I am not as productive as I'd like to be. And it's not like I don't have things to do; if anything it's quite the opposite. I'd like to...

• Do more programming
  • Finish up an emulator
  • Get a rudimentary debugger to work
  • Write a C parser to have more useful code tools available
  • Maybe a compiler?
  • Maybe an IDE?
  • Get more into embedded system stuff. Maybe some bare metal? Assembly?
• Get better at playing the piano
• Keep my room more clean (I'm writing this knowing full well that this apartment is in dire need of some vacuum cleaning)
• Read more books
• Go on daily walks because jesus fucking christ I sit in front of the pc the whole fucking day
• Lose some weight (fucking christmas season, man)
• Maybe start a little art hobby. Nothing fancy, just becoming not shitdecent at pixel art or pencil sketches or something
• Work on my posture as I walk around like the hunchback of notre-dame
• Finish my god damn fucking bachelor's thesis and thus my degree
• Spend more of my time being productive, or rather spending less "meh"-time on reddit and youtube

Having ambitions is good and all, but it's quite worthless if one does not work on them. But this is just me being just a bit too harsh:

Self-criticism, or just criticism in general comes with a purpose: It's supposed to help someone to improve in some shape or form. This might result in "changing something", but it can also be changing the way something is presented. In these aspects, the self-criticism I indulge in seems pretty double-edged.

Let's start with the ugly: There's quite the room for improvement. I had my fair share of days where I was laying in bed, thinking about what I achieved or how I felt during the day the day, and concluded that I

1. didn't make any progress on any of my goals,
2. spent most of my day browsing YouTube and Reddit, and worst of all:
3. felt pretty "meh" during most of it.

These "0-days" I want to get rid of entirely. I don't need to have my life figured out at the moment, I don't need to Min-Max every single day of mine. Hell, not even most days.

What I want is a baseline. Regardless of what it is, each day I want to be able to say: "Hey, even if I didn't achieve a lot, I managed to make progress on X". I think that's a pretty achievable goal and a good starting point.

As of writing, this is the 9th day of the new year, and I have pretty mixed feelings on my progress so far. Mentally, I'm always procrastinating "just one more hour", which slowly but surely morphs into wasting the day. While I do feel bad about it, I try to justify it to myself by saying "oh well that was only one day. Tomorrow I'll be better, for sure".

Yeah that shit doesn't work, at least not for me. A good thought exercise I've picked up somewhere was to focus on the previous day and ask yourself: "If you'd spend the next 30 years spending each day like that, where would you end up?" This can be pretty brutal, but it helps internalizing the long term consequences of short term procrastination. 30 years of baby-steps will still get you a long way in comparison to treading water for 30 years.

Generally speaking, starting a task is the largest hurdle for myself. After I start working on something, spending a few hours on something is less of a problem. Just starting the thing is my largest problem. I know that this is a somewhat common issue, but fucking hell this sounds like utter insanity. Doing the thing, logically speaking, is supposed the difficult part. Any dumbfuck can start working on something, consistency, continuous effort and actual progress is the difficult part.

There are some little tricks which can help to get over said hurdle:

• "3-2-1": Take a deep breath, count yourself down, and go get'em. Sounds stupid, but hey, as long as it works.
• The "X Minutes"-Rule: If something takes less time than X minutes, just fucking do it immediately instead of beating yourself up over the whole day. Works best for small things like vacuum cleaning.
• Being a little self-deprecating: Make sure not to do this too much, but sometimes telling oneself "quit being a bitch and clean your fucking room" can do wonders.
• Meditation: This little meditation exercise by Jonathan Blow helps examining physical and mental sensations. For some weird fucking reason, many mental thoughts can be "removed" by focussing on them, like pointing a flashlight at a shadow. It sounds utterly insane, but it has helped me before. Afterall, some temporary relief is all you need to get over the initial hurdle. I practiced this on my walks, now I need to deploy this where it matters.

More fundamentally, there are things like motivation and discipline: Motivation is the thing making me start new projects, picking up new hobbies, basically doing anything new besides work, while discipline is the thing I lack most of. Having motivation is good, being disciplined is better.

However, routine trumps them both. I don't think this necessarily works for "Deep Work", but for things like the daily walks I feel meh about it works wonders: No need to have motivation nor discipline if your brain is on auto-pilot until you step out of the apartment. "Atomic Habits" by James Clear is a good book on building habits. While I do enjoy walks in the night more, I realized that for me, walking in the morning is easier to work into my morning routine and thus leads to a higher successrate of me actually fucking walking. Bonus points for stacking these things together, like doing exercises for my back immediately after returning back home from the walk.

This rambling is nothing new for me, as I had talked to two close friends of mine about it (probably on several occasions). Both of them provided great input which helps me transform my "self-criticism" into actual criticism instead of hatred [0]:

Recognizing these shortcomings of mine is crucial. Heck, even if I spin around in circles, recognizing that one is within a circle provides new insight into the situation and is the first step into breaking out of it. It sounds super cheesy, but man that is something important to internalize. That alone can shift the entire narrative from "I'm making no progress whatsoever" to "I'm looping again. I have to change something up".

The other insight was just an innocent question: "Aren't you a bit hard on yourself?" This small question helped me to properly differentiate between proper criticism and self-deprecation. Let's shift perspective for a moment: If I were a friend of mine and that person said "boohoo, I didn't accomplish much this year" - what would I say to this person? I'd say: "You're a dumb fuck". Let's go over the list of things I want to do once more and set that into perspective:

• Do more programming:
• I (somewhat randomly) started practicing piano in september. Sure, I have neglected guitar practice, but man, my progress is not that bad for just four months. At the very least, that's way better progress than I expected, so that's a plus. And being able to play two instruments is pretty badass.
• Keep my room more clean: Yes, but this a constant process. The room will stay clean for a day or two, after which it will become dusty again. So that "goal" is quite easy to fail and impossible to reach "the end". So just vacuum more often, that's do-able.
• Read more books: Yes, but I barely read any books as a teenager. Just going over the pdfslist of finished books I have obviously improved a ton in that regard.
• Go on daily walks: Again, even some walks from time to time is/was way better than what I did years prior to that - which was nothing at all.
• Lose some weight: It was fucking christmas season. If that's not the time to stuff yourself full I don't know what is. Just keep an eye on the scale and I'll be fine.
• Maybe start a little art hobby: Sure! Sound great. Video games, programming, playing the guitar and piano and reading take up quite some time already. It's nice to be able to switch between hobbies easily, but, if I wanted to, I already have enough hobbies which I could spend enough time on.
• Work on my posture: I am (sometimes) doing the 9min exercises for my lower back. Again, compared to previous years, that's a dope improvement.
• Bachelor's thesis: I've done most of the programming part and "just" need to write things down for now. I got this.
• Being more productive: I might be more productive than I used to! I need to remind myself that last year I had more things going on at uni. Now there's only the thesis left, which I am able to do at my own pace. This means while I might waste more "total hours" in a day, I could be more productive in regards to "% of my free-time" [1].

So: Always set goals, accomplishments and problems into context. Ironically enough, one could say that writing down these thoughts is a form of procrastination, and I'd somewhat agree. But I'm off to cleaning my room and putting some hours into my thesis - because writing all of this down only to then waste the rest of the day sounds fucking moronic, doesn't it?