execution.txt performing the balancing act
Original Author: Sahil Gautam <printfdebugging@gmail.com>
Homepage: <https://printfdebugging.in/>
License: GNU GPL v2
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CONTENTS
0. Execution Plan execution-plan
1. Sleep sleep
2. Sexual Energy Conservation sexual-energy
3. Food and Eating Habbits eating-habbits
4. Physical Fittness physical-fittness
5. Phone and Constant Notifications phone-and-notifications
6. Internet Habbits internet-habbits
7. Daily Living Chores and People daily-chores-and-people
8. Personal Projects personal-projects
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Execution Plan execution-plan
having plans.txt is important, but just that isn't enough. one also
needs to have an execution plan to make sure that the milestones in the
plan are achieved successfully, in time. an execution plan is a stratergy
which learns from past mistakes and failures and avoids them in future.
here's my execution plan for the next few years. i didn't reach these
conclusions in a day or week, it took years of observation and hundreds of
repititions of same mistakes over and over.
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Sleep sleep
growing up, i often heard "4 hours of sleep is enough" first in school,
and then in college. i was able to follow it for about 6-8 months during
my 10th class as back then my parents would wake me up for school and i
was so in love with maths to not care about sleeping at night... but i
could never reproduce it in college.
whenever i slept less at night, i was tempted to sleep in the afternoon,
and whenever i gave into that temptation, the whole sleep cycle was
disturbed as i wouldn't fall asleep during the night if i slept in the day
time.
sleeping early, around 10pm and sleeping for around 7.5h - 8h to wake up
early the next day, one doesn't feel tired anymore during the day. and
even if there are those phases of lazyness during the day, one can just
ignore them by knowing that they slept enough at night. being well rested
is important.
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Sexual Energy Conservation sexual-energy
as i turned 18, i found that the body has it's own goals, and those are
usually not aligned with my goals. after experimenting quite a bit (solo),
i found that supression doesn't work, it makes the situation worst. on the
other hand too much indulgence isn't benificial either, as it's not that
much different from eating chocolates, it's all about that instant release
of pleasure hormons.
one has to experiment and find ways to put it on the backfoot so that it
doesn't take up any space in the working memory of the brain. getting used
to being bored helps, playing sports helps, having something that you
enjoy working on helps, staying away from entertainment helps... what
helps the most is timeboxing, something like once every two weeks.
constant supression and denial doesn't help, not exercising doesn't help,
roaming on the internet purposelessly doesn't help...
sexual pleasure takes probably the biggest section of our brain's reward
mechanism, and by denying or limiting access to it, we force ourselves to
get out in the wild, do something worth while and derive pleasure from
that process. it also avoids wastage of raw energy which the body has to
then build up again.
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Food and Eating Habbits eating-habbits
:) again, after eating a lot of chocolates (for months) and gaining quite
some weight, i realize that i need to reconsider my eating habbits.
some kinds of foods should simply be avoided as they don't do any good.
packaged foods, chocolates and sugars, cold drinks, oily foods,
potatoes etc. these don't do any good to the body and are mostly for the
entertainment of the tongue which, from my experience, lasts only while
you eat the thing. and then you want more of it... ==> sahil becomes fat
it's easy to over eat during the main meals, so one has to consciously put
less on their plate and constantly keep checking if they are close to full
or not. leaving some empty space is good. and not drinking any water after
the meal helps digest the food faster (by not slowing it down).
boiled vegetables and soups are good for health, and they taste decent
with some spicy magic. when i drink filter coffee without sugar, i get
into a zone and find it really easy to collect all my energy and put it to
one task.
ultimately i realize that food is fuel, not entertainment and if i keep
it that way, then it creates a void for pleasure in the brain as talked
about at the end of the sexual-energy section, and then i can derive
that pleasure from some real meaningful work, than from grazing like a
cow.
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Physical Fittness physical-fittness
i ate a lot of chocolats, i grew fat! being fat sucks, the body language
changes, the way you walk changes, the way you sit/stand changes... and it
changes in a bad way.
one has to take care of their body if one wants it to last for 70, 80, 90
years or more. running and pushups seem to be the best long term choice as
for that i just need a track which i can find anywhere, no other player
needed, and tracks are not closed on sundays.
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Phone and Constant Notifications phone-and-notifications
as soon as i go home from college, i will ditch my phone, and touch it
only on the weekends for 15min to see if i missed something important.
phones suck! they increase stress by constantly ringing and it's really
easy to entertain yourself to death if you have some free time. i will be
buying a "traditional" alarm clock.
for my computer, i removed dunst from autostart script. so there's no
notification daemon running and disturbing me, not anymore! so then it
would be my choice to switch contexts and check mails or irc chats.
for events like daily meetings, i would have to be aware of time, but
atleast i won't have random popups on the screen stealing my attention all
the sudden.
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Internet Habbits internet-habbits
internet is quite a dangerous place, not for users at all! i have had this
addiction for quite some time, and i struggle to focus on things. whether
you see it as a problem or not depends on what you want to do with your
life, your understanding of things. like i have a roommate, who watches
right wing propoganda videos about 'religion being in danger' and
considers elon as his idol... i don't think he will ever consider it as a
problem or addiction, unless something magical happens.
one has to go thorugh the 'internet phase' and then decide what's worth it
and what's not. internet is unavoidable, but one can mindfully avoid some
parts of it, and some forms of content like videos or songs. i think
avoiding video platforms solves 90% of my internet problems.
of-course complete avoidence of videos is not possible, in which case one
has to constantly remind oneself what they really want and what is being
pushed upon them, and the fact that internet is not for the user, and
one mustn't put the guard down for even a single moment. and also remember
that internet is not for entertainment either.
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Daily Living Chores and People daily-chores-and-people
i struggled with this a lot in the past, but i have discovered the trick.
i was frustrated by stupid daily chores (admin work) like completing
worthless (paper filling) assignments, listening to professors not really
into their subjects etc... it was really painful. the simple solution is
to ask what can i do and if the answer to that is nothing, then simply
stop thinking about that.
people issues were a little more complex. so often in conversations with
my college friends, and my parents i would introduce ideas like
god doesn't exist or love is a fallacy... and they would start
defending their beliefs. i didn't know how to read the room back then, but
now i understand what that means. that means 'back off' if the audience
can't digest what you are saying and if convincing them is not that
important.
part of the 'people issue' was because i was immature, and wanted
validation, but it's a lot better now, atleast i notice it now and when i
do, i 'back off' respectfully. i don't persue silly topics anymore... a
few minutes into the conversation and i know whether to continue on the
same topic, or switch topics, or 'back off' and end the conversation.
==============================================================================
Personal Projects personal-projects
after data-gathering.txt about how to become a good programmer, i found
myself interested in quite some projects, read the-balancing-act to know
how i organized them. as per plans.txt, the first few years would be
spent reading, modifying, rewriting existing projects to learn more about
software. programming-literature and projects are at the end of the
list, to put practical before the theory!
the idea is to not abandon the ambitions but put them on the sidelines for
some time, and first gain some experience by getting some projects done on
the libreoffice and allotropia side.
if everything goes as planned then ~5y down the road, i will have a really
deep understanding of software design (arcitecture), how programming
languages work, and low level computer graphics. then i would be in a
better position to say whether those ambitions are worth a try.
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