Man it's way too late for this, but here I go. First things first: What have I been up to? What is my progress on things?

I finished the book "The mythical man-month". That was a good read, would recommend to other programmers / people interested in programming. This book helped me gain a new perspective on the creation of software, the intrinsic difficulty creating these systems and more. I'm surprised how well some the contents of this book aged.

I started transcribing some sheet music for piano of an arrangement of which I couldn't find / purchase any existing sheet music. My lack of music theory comprehension makes this a bit tricky, but so far I can manage. I'm missing roughly 40 seconds worth of music in my transcription. The rest should mostly be repetition. I should probably clean my transcription up afterwards, but I'm not sure whether I can be bothered doing that later. Once I'm done with that I'll probably upload it either here or on my other website. And I still need to create a post describing how I did these things in the first place, because, although it's tedious and stupid, it actually somewhat works (for me).

My piano practice is making steady progress. The piece I'm currently practicing will probably occupy me for several more months, and even after that I'm certain there are two or more parts which I won't come close to getting right. However, it's still lots of fun. And additionally, I have >2/3 of it (somewhat) memorized already, so that's a big chunk of work already done.

What about my programming projects? I think I haven't spent a single minute on them. Yikes, that's gotta improve.

Daily walks? There's been quite a bunch of snow lately, so I don't feel bad for skipping on that.

Ok and now for the main culprit of my ramblings: My fucking thesis.

It's coming along. I, sadly, still have some 0-days [0], which I absolutely fucking hate. But I think, given a few actual productive fucking days, I can be done with the main part of the thesis soon. The pages have been filling themselves pretty pretty much automatically thanks to the visualizations, further explanations and overviews over various topics. So I don't think I have to worry in that regard.

What have I been wasting my time on then? This month it probably was Reddit and YouTube. And here comes the worst part: I don't think I particularly enjoyed either of them.

Reddit? Waste of time. Full stop. Even the memes are feeling stale [1]. So I have been heavily reducing my reddit usage over the last few days, and my (current) plan is to completely drop using it all together.

Dropping reddit made me use YouTube more extensively. Fugg. And even here: Given a day spent mostly on YouTube, how many videos did I actually enjoy? Honestly, ~1 hour? Maybe two? Certainly not most of the day. So next big plan: Fucking drop that bitch as well. Given the time I spent, I might very well be addicted to YouTube, which has towill fucking stop.

I feel like I wrote this before, but still: I want to fill my day with things that are either full of enjoyment or full of progress[2]. This involves reflecting on each day, and deciding which activities I did were worth doing.

This worked fine for reddit and other stuff, but why not YouTube? I've been realizing that I try incredibly hard to not be bored. And that lack of boredom is problematic: Most of my days are filled with "just enough"-lackluster activities to just be not bored enough. On top of that come the actual fun activities (playing piano, writing this, reading, hanging out / chatting / watching stuff with friends).

I need to embrace boredom. Not because the state of boredom is something to strive for, but because it is boredom which drives us to fulfilling activities. Neither do I mean that I need to be either productive or having fun throughout the whole day. I want boredom to focus my time: Explore things, learn things, do the task I didn't want to do because what else am I going to do otherwise? Might as well spend my time working or improving myself at doing x. Boredom should drive me to either be productive (because what else should I do otherwise?) or do to activities I truly enjoy doing.

Here's my weakness: It's the morning. I made food. Well, eating is nice, but also boring. So I'm gonna open up some YouTube-video to watch while eating. But after I'm done eating, I probably won't stop the video half-way. And depending on the video series / topic, I probably won't stop after finishing that video either. Minutes become hours, and there goes my time.

That shit won't fly anymore (or at the very least, way less than before). I need to be on my own and become bored.

• "I'm too tired to be productive right now": This is a whole separate issue on its own, but for now: Fine. But this will now mean that I'm too tired to watch videos as well.
• "But I'm bored": Well then you aren't that fucking tired after all, are you? I can't be simultaneously "too tired" and bored. If I truly were too tired, I wouldn't mind not doing anything. This shit is called resting, and resting is fine.
• "But I don't wanna do x right now": Fine. Do y instead. But you won't spend the whole day e.g. on the piano. So after a while, you will become bored of that as well. Repeat until too bored to do anything but work.

So it's time to stop bullshitting myself. Become bored. Embrace boredom. Let the boredom guide myself to improvement.