Day 3: Still sick; Random musings

I'm still down with the after effects of yesterday's diarrhoea. This affected my ability to do any serious work at all today. However, i'm not going to let it affect the one thing I look forward to everyday:



writing my daily journal (besides talking to my girlfriend and coming home to my family)



I'm not going to let some sickness affect how i breath words. Here it goes...



My Feelings

I'm not at all that happy that today wasn't productive. It's a terrible feeling to be sick. In order to not be sick as often again, I've started working out again to work on my immune system. I'm also watching my diet more closely and eating more greens and fruits – variety basically.



I've also struggled a lot today on deciding whether to work on a data visualization homework that's due at Thursday, 2359. So much anxiety and agony. Every hour I spend on that shitty assignment is less time I can spend on my part-time software engineering job. That's less fulfilment and less income, which means more pain and less savings. Why would I want that? 🤷‍♂️ I hate school.



I have to write this down somewhere in a journal so if I ever get to design an educational curriculum that's 100x better, I'll know to refer to the times I struggled and this is one such time.





The assignment is shitty and painful because:



1. I don't see how it benefits me besides learning how to do geo-visualisations.

   
   

2. It expects me to google and read dozens of articles to learn something. I understand that this might train me to learn how to be resourceful. But heck, there's better ways to do that.

   
   

   It would be way better if it was done collaboratively. If there is someone in my class who is way better at learning how to be resourceful, it would be much more effective to learn from him than trying to poke around in the black hole of the internet.

   
   

   Why should we waste 38 students time (38 x 10 hours = 380 hours = 15 human days wasted) when one of humanity's greatest strengths is in the power of crowds? The Internet has successfully harnessed that crowd to compress knowledge which would otherwise have taken years if not decades to learn. Look at Wikipedia for example. You get a bird's eye view of a specific topic. That was made possible by crowd sourcing.



Twitter Diet

There's something special about twitter. The constraint of 140 characters forces people to write succinctly. That somehow led to the greatest entrepreneurs and thinkers of our time to congregate there.



Many of these people that congregate there are interesting for many reasons:



1. They are working on really cool problems I haven't thought of.

2. They tweet about their journey in bite-size which I can easily digest and keep up with them on a regular basis. It gives me the “I did it, so can you” vibes which fuels me.

3. They share their thoughts which I can track over an extended period of time – we evolved to imitate people and that's how we learn faster (look into mirror neurons).

   
   

   A working theory I have right now: I can do the same with imitating how people think. This works only if I have enough data which tweets can provide me with.



Thoughts on Clockify

It's really just an okay mac app for tracking how I spend my time in a mindful manner. I don't think falls in the realm of great because it disrupts my flow. Great apps are not beasts that performs every possible function the creator(s) can think of. They are great because they simply flow. Clockify doesn't do that for the reasons below:



1. Not easy to click on a repetitive task and have it run on a new timer.

   
   

2. Not easy to correct a wrong action – setting up a new timer when I meant to run it on an older task

   
   

   This might be because I don't understand how I'm supposed to use the interface. Am i meant to create a new instance of the same task because it assumes I took a break (hence it breaks up into 2 instances of the same task – they are the same task because they are named the same title)

   
   

   
   

   

   
   

3. Every time I open the app, I have to guess what the icons mean. I wished I didn't have to wrestle with that.

   
   

   It could be as simple as using hash tags or slash commands like how Roam Research does it.

   
   

   Just let me start the task already damn it.

   
   

   



I'm making it a personal goal to work on my own Clockify once I've reached $7K MRR which will be enough to substitute a full-time software engineer's salary. There is so much benefit others can have from a better Clockify substitute.