Alkan

My routine is becoming fairly automatic already, and I rouse myself from bed more quickly. I'm only not journalling here, every day. Most days, or every couple of days seems to work for an update here. I have other places that I also journal in for more private thoughts. I'm noticing that the most effective form of meditation I'm doing is where I'm trying to make myself aware of all consciousness simultaneously. When I come out of that, I find my ability to focus and get things done is substantially increased. I also gain a certain fluidity in my movement when I do it that way. It also substantially increases my self awareness of my own thinking, direction of thinking and feelings about that thinking. It's almost like it's so difficult to cover your whole awareness consciously that when you stop trying to do that and return to a normal state of living, it's like it's easy to stay focused. Anyways, I've rearranged my goals based on a few recent things: 4.0 GPASocializeCyclingYouTube channelSame details as above with those, though I'm going to put more effort into the socializing.

My Morning Routine ShowerMake BedMake my spinach and berry smoothieMake my coffee (essentially simultaneously)Tidy up apartment for 30 minutes (if necessary)MeditateJournal (Here)Plan dayI didn't do it in this order this morning, but I will do it in that order tomorrow morning. And the next, and the next. The more automatic this process becomes, the faster I will get through each of these. The goal is to complete the whole thing averaging in just a little over an hour (by keeping my apartment clean). I need to create my routine in a place. I need to find a place to organize my goals and routine such that it's easily visible. In the evening, I also need to be journalling, paying attention to what I did right and wrong throughout the day so that I can keep improving, while giving myself a little mental reward for doing something right. I also need a routine for the evening to make sure that I sleep properly, or perhaps, more of a set of things that interfere with sleep: Don't drink too much waterDon't eat too much and/or eating poorlyDon't eat too much saltNo alcohol lateKeep coffee to one cup in the morningToo little exerciseToo much exerciseToo much light too late (computer screen needs to be out of sight for 45 minutes before I intend to go to bed).Napping too longNot prepping for bed (hydrate early enough, eat the right amount of food, brush teeth, turn down lights, read a book)My entries seem to just be getting longer. This whole self-improvement deal is a lot of work. Which makes it fun.

I hit a month recently. I feel like I'm a completely transformed person. I'm never going back.

Coffee I drank too much yesterday. It put my mind into a mode of having racing thoughts - for a long time. I was fairly productive yesterday, but it wasn't to the degree that I am looking for. I give myself room for improvement in this area, however. I accept that it's going to take time to become more productive, but because I desire it and have made considerable progress already, I trust that it will happen. Today I made 20 grams of beans worth - about a cup and a half. This seems to be the perfect amount, and I'm going to incorporate this specific amount as the amount that I'll have each day. Details What a difference paying attention to the details of your life makes in improving oneself. It stops you from mindlessly making the same mistakes over and over again, creating rapid adjustment. Pomodoros as Measurement Today I am designating a new unit of time measurement - the pomodoro, from the pomodoro technique. However, a pomodoro for me is 45 minutes. Measuring things in pomodoros makes it easier to block out time for said activities, and drives in the fact that it's a rather concentrated effort (thus making 45 minutes worth more like 1.5-3 hours of less focused effort). Internet I am also going to place more emphasis on mindfulness about using the computer. I'm a very curious person - this seems to be my greatest challenge in terms of not using the internet for a long period of time. I spend a lot of time finding information, trying to scratch my mental itch. A good way to mitigate that itch is to ask what you're actually going to get out of that information. If it's something practically useful in the present moment, then it's worth looking up. If it's not going to be useful now and the information is low priority, just don't bother. And, if it's perhaps low priority but something I'd really like to know - I can write it down and look it up later. It only generates more questions when you start answering them. That said, obviously with my informational thirst, I have a valuable resource at my disposal. It's just a matter of prioritizing the usage of that drive and being mindful of the urge to simply go and dig for the information. Decisiveness - Making a Plan and Acting on it I've noticed that when I'm doing a task, I will almost always get frustrated and stressed out by everything else having some level of priority, perhaps higher than what I am currently doing. This is another area that I need work in. For instance, today I am going to finish cleaning my room so that I have a clear space to be productive in. However, I notice that I am becoming indecisive, and stop doing anything because I believe that what I have to work on is a higher priority than a clean room. Well, it is, however, I'll be more productive overall for the day if I start with my room and then work in it with a clean mind. So, I need a sort of mental flowchart for task designation. So, in fact, I need to make cleanliness a much higher priority, since it makes me more productive in general. Still, if my room is a mess and I have something due the next day, obviously I have to work with what I've got or go somewhere else. But, this is why I quit games in the first place - so that none of this stuff becomes too much of a problem. Then, I have to come up with better methods of planning out and doing my homework. Daily practice on these things makes it much easier - every time you sleep on something it crystallizes, slightly. It would be far better to practice something intensely one hour a day for a week than to attempt to practice for 7 hours in one day. So, I need to learn to stop working on things, accepting less of a particular thing in a day so that I'm doing more of everything throughout the week. Basically, the lesson learned from this is that I need to plan out my day instead of just mindlessly plowing at it so that I'm not trying to make decisions on the fly. I have too many things to manage to attack it willy-nilly. And, I have to have patience - accepting the fact that I cannot tackle everything at once, allowing things to remain unfinished while I work on things by my planning.

