it up, but it’s not possible to control what happens to you.

So rather: how can I find these other behaviors that are working against me without me realizing?
If I missed something as essential as “be 100% honest about your feelings with your loved ones”, I really wonder what other subtilities I am missing…

If I had to guess: “live a healthy lifestyle” and “enjoy what you have now”. Which are both stuff that I do in moderation. When will I get the peak of illumination and really integrate them into my life?

Beeminder helps, but it cannot fix this kind of stuff. Forcing me to do sports: I did it, but I stopped it.
Beeminder is only a corrective lens. If I cannot see in the first place, deeply into me, the problems; then, even a 90$ is not going to force me into acting.

So… yes, relationships are a skill. Lesson number 1: be honest and explicit

And also: how can I increase the rate of these discoveries?

sheik · November 29, 2023, 2:19am

Final Version

I’m trying out the “final version” productivity system I’ve seen around on the forum.

I can say that it was pretty successful for me.

The main principle at work is that it makes me do a few short and easy tasks, slowly ramping up to hard tasks.

This way, I don’t get this procrastination of “ah! this is too hard”.

Before:

“I need to call the doctor, I need to make this complex feature, I need to fix my taxes… Ah! My life sucks”.

Now:

“Ok, I need to do this in this order: 1. Call the doctor; 2. Fix my taxes; 3. Make this complex feature. Calling my doctor is easy. I am doing it now. Ah, what should I do now? Oh fixing taxes? That sounds boring, but I’m on a roll.” etc.

So, pretty good!

I’ve started using Todoist again to use this. I like the “karma points” system.

I can definitely feel an improvement in my relationship to work.