Alright, I know the first question to you reading this would be, what happened? Why did you miss so many days of daily blogging? Well, to be honest, I guess much of it is due to the shift in focus to my uni preparation and some of the reasoning can be attributed to my laziness in general. But I don’t like having excuses so I’m going to take a hit and claim that it’s my poor time management skills. But I can say one thing, from here on, my blogs will probably continue to be pretty random and not so frequent but while I’m free, I’m going to try my best to write a blog. Interestingly though, the theme of this post is productivity.
Since the Christmas holidays, I got carried away with the whole, “it’s a holiday so I can chill” mentality. Although it took me about a month of moderate work(3-4 hours a day) to realise, I’m really behind on my work and need to get a move on. Having realised it, it took me a further week to start actively putting in the effort to catalyse my productivity. And today, I had perhaps the most productive session in a long time. Yesterday, I discovered a channel called ‘Ari Horesh’ and he does very long live streams of himself studying almost every day. Through that channel, I discovered many other channels of the same theme which opened me up to the realisation that I’m nowhere near as productive as I think compared to these guys. So that instantly invoked me to get a move on and boost my productivity.
I set my alarm, went to bed with my Kindle reading out the final chapters of ‘Our Final Invention'(a book about AI), and soon went to sleep. I then woke up at 04:30 feeling supercharged and refreshed to have a productive day and I don’t think I’ve had a more productive day than this (ever?). I used the Pomodoro method and joined in on the live stream to get some company and the vibe of studying along with others is on another level! It encouraged me to stay focused, motivated and productive. So there I was, hustling and working through my write-up that’s due in 2 days. So I did 50 minutes of studying and then a 10-minute break. And I carried on almost entirely until 18:30 in the evening. I did miss around 3 sessions worth of studying due to my morning routine, breakfast and lunch. Although I am now trying to catch up on those missed sessions before I go back to repeat it again.
Yes, I intend to carry this on for as long as I can go really. It has proven for me to be a highly effective strategy and the best thing is that there’s company for you to constantly feel inspired. It’s really a treat for us(consumers) to find such wonderful content on the web. During those 10 minute breaks, Ari reads the comments section and has some conversations with people which is pretty chill so there is a nice balance of both productivity and relaxation.
I’m glad I’ve discovered this content at the right time. I know it’s going to be incredibly useful in:
- Completing more tasks
- Regulating my routine
- Improving my concentration
- Motivating me to study more
- Getting up early
- And much more.
There is a vast sea of tools that try to help you out with productivity although I believe nothing is as powerful as this. The motivation that comes from studying together is so strong that it can easily replace the motivation that any app may provide. Although within these live streams, I used an app called Forest which lets you plant trees upon studying for a certain amount of time. And getting distracted on the phone would cause the tree to wither and hence the entire time is untracked. So it works well in conjunction with the live streams. And I hope to use it a lot more in the coming future.
On another note, I recently subscribed to the Audible free trial in order to try it out and see whether audiobooks work for me. I’ve found the problem with audiobooks to be that they’re not really compatible with my routine and the tasks I do. But with me running daily now, I’ve found the perfect time to listen to audiobooks(during my runs). So that has enabled me to try it out for a couple of days and I must say, it’s a sweet productivity hack. It has enabled me to munch through more of my book in a shorter time(due to the increased playback speed) and, I can focus surprisingly well during my runs, so the retention has also been considerably high.
My review on the app would be that it’s a pretty well-built app which serves its purpose well, although it could improve in note-taking. As a person who takes a lot of highlights and notes while reading, I would like to have a feature to constantly annotate my ideas on the book. And Audible(despite being the biggest audiobook app) doesn’t have this feature which is kinda annoying. I’ve written plenty about note-taking and how it can be tremendously effective so including this feature would be priceless for me. It would open up new doors to the audiobook experience and would allow me to enjoy the experience a lot more. Although I do like the fact that the new Kindle’s support the audiobook listening experience thanks to their Bluetooth capability. I’ll see how the trial works out and whether it actually boosts the number of books I read per year.
If you’re interested, I’ve currently almost finished reading ‘Our Final Invention’ which is a pretty interesting take on the dangers and the general path to AI in our future. It’s an ultimate warning that we should be careful about the development of AI in an era where it’s rapidly developing. It answers many of the basic questions that we have about AI so is an excellent book for understanding AI. It makes very appealing comparisons of what could go wrong and it works through in a linear order to highlight the path that we’re likely to take and what we’re likely to end up with. I’d recommend it!
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