Today I came here to take my goals from this post and write them down in a place where they will be visible every day. I noticed something along the way: I'm getting distracted by a few things on the internet on my way to this post. They aren't exactly unproductive distractions, but they're not what I set out to do right now. So, in that, I realize now that I need to have more of a conscious mental presence when I am on the internet so that I'm not getting delayed or distracted by it, and that I'm doing what I actually intend to do with my time. Of course, some free browsing time (on useful things) is good for staying creative and absorbing large amounts of information. But there's a time for that, and it's morning - hence this isn't the time. Meditation is allowing me to be more aware of things like this as they happen. I've been quite productive lately thanks to meditation and cutting out games. Now I am making ground on more of these little areas where things still go wrong because I've created a good baseline of improvement.

Ah, an artist. Art is one of my passions. You did well on that piece - emphasis created on the flower in the sun is well done, with that extreme contrast. Also, the light and the dark are well balanced in the space on the painting. Keep it up! I also wonder if I have ADHD. I've never seen anyone about it, but I can relate to just about all of the inattentive-type issues but few of the hyperactive traits. Meditation seems to be having a highly positive impact for me. It's even impacting my art and music - I start to think about the lines as I place them down, instead of getting this messy crap. And, with music it's like I'm more aware of my playing and can apply finer nuance and really be in the moment with the piece itself, instead of being sort of lost in thought while my hands make the motion on the keys.

Consistency is irreplaceable. Goals for 2016: Get into research4.0 GPAHave my YouTube Channel with at least one video on it by summer, and develop a clear vision for it.Low bodyfat percentage and high power on the bikeImprove social life (vague, I know, but with everything else I have going on, that's why it's at this place on the list - it still ties into a lot of the things on the list, however, with school and cycling)Aggressive, for sure, but doable, I believe. That is why I have titled this entry "Consistency is irreplaceable." So, in making the connection strong, I am going to list out exactly what I have to do every day, or as close to every day as I possibly can (relapse is often caused by unattainable perfectionism) to get to those goals. So, to accomplish goal 1, I'm going to have to go around contacting professors, every day, digging around the research going on at my university, and preparing myself socially for that, researching what they do so that I don't just come in like any other guy "oh, I'll do this here." 2. I have to do homework/studying every day for a good 3-6 hours, some days, 10. So, I'll list out how much I am going to have to do. To maintain attention, focus and efficiency, I'll need to meditate. I also need to consistently go to office hours, so I'll be making each professor's once a week. 3. I am going to put a minimum of 45 minutes a day of researching, practicing the tools, etc. and for this channel to work. Probably will be pretty close to a maximum 7 hours a week on this activity with everything else. 4. I am going to have to bike consistently and eat healthily. I have very little time, so while I am still on break, I need to learn 10-12 very quick, healthy recipes. And, since I will have little time, I'm going to have to focus on short distance efforts, and maybe do one long ride on the weekends (only 40 required for the "long" ride, 60+ would be ideal). My bike training is a difficult thing to plan, but I can list out what I am doing here. I'll do two sets of intervals during the week, one time trial, and one long ride. That should give me about 6 hours. Commuting to campus will also be training. 5. Meet with one new person every two weeks. Sounds like not much, but there's a huge amount already going on. More thoughts for the day: planning and journaling are motivating, making the tasks clearer and more enjoyable. Building these habits over time is not something that I can go without.

