2021 Routine

At first, I wanted to write about my work only when something significant happens. But when I think about it now, I’d rather keep this site as authentic as possible and note my everyday life just as I do it in my journal. Also, it will keep me accountable for all of my ventures. As a consequence, when I don’t fulfill my goals, I will not only let myself down, but also someone else… Okay nobody is reading it, but potentially someone could, so that’s enough to change the way my brain operates.

Most importantly, I stick to my daily schedule, which keeps me doing the same activities consistently. That is why I’ll go over how my day currently looks like and what progress I’ve made in specific areas.

Right after eating my breakfast, I start my shallow work routine, which starts with playing chess for at least 30 minutes.

Chess

About 2 months ago I decided to regularly play chess to eventually get better at it and it’s going good so far. The problem is that I want to progress as fast as possible and that makes me play chess even after my daily goal is done. In my free time I watch game analyses, sometimes I play chess before going to sleep and then in the night I dream about chess. Okay, maybe not this one, but you get the point.

Definitely I'll have to set some restrictions for my chess time. Last thing I want is approaching chess as a time killer and activity for postponing doing the important work.

But it’s working, as you can see it on the graph of my Rapid Ranking on chess.com

But it will not work for ever. I just started from a really low level, so I could get better by only playing. But the time for more deliberate trainings and exercises has come.

Yes, I am still pretty bad, but the progress is there. A new account on chess.com starts with 800 ranking points that I quickly lost. But then, there is a steady progress and currently I am on 853 points. I also marked the day that I started playing every day – around 12th of June.

Probably I will never play competitively, that is not even the goal. I’d like to play decent chess, so my goal is the rating of about 1200-1300 and then I’ll prioritize working on other skills.

Reading non-fiction

After learning chess, I go and read a non-fiction book for another half an hour. I have finished reading “Essentialism” and now I’m reading “Never split the difference” (a guide on negotiating).

Essentialism is a great book, as I wrote previously. I will write a summary of it, but I just didn’t want to write 2 blog posts, one after another, about the same book. Another excuse is that I probably need to get some experience using this book as a guide, so I’ll take my time.

When it comes to “Never split the difference”, I think I underestimated this one. I am not entirely sure what did I expect, but I got positively surprised. The book is really on point, precise, concise, and practical. That’s rare. There is value in it that can be used every single day with people around us, not only when negotiating business contracts. I’m not even halfway through the book, but I feel like my emotional intelligence level has risen by about 20%. This is power. If I’ll make a summary about it, I will support it with my personal experiences for sure.

So overall, I’m happy that I picked it up.

Learning the Dvorak keyboard layout

Then there is time for 30 minutes of learning the Dvorak keyboard layout. Yeah, I know – I’m so random. But I actually like the idea of learning more efficient way to type, especially as a future programmer and writer of this blog. The plan was to record a whole video about Dvorak layout and me learning it. I have some short clips prepared already, but it will take a lot more time to get it done. For some reason my brain wants to stick to the familiar way of typing. I know better.

Yes, there is 2 of me in my head. Or even more. Isn't that normal? Oh, okay...

Anyways, I will not provide you will a lot of details here as I would have to explain my method of learning and everything, which I’d like to leave for the actual video/post about my story of learning Dvorak. All I can say is now, for the documenting purposes, that I’ve mastered Home Row Position and soon, I’ll have mastered my index fingers. I’m not focusing yet on my middle and ring fingers, since I want to have strong foundation before moving on.

The site that I use for learning Dvorak is called ratatype.com If anyone was interested.

General knowledge (now geography)

Few days ago, to my routine I’ve added learning random stuff that I never had time to learn. One of such things is knowing all of the countries in the world. It’s quite useful knowledge to have, but it’s not a necessity. I thought it might come in handy when I’m interested in geopolitics and traveling. I like to track the changes in our world and analyze them to see the big picture. For that reason, I’m going to learn and remember every country, alongside some basic information about it. Then in the future I’ll probably get to the history of certain regions. So far, I know both Americas and Europe, of course. Today I started with Africa, so I begin to understand what is where.

To unveil a little bit of what is it all about, here’s a fun fact:

There is a country in Africa called Sudan, which was dependent on its oil deposits. For religious reasons, in 2011 through referendum, the country got divided into (Muslim) Sudan and (Christian and Animist) South Sudan, which is currently the youngest country in the world. 98.83% of people voted for independence of South Sudan, so they were really unhappy as one country.Unfortunately for Sudan, South Sudan has got most of the large oilfields (80% of oil) and for that reason Sudan is doing terribly as a country - It ranked one of the lowest scores in Human Development Index.

What is more, China is heavily invested in Sudan and owns 40% of shares of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company – petroleum company operating in Sudan. China is also one of the Sudan’s major trading partners. Interesting.

