An Unexpected Position
21 Mar 2013UT is now back from spring break, which means that after a relaxing round of putting some time in on reading for pleasure and working on fun stuff cough cough mwoarena cough I’m now back at school with new due-dates and assignments in hand. Coincidentally, I’m already behind on my various assignments while new and interesting things to do are popping up as fast as I can write them down. Buisness as usual that is, but for that I’m now tracking my time.
As a personal dicipline, I got a faux-leather notebook about 2.5” x 4” and have been conciously logging todo items, ideas and my time usage in this one book. This makes it easy in theory to look at my time and go “oh hey, this is the sink”. The reality is that it seems I don’t have any of the suspected sinks. The obvious things on which I could blame a lack of productivity is the bottomless time sinkhole of news (HN and Reddit largely) and gaming. Rather the sinkhole seems to be what I have long pretended to be work: Writing Clojure code and lurking on Freenode’s #Clojure channel.
What brings me to this conclusion? One word:
Sad. Sad is a non-trivial program
which as the git log reflects I hacked in what ammounts to a single
three day sprint. The resulting codebase is the first Clojure code
I’ve written which I think is both clean and stable but that’s besides
the point. Sad freaking does code generation! I mean how many programs
can claim to eat arbitrary ammounts of BNF and generate a valid
parser? Yeah, I thought not… Only mine! The parsers are even
human-readable and approximate human-generated code thanks to some
serious macro hacking with the ~' symbol prefix.
Then this afternoon rather than do the physics homework itself, I went and wrote Imprecise which is designed to automate the sort of toleranced arithmetic operations which the physics work was calling upon me to perform.
Now I think that both of these are great tools… if I didn’t I would be ninja deleting the github repositories and adding the codebases to the list of things I want to clean up some day when I “get free time” or whatever that means. However while they may be great tools and they were valuable exercises in some of Clojure’s internals writing them was a poor choice in time management. In the longest term, having these tool kits will pay off… I can do my homework faster and implement more complex grammars now which is great… but I still didn’t finish the physics homework before it was due yesterday because I was sinking time into those two. And yet here I sit typing a blog post rather than sleeping, thus further handicapping myself for the morrow.
Creatures of Habbit
One issue is that I’m trying to change a whole lot in one go. First of all I am used to a 2am bedtime and a 7am wakeup, a sleep pattern which is above all in the long term unsustainable and which I feel is contributing greatly to my general lack of focus. I’m trying to transition to a 10pm to 6am sleep schedule followed by a morning workout. In three days of supposedly being on this schedule however I’ve only managed it once. Add to this mess of change in habits and sleep deprivation that I’m exploring aderall with my doctor and I’m just all kinds of messed up at present.
And the trick seems to be that I need to avoid my old habits. Certain behaviors such as hanging up my backpack and sitting down before my big desktop computer are strongly related to goofing off. The ritual is that I’ll browse HN, maybe r/gifs if I’m feeling stressed and exhibiting more avoidance behavior than usual followed with high probability by a reboot into Windows where I waste the rest of the evening playing games.
Yeah. I don’t do a lot of homework at my desk.
So I need to stop trying to do so. My desktop isn’t portable and I’m not going to get rid of it so I need to work elsewhere. I shouldn’t even bother returning to my room until I’m ready to goof off if this is the habitual beh