I learned that the hard way. Lol.

Meditation is largely going well. My ability to stay focused on it varies by the day. It is having a gradual impact on my ability to focus. I am now starting to think of new ways to continually put my brain in a state of challenge. I'm working on developing a routine that creates a state of constant mental challenge, and likewise, enhancement of mental capabilities. So, in that light, one of my new projects is going to be developing stimuli that challenge me to challenge my brain. In that process, with mindfulness meditation, I'm getting a greater sense of what it actually feels like to think hard - I'm getting better at accessing that state of being mentally challenged, as well as enjoying that state. I remember noticing that I had particularly strong faculties after a particularly demanding semester. I am going to challenge myself like that every day. More notes: Use the parts of the brain appropriate for a specific task when learning. I.e. train your intuition for social skills instead of just analytically trying to do everything. Train your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex when training self-control. There are no studies done on training oneself creatively over the course of years to improve fluid/general intelligence, but intelligence is related to the connectedness of the brain, especially between distant regions in the brain.

I'm thinking about thinking. Modulating your thoughts is a really good way to stay in control. I'm trying to think about how to pay attention to some thoughts and ignore other thoughts. For instance, at first glance, enjoying science fiction might not seem so beneficial. Except that I have a deep fascination with and love of technology that is fueled by that fantasy - that fascination drives me to work harder towards my goals, to find it more interesting picking it apart and making something with it.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141028082355.htm Meditation improves creativity. I noticed this almost immediately, when I restarted meditating the first time in months, I had to stop three times because I had three great ideas spring into my mind. Rapid creativity is an awesome effect of meditation.

Develop exercises that challenge your short term memory. N back training is a common one I keep seeing as effective. Basically, you have a series of letters. When you see a repeat of the same letter at a specific interval, then you push a button. So, it's really quite challenging. So, it's not like remembering what a word means 10 minutes later, which is just short term memory. It's being able to hold a large amount of information in your conscious mind at once and work with it.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/you-can-increase-your-intelligence-5-ways-to-maximize-your-cognitive-potential/ I thought that this article was pretty illuminating on what does and doesn't work - namely, when you become efficient at a skill, it's not an increase in intelligence. It's constantly being in a state of using your brain to solve new problems that improves fluid intelligence. I.e. if you take an IQ test 20 times and eventually get 160, it doesn't mean that you have an IQ of 160. Furthermore, IQ tests deal with rather simple information: http://tap.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/24/6/795 Humans are notoriously bad at the things that IQ tests actually test. We'll probably make AI that solves IQ tests long before the Turing test. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/04/25/0801268105.abstract That one is from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (scientific gold standard, basically), which is referenced in the Scientific American article. However, focus is also a completely different area, and is much more trainable than intelligence.

I am starting a project to really improve my innate productivity over this winter break by a huge margin. I realized that I need to turn it into a research project if I really want to get the most out of it. This article so far has totally blown me away: https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201312/meet-the-super-taskers It offers up traits of highly productive people - strong working memory and an ability to tune out distractions. We all know that the brain is changed by what we do, so, naturally we want to improve in those specific areas: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic/201203/training-working-memory-why-and-how Note: that article says play chess. Don't - it could easily lead back to a loophole of game playing for this particular crowd. Err on the side of caution with that one and just avoid it. Anyways, meditation works as well: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/03/27/0956797612459659.short?rss=1&%3bssource=mfr And, funny enough, meditation also helps tune out distractions by making you more aware of what's going on within you.

