Energy Management

I post here semi-frequently.  But it's summer, and there's other things I may be doing, like grinding through math problems (as you have seen on this blog I'm very interested in math).  I also do a variety of other interests.

So why am I not just doing other things all day, while taking short 20-minute breaks or so to relax?  Why waste time on such a blog, you may ask?

It's a very valid question.  First and foremost, though, I genuinely enjoy technical writing, and would simply like a space online to kind of just... be myself, but embodied as intricate, and elegant letters on a (web) page.  But there's another reason.

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It's summer right now for me, so it's very easy to get an almost unlimited amount of time.  And I'd very much like to do math or computer science all through it.  But then, time management has been a big issue:  Sometimes, I get distracted from solving a USACO Silver or CodeForces ~1800-rated problem, and pull up my Windows Virtual Machine and GitHub to debug another gnarly Windows DPI scaling bug in a GUI Framework I contribute to (more information on in a later post).  Occasional task-switching is of course fine given my time constraints, but then...

...well, other times, I get distracted from that, and just straight up start working out another AMC12 problem on a random piece of line paper, writing sideways instead of straight like I'm supposed to.  I then make a huge mess, and never got anything done.

Next, I've tried taking breaks, but even then I get distracted from breaks, and feel the pressure of yet another bug in my code undebugged, yet another math problem that I read up on that I feared forgetting tomorrow, yet another arpeggio I haven't practiced enough on the saxophone, yet another scale degree that I mess up on the piano, yet another...

So, it was a huge mess, and even after some other minor brain hacks, I was unable to focus through more than one productive thing per day.  And as I looked back at this situation, I blamed myself for not being disciplined enough.

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After dealing with this for about one week, I got tired of it.  Looking back at this whole situation, however, I realized that wasn't tired of the situation; I was tired in the situation.  And for any of this to get better, I needed to adapt.

I have no idea why, but sometimes, I'm just really, really, tired.  Sometimes it happens in the morning when I've done absolutely nothing, sometimes it happens after I finish studying... in either case, it happens, not only when I run out of time and stress over something, but when I run out of energy.  Sometimes it's at 8AM, sometimes it's at 2PM, and these things can just hit you on the spot.  So I needed to do something about it, and not just plan out of my day like a traditional, hour-by-hour schedule.

It turns out that I still need some sort of thing to keep me occupied during these periods, or I'll start to get bored; and when I get bored, I still have other things I need to do, so boredom's not a great state to be in.  And that's part of the reason I blog here.  I also like to do other things, such as rewatch my favorite movie clips, or just run around like crazy on my carpet floor.

And when I do these things, I feel like time isn't what I need to manage; it's not that I intentionally delay everything until the last minute, it's that at 1PM, 9 hours from my bedtime, I just physically feel like I can't drag on my touchpad, click on an icon, or write on a sheet of scratch paper, even though I really want to do it.

What I needed was to manage energy—conserve some and don't burn through it in the morning, even though you still have time left to do your other tasks.  What I needed was some of those occasional, relaxing things I wanted to do.  And sometimes, what I needed was to just lay on bed for a moment, and imagine myself with my favorite fictional characters (yes, it's still a challenge for readers to guess them), or just lie down and relax my muscles.

And after that, I give myself some grace.  I learnt to accept that sometimes, I do need to get distracted.  I learnt to be grateful for every single thing I could get done.  But most importantly, I started getting more and more things done per day.  Hopefully, this productivity boost will remain manageable, and adapt my ever increasing workload from 4 college credits when high school starts.