recent events

I don’t really know what to say regarding the events that have transpired in the recent handful of days nor about the state of the world that lead to these events. A lot of it makes me very sad––we are dealing with massively scaled, complex problems that correspondingly demand massively scaled, complex solutions.

I’m always scared of having public political conversations in large part because I don’t think I’m a “politics person”––I feel out of touch in terms of dealing with personally political issues and I don’t feel as though I’ve read enough things to make well-defended, evidence based arguments. Most of my political discussions go more like “I think __ because I feel __” rather than “oh I know __ because I studied __ and therefore I’m pretty sure that __ is good.” If you’re like me, and you’ve never considered yourself a politics person, consider the idea that if we consider ourselves “good” people, we must by extension also consider ourselves politics people in the current state of the world. If we oppose racism and believe in equality, we by extension must also become well-versed in political issues, because (and this makes me very sad) racism is a political issue. I wish that racism and basic human equality weren’t political issues, but they are. This is the state of the country we live in.

I spend a lot of time working––studying for exams, completing assignments, reading/thinking about things, all because I believe that someday this will better enable me to make the world a better place. But right now, we are presented with a golden opportunity to help make the world a better place right in this present moment, and, yet, I admit that I personally drag my feet in putting in the same amount of effort to study the information surrounding political issues.

Two years ago, I decided I was going to major in computer science. I was scared and didn’t feel qualified to comment on anything CS-related because I didn’t consider myself a “CS person.” It took consistent effort over an extended period of time to get to where I was confident enough to label myself as such. It will likewise take time/effort to develop a good perspective on political issues.

So, if you’re like me and never really considered yourself a political person, now’s the time to become one. If you consider yourself a “good” person who wants equality, you must also start to consider yourself a “politics” person, as sadly these are political issues.

productivity update

With school kind of downgrading into an afterthought, I’ve had a lot of time to spend increasing knowledge in other areas of my life, from entrepreneurship to hacking abilities to random things like quantum communications. However, the area where I’ve learned the most has definitely been productivity and how I personally work.

This past week, I’ve been waking up at 8 AM and working until 5 PM, where I allow myself to relax and play games with my friends. This has the benefit of playing video games stress-free, and I’ve felt more productive that I’ve felt in a very long time. This recent spree spawned out of combination of factors: watching videos by some of my favorite YouTubers as well as the fact that very soon I’ll have to start waking up early for my internship.

In any case, I’m really happy with my personal progress in terms of productivity and fighting procrastination.

a bad productivity mindset

Some of you who are close to me know that I do a lot of reading/thinking about productivity, and I’m constantly trying to learn more about my own productivity and what works for me. I’d say this past week has been a period where everything is finally coming together, and I’m starting to feel really good about my own state.

I’m not sure how many of you guys will relate, but I developed a rather severe procrastination habit around my junior year of high school. This has continued to worsen over the years, and I was definitely aware of consequent negative effects on my life. If this sounds familiar to you, I first want you to know something that helped me a lot––pretty much everyone, even the most accomplished people you know/see in the world, suffers from some pretty severe procrastination habits. If you feel bad about yourself because you procrastinate, one of the first things you must do is to stop and recognize that procrastination patterns are in large part biological and don’t reflect you as a person.

As someone who is really ambitious/values getting lots of work done, I used to hate the fact that I was a procrastinator. I’d procrastinate, try really hard to will myself out of a procrastination mood, consequently fail, and then label myself as someone who was weakwilled/lazy simply because I was unable to break a procrastination mood. This is wrong, labelling yourself as an inherent procrastinator will only make things worse, and there’s no sense in suffering twice (suffering the effects of procrastinating and THEN feeling bad about it). This is a good video on how labelling yourself can affect your habit-building attempts (hover/click to watch). I found the things the video talks about to be extremely true in my personal life.

my solution!

Once I accepted that procrastination was more of a byproduct of biological pathways reinforced in my brain over years of shitty practices, I could then treat it as a quantitative problem that could be solved.

First off, stimuli/dopamine is ruining your productivity! I don’t know how many of you guys read regularly, but have you ever tried to start reading, only to find that your brain gets bored/wanders off after a handful of minutes? Why can we focus on social media for 30 minutes at a time, but reading/working feels impossible after just 1-2 minutes?

The answer is that social media/video games are engineered to give your brain a huge amount of stimuli/dopamine. Your brain becomes addicted to it, and when you try to immediately switch from fun stuff (social media/games) to boring stuff (reading/working), your brain starts immediately regretting it/you will want to switch back to whatever task you’re doing.

I felt this a lot when I tried to work during afternoons––I’d start working for like 30 seconds, and then immediately feel drawn back to whatever fun stuff I was doing. Only towards night time, where the imposing deadline finally forces me to work for more than 20 minutes will I then enter the “flow” state where working all of a sudden doesn’t feel bad at all.

What I do now is divide my day into sections. I allow myself high dopamine/stimuli activities, but only in the evening after I’ve done most of my work. This way, there is no biological force causing me to procrastinate when I’m trying to work, I get to play more/have way more enjoyment, and my productive hours are far more efficient (since I don’t have to constantly fight/reset my brain).

I even allow myself to check social media/watch youtube during the day because if I do end up distracted, I do what I call a “stimulus reset.” Essentially, I go for a short walk or a quick workout, and this period of time is normally enough to reset your stimulus/dopamine levels back to normal. Then, if you just will yourself to not reintroduce stimuli to your life for just a few minutes (surprisingly very easy after a stimulus reset, try it!), you’ll very easily enter your flow state again and you’ll be golden. Note that if you don’t take this stimulus reset, it will likely be very hard to force your brain back into productivity mode (especially if you’re like me and had years of procrastination habits built up in your brain).

final notes

While you’re in the procrastination mood, you often have very little control. This doesn’t mean you should just give up and not try to fight it––I think ultimately, if being more productive makes you happier, then of course you should strive to make yourself happier and trying to snap out of a procrastination mood is part of that effort. What you shouldn’t do is let your craze of being productive make you less happy because you cut out all enjoyment in your life and start hating yourself for procrastinating. Ultimately, I think being more productive is beneficial only to the extent that you feel fulfilled/happy with the corresponding work that you’re able to accomplish. Sacrificing happiness for accomplishments is stupid because at the end of the day, accomplishments are supposed to make you happy. They lose all meaning if they don’t achieve even that.

I’ve found that it’s far more effective to utilize your moments of clarity, rather than your moments of procrastination, to beat procrastination. Essentially what I mean is, while you’re feeling productive/have clarity of thought, set yourself up in such a way that you avoid situations that’ll inevitably lead yourself down procrastination pathways. My idea of stimulus resets/moving video games to only the evenings is a good example––without those procrastion habit pathways/high stimulus levels during when I’m supposed to be working, I don’t have to face difficult situations where I need to actively fight off procrastination urges. Because I lose those fights pretty much every single time.

I kind of just splurged all my thoughts onto this post, but I’d be more than happy to discuss anything in the post in greater detail if you just shoot me a message. Good luck everyone and I hope you’re all doing well in these VERY crazy times.