Thank you! Since there are still things I use the internet for, I am going to make a list of things that count as acceptable and basically shove everything aside. Facebook scrolling just is not acceptable. Basically, this forum is acceptable, anything that I can definitively say helps me build a youtube channel is acceptable and anything that helps me learn (i.e. reading books, watching useful videos). No more mindlessness. Not even for 10 minutes. No more watching random videos. Just enough. Another thought: focus on the rewards of not using, the feeling of relief of not succumbing to the urge, feeling the time waster distraction vanishing.

The semester ended. Instead of rewarding myself with internet time, I decided to ride my bike and start cleaning up the mess in my apartment from studying. I also am challenging myself to meditate for 15-30 minutes per day for 30 days, and train myself to do it without a guide (it actually seems to work better for me without one because I can stop thinking in words and kind of just plug into a non-lingual state of mind and skip directly to the stuff that gets me into a pretty deep state of meditation). I'm essentially cutting out activities that are overstimulating and cause addiction. What I'm finding is that my reward triggers seem to stimulate more easily as a state of existing on a daily basis when I am taking care of myself and NOT overstimulating myself. I never want to go back. I'm overwhelmingly happy. I forgot about this part the last time I cut out my distractions. Except I didn't account for complacency last time and I didn't view it as permanent. I feel amazing right now, like anything is possible.

Today's notes: living in the moment, information intake It has a lot to do with focus, in this specific case, letting go of control, essentially. I'm studying right now and the urge to distract myself seems to be stemming from the fact that I have limited time, and that I can't just let go and let myself not be in control of the time and do the best with it that I can. Information intake is like flow across a membrane. It takes time. Learning takes time and the rate at which you can learn/take in information and process it is limited. Imagine a pump pushing water through a thick filter. It takes a lot of force to very mildly increase the rate of flow across the filter. Taking in information is the same - you can try really hard but you're going to suffer from diminishing returns. You'll get more information in by spending more time on taking in that information. This visual is for procrastinators, like me. If you accept that your rate of learning is capped, and that you need large amounts of time to take in information adequately, you'll be more aware of the damage you're doing while procrastinating. It's an intuitive counter-effect to feeling like you have time - you need to use that time, or damage will be done! This morning so far: I've vastly improved my ability to focus, though it took a week to set in. I'm more focused than I've been in years. I'm taking natural breaks for perhaps 2 minutes every 15 minutes of focused effort, sort of like a natural pomodoro technique without needing to use a timer or the like. It's all thanks to the improvement in sleep, routine and cutting out distractions. Stimulating distractions make whatever I need to focus on far less interesting because they keep constantly pushing up against my awareness when I'm taking part in them. It's strongly worth noting just how damaging these distractions actually are to life, and why, if I ever resumed gaming, I would lose my attention span because I'd be constantly jonesing for a distraction. That damage would be done. I feel like my measurable IQ has jumped 20 points because of this barrier between my brain and the world being lifted.

I was actually referring to it. Its more difficult when the failure is born of internal issues of willpower, thanks to gaming. This place helps me validate that it's essentially the same, internal or external failures. Both are experience that help you learn, and not just learn, but learn intuitively.

I had a trigger for distraction and unproductive behaviors today. Instead, I meditated and took a nap. Then returned to work. I created a flowchart of the addiction cycle, but how you also break out of it. It also caused me to draw the conclusion that the difference between productive people and unproductive people isn't actually that big - people who are less productive face greater rates of failure, which destroys the reward cycle for effort and puts them on track for a reward cycle for addictive behaviors. Being able to cope with failure after working hard, and being able to recognize and prevent complacency from setting in are the keys to permanent change. Edit: I've sort of noticed in my flowchart that the key to breaking out of the addiction cycle (painful stimuli->need for escape->use addiction to escape->create more damage->painful stimuli), is how much grit you have. How tough you are, how emotionally resilient you are. All of those learned things.

