Revelations in Review

Three months ago, I made a decision to spend more time on creative pursuits. There have been some startling, disappointing revelations.

To catch you up, I am doing two things:

1. Consciously reviewing time spent on tasks
2. Planning to make course corrections to achieve goals

I use Toggl Track for the former and Notion for the latter. My Notion setup is elaborate (read complex and confusing) because I’m trying to build it by watching the free videos of August Bradley about building a Life OS using his Notion Pillars-Pipeline-Vault (PPV) system.

General Observations

• I aim to do too much
• I don’t have enough rest time
• I prioritize reading and work
• I don’t prioritize music and creative writing as much as I should
• My idea of projects, tasks, and measurable goals is messy
• I don’t review as frequently as I should
• I don’t course-correct as much as I should

Changes Planned (Course Corrections)

• Scheduling/planning fewer things to do
• Prioritizing rest and sleep
• Controlling time at work
• Prioritizing music over reading
• Re-evaluating creative writing goals
• Better organization in Notion
• Frequent reviews and more course-correction

Life OS

I’m learning Notion. Trying to get my shit together. Thanks to people like August Bradley (and his amazing YouTube channel), I’m making progress.

That’s great. But it’s a lot of work. A lot of work to get a lot of work done. Well, it’s supposed to be difficult to set up, but once done, getting this done should become easier.

Things will become easier to do. The efforts will be less, but the results will be higher. That’s the goal, and I hope to convert my unfocused creativity–both in song and prose– to something more tangible, something that I can be proud of or not be ashamed of.

Those two do not quite mean opposites. They coexist in my little head. Yes, it is literally small, but the brain in it is still active.

May Day

The first day of the month brings joy because of my decision to let it.

I am one of those weird social misfits who looks down upon society because of the unnecessary importance given to anniversaries of purely coincidental events such as birth and death. I consider as sufficiently progressive and vain to decry the structure of the industrial work week, and the nauseating glamorization of the weekend and its tumorous longer siblings.

Celebrations of human achievements are more permissible, including the feat of two or more humans to be sufficiently empathic and accommodating for any form of collaborative enterprise, including marriage. Personal achievements that drive individuals to attain further achievements seem to be the most meaningful among them all.

My turn-of-the-month happiness is a personal achievement cycle that I’m trying hard to sustain. It is to manage my reading and buying books. It started because of a system adopted by a book-club Discord, which deletes/archives most conversation channels for books of the past month on the first day of the new month. The only exceptions are for series read-alongs where a series is to be read over several months.

When I started reading along with this book club [YouTube Channel], I made the fatal mistake of waiting on the first or the second day of the next month to finish a book, thus missing out on some of the most entertaining and insightful discussion regarding the words that I had just finished reading.

I made this setback into a positive-rewarding system, in which my reading planning involves a soft reset on the first day of every month. This is also the day that I usually buy all the books that I thought I should buy over the course of the last month. Of course, this is also the day that I usually start all the books of the new month as well as read a chapter of two of the books that I’m lagging behind because they are not part of the monthly cycle.

Now that I have provided you with an unsolicited explanation, here are the books that I have started today. I’m not giving you the list of books I bought today because that’s way longer, just like that of any respectable book nerd, a title that I’m not yet comfortable with.

• “The Reality Dysfunction” by Peter F. Hamilton (who has inspired me more than most with a chapter in “Pandora’s Star”; it’s about MorningLightMountain, one of the main antagonists in the Commonwealth Saga)
• “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” by Douglas Adams (a series read-along; my second read)
• “Flower for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes (my first Keyes novel, and boy, is it fascinating!)
• “Ulysses” by James Joyce (a classic that I have been meaning to read for a while)
• “Digital Fortress” by Dan Brown (replacing “Next” by Michael Crichton as a fast-paced thriller to take with me on my walks/runs)
• “No Country for Old Men” by Cormac McCarthy (been wanting to read something after my memorable experience reading “The Road”)
• “The Art of the Novel” by Milan Kundera

A few of these are short books (and I know the others are really long), so I might have room to finish some of my other currently-reading books along with these.

The difficulty in purchasing

One of the little reminders that I have on my weekly/monthly planner document is “purchase.” I have it on because I have a tendency to wait too long to make sure—sometimes doubly, trebly so—that I should purchase something. Because I generally end up purchasing things that I actually need, the net result is excessive analysis and time lost.

Buying things, especially gadgetry and music and video gear, continues to be difficult, with the eventual experience of using what I bought never living up to the expectations that I had going in. I have been bitten so many times that in the hours following the eventual commitment to purchasing the said product, I regret having made the decision.

The situation eventually improves to a settled state of the regular use of the product in my life and my workflows, accompanied by the consistent, slight disappointment because things haven’t been as smooth and wonderful as I would have wanted it to be.

It is still a work-in-progress, I guess, as most things are, and as most of life is, from its beginning to the end. Now that I think of it like that, I have another observation to make. Yesterday was a day of admissions, and today is one of observations.

Since I have started to write it down, I have improved on shortening the delay to commitment. It’s a similar story with most of the things that I decided to put down in my planner, which I realize is an improvement I made to my life only a year or so ago. Another work in progress!