I don’t know the history of Sudan. I don’t know anything more than what I just wrote. But that seems like a good start, or at least some basic information that I can connect with other news in the future.

Why would I ever need that information? You never know. But it seems at least a bit useful, unlike knowledge needed for games like Who wants to be a millionaire? I literally don’t care what pirate died in 1718 in a battle off the coast of what is now North Carolina. Right? Or was it someone important? xD I literally just took a random question from the internet, but it looks pretty much useless.

Okaaay, I cannot keep my curiosity on the leash. It was Blackbeard. The name rings a bell, it is someone quite important. Still, I don’t even want to remember how exactly he died, where and when.

Creative work

Next, when I have some time to spare before my lunchtime, it’s usually time to do some creative work like writing these blog posts. There is not a whole lot to say here, as everyone can clearly see how it is going. I’m not a great writer, everything still seems like work in progress when I struggle to figure out how it all should be done properly. The truth is that I’m not worrying about it, yet. I am inexperienced, so I am allowed to make a lot of mistakes. It's fine.

Everything I care about here is writing consistently. I enjoy it more and more with every paragraph I write. That’s a good sign, so I will just stick to what’s working.

"Deep" work

After eating my lunch and napping for 26 minutes, it is time for my afternoon working session from 15:00 to 18:00. It is my special period reserved for deep work and, to be honest, that is exactly where I’m failing recently. Somehow, I am unable to heavily work on a certain task, focus for at least an hour. There might be a few reasons behind it, mostly personal ones. The point is, that I wanted to call it out, that this is where I want to improve.

So, in the afternoon I do study, but it’s just not the type of work that should be done. It is still a shallow work. Mostly I’ve been doing courses, or playing chess, or simply watching YouTube. I miss thinking heavily while programming. I miss doing some math. I miss my flow state.

I have finished my third course called The Bits and Bytes of Computer Networking. They are quite interesting, and I want to keep doing them, just not every day.

After watching some tutorials on Altium Designer, I’ll probably start working on some project. Definitely looking forward to it.

Also, I will have some more work in my students’ club, so hopefully I’ll be doing some mentally demanding tasks. We’ll see.

Cycling

That’s how we get to the evening, which starts at 18:00. My evening aren’t strictly scheduled, but I still make some things done. Most important one of them is cycling. It is my daily dose of physical activity. My day is incomplete without it, so I never miss a day, unless I’m on a trip. I even tried to take a day off to recover, but for some reason I just felt bad sitting all day and I went on a ride. That means that it’s already a habit. I don’t have to force myself to cycle or anything. I just do it for roughly an hour every single day and I’m quite proud of that. I did a blood test a while ago and it was pleased to see my high level of hemoglobin.

One day I’d like to participate in a professional cycling race. Seems unrealistic, but really exciting. World class athletes train ever since they were a child, nonstop. I wonder what it would take me, who started about 5 months ago, to be at their level. But let’s not drift off too far away. Good job to me for cycling every day, keep it up.

Drawing

Another activity for evenings is drawing, and this is another failure that I’m trying to tackle. I have always been terrible at every artistic activity, and I’d like to change it. But it’s merely a side-hobby for quite some time. If there’s anything else to do, I would do that thing instead of drawing. Not anymore. I want to really be able to express myself and maybe ease the stresses of everyday life. It’s a life skill as it also trains your eye to observe everything around you.

So, the plan is simple: I am marking Sundays as days off. It will be my relaxation/creative day. No pressure to do anything, but the main goal will be to gather ideas, write and draw. It’ll be like an experiment to see if it helps me with drawing consistently. Of course, I will try to draw not only on Sundays, but at least I’ll have a bare minimum that is more achievable than drawing every day. We’ll see.

Reading fiction

Last thing that I do regularly that could be considered a productive way to spend my time is reading less mentally demanding books. Everyday, before going to bed, I turn off all of my electrical devices and I just read usually for an hour. Currently I am reading Ranger’s Apprentice book series. I’ve read the whole series over 8 years ago and I don’t remember much of it. As it turned out, it was also a childhood series of one of my friends and we decided to read it again, together. I’m already on 6th book out of 12 and I absolutely love it.

It is targeted at teenagers, but that’s what makes it so easy to read. Not mentioning the nostalgia that it brings in. And I sleep better thanks to that reading routine.

All these benefits make it hard to break the streak, so I don’t have to worry about it. I’m doing well on that field.

These were all the things I currently do, but it will not stay like this for long. I want to improve in couple of areas and I had another student’s club meeting, after which I have some technical work to do. Definitely I’m going to learn Altium Designer and I got an FPGA board (Spartan 3A), from my project leader, to experiment with. It will take some time probably to start it off, as I still have a trip planned and obviously, things will not progress a lot during that time.