What's even sadder is when players of these games defend the creators and claim that they're not trying to addict players to make more money.

I saw the video on it. I suggested writing about something in a notebook instead, jotting down thoughts, or if you're an artist, sketching. Work on something creative that gets you closer to your goals. Or, anything that's relaxing and productive, but mainly that doesn't trigger the short circuit of doing things that immediately alleviate boredom. Boredom is a badge of honor. Hell, boredom is a luxury, it means you have time on your hands.

Unfortunately I work at a place where knowing about alcohol is not a requirement per se, but its a strong pressure. Likewise, I might be moving on from that job and finding something else. New plan of action: since I am in college, hate part time jobs, and have a lot of work to do on myself, I am going to make my own YouTube channel, where I do a unique take on self-actualization. I was inspired by FightMediocrity, and I am confident in my ability to work hard at it as a project and learn what I need to over time to set it up. It'll be my 2016 project, though I'll be starting it when finals are over, building up the necessary skills. Today: I meditated again, and I am already finding cleaning up my place going from irritating task to soothing activity. I made a stir fry of tofu and vegetables. It's amazing what happens when you have even modestly increased willpower.

In getting good sleep, I need to eat correctly and not put bad things into my body. I am cutting out alcohol, most of my caffeine intake, bringing in a lot more fresh fruits, vegetables, etc. There was a point in time when I ate an extremely healthy diet - I essentially did it based on getting proper nutrients, paying attention to the diets of people who live in regions with extreme longevity, as well as paying attention to how inflamed I feel (there is this odd feeling I get when I eat something that just doesn't sit right). Anyways, it involves a lot of raw vegetables, but also things like quinoa, corn, sweet potatoes, etc. It might sound disgusting to some, but I just drank a smoothie of spinach, a banana, berries, almond milk with some raw garlic thrown in. Coriander was also added to flavor it. It sounds bad on paper, but in practice it is like drinking the smell of a garden. When I drank it, a wave of relief came over me, since I was hungover today and have been eating generally unhealthy things. I also just meditated, and plan to do that each day to build up the willpower. Thoughts for the day: You can control yourself by controlling your thoughts. You can save willpower by being efficient in what you choose to think about. Don't fight temptation - distract yourself from it. Focus on the rewards that come from doing the work, especially the instantaneous feeling of productivity. There is a positive feeling associated with feeling productive, and the more you imagine that feeling, the more you will crave productivity. At least, that's how it goes with me.

That's why I'd just stop watching the storylines of games too. It's not worth a relapse. I mean, what else are you doing in life that makes you want to not play games? Those are important things, and the storyline of some game, while entertaining and intriguing, just isn't worth losing out on those important things.

Today's entry: I've been severely underestimating the power of waking up early, no matter what. I want this daily routine to take precedence over the others: it is the one that will allow a greater number of things to fall into place. I woke up early today after a late shift at work, and yet, I'm still energized by the cortisol and sense of having a large chunk of time to work on things that I need to, as well as being mentally refreshed. I also need to pay attention to how good it feels so that it becomes a reward cycle, and thus a habit. I mean every day. No sleeping in. Going to bed early is the way to get extra sleep. Out of bed by 6, every day, is to be the norm. I don't need absolutely 8 hours of sleep every night, and by not getting up early I shoot myself in the foot anyways because it never gets my body into a solid sleep cycle anyways. I'm far too ambitious to worry about not getting a couple hours of sleep here and there, and to worry about dealing with feeling slightly uncomfortable in getting out of bed in the morning. I just need to motivate myself out of bed with things like coffee if it's particularly difficult, as well as the feeling of being energized. No matter how poor my sleep was the previous night, I still have a great amount of energy if I force myself up early. It's just how I operate. So, main focus here is to become a habitual early riser. Sleeping in is a dangerous temptation, one that has the potential to wipe out an entire day of productivity.