karabas

Day 2/120 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Pomodorro Lvl 2 (56/100) Sleep before midnight x0 (longest streak: 4) Spiritual Routine: 0/7 Sleep: 1am-6:45am, 7:30am-11:30am I'm re-starting this journal, although I'm going to have to put it on pause in 10 days while I'll be on pilgrimage in Saudi. It's actually been going pretty amazing in a number of ways. I've been super productive: I'm on target for doing 40 work hours (or even more!) by end of Saturday, which I don't think I've ever done. I've been going to the gym daily (my wife and I got a deal: $10 for 2 weeks of gym for the both of us) for 45-60 minutes a day. I think it's mostly due to the fact that we're staying with someone else. Meals aren't really a responsibility. Neither is groceries or anything else of that sort. I basically wake up and do work, go to the gym, and go to sleep. I haven't fixed my sleep but I'm slowly working towards it. Also my spiritual routine has taken a hit and I need to revive that, but it's mostly a problem of sleep. If I can get up on time and stop wasting so many hours on sleep (I've been sleeping for 10+ hours a day on average), I'd have time for it. Work's going well. I wish I had the time to work on my business, but right now I'm swamped with client work at great rates, so I can't complain. I'm also taking nearly 2 weeks off for the pilgrimage and then I'll be traveling and working a lot less for Christmas break (going to visit my family), so I need to make up for all that time spent not working. Video stuff has been a problem, but I've stayed off of them for 2 days now, so that's an improvement. I've gotten stuck with a new bad habit: sudokus. I can solve pretty much everything except for the most ridiculously hard ones, but it takes me close to 45 minutes to solve a difficult puzzle and I've been doing them all the time. So that's another time sink. Anyway, that's the update for now.

Wow, first post in nearly two weeks. I had a friend come stay over with us last week, which meant that I was taking him around and had less time for work & other productive activities. Then I got sick, then we traveled. I'm still recovering and I'm currently abroad at my in-laws' place. So far I'm struggling to be productive here, there is no work space and I'm constantly distracted by other things. In two weeks or so, we're traveling to Saudi for the umrah and I'm taking those 10 days completely off. So I gotta put in as much work as I can between now and then. Let's see what I can do. I haven't gamed or come close to it - that's 83 days now since I quit, so I'm nearing my 90 day mark with barely a hint of any craving or risk of falling back into it (I did see a mobile game today that I was tempted to buy until I remembered about my detox). That's progress, I guess! I haven't been good about videos, though ? But I think I have the opportunity here as it's much harder for me to watch stuff here. If I get momentum here and I definitely won't watch anything in Mecca/Medina (God willing), I could set myself up for 4 weeks of video-free time. That's a lot of momentum! Let's hope I can get it going again. Yeah I found a very easy workaround that so far has kept me watching stuff. It's clearly a bug and I've contacted support, but they've been quiet since I've sent them screenshots. And yeah, I work from home - coworking space isn't an option. And honestly, people other than my wife seeing my watch videos isn't a big pain point for me (unless it's something embarrassing). So it's a bit of a dilemma ?

Day 0/120 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Pomodorro Lvl 2 (67/100) Sleep before midnight x1 (longest streak: 4) Spiritual Routine: 4/7 Sleep: 12:10am - 7:20am I'm still watching a game show from my home country. I think nostalgia is one of my most powerful relapse methods. I used to watch this show with my parents as a kid and it was good times, and now I'm watching it again. Sigh. At least it's somewhat intellectually stimulating? However, despite all that, I've been able to be fairly productive. Last week I was able to finally do 40 hours of work (this is not counting stuff I do on the side, like work on my business, read Qur'an, and a class I recently started taking in Islamic Law & Theology, etc). I literally don't remember the last time I was able to do something like that since I started freelancing. I wish I could say that my plan for the next month or so is to ensure that I can keep this up, but the reality is that we're doing so much traveling, it's going to wreck my habits. Oh, speaking of travel, completely forgot to mention: my wife and I are going on Umra, which is a minor version of the Hajj to Mecca (can be done any time of the year, unlike Hajj, and has a lot fewer components). We've done it once before a few years back, but we decided to go again because there's a particular teacher leading the group this year. He hasn't lead groups for years and he's probably the most influential person in our lives in terms of understanding our religion, so it's a great opportunity. But overall I think it's a great opportunity for self transformation. While we obviously believe that God hears and sees all, there's something different about standing in front of the Ka'ba. It's almost like you're standing in front of Him. It's a very awesome experience, in the original sense of the word "awesome". So I want to drag my broken, flawed, Netflix-watching butt there and just pray my heart out. A lot of Islamic spirituality is based on the recognition that you can't do anything except through Him. I don't think I was there 2 years back when we went, but after struggling with myself over gaming and entertainment for the last year, I think I have a much stronger recognition of that. We're also going to Medina, where the Prophet (peace be upon him) is buried. It's not part of the rites of Umra (or Hajj), but very few miss out on going there. It's very interesting to see how the two cities feel. Mecca is the city of God and it's almost overwhelming. It's majestic, but crowded, busy, bustling, constantly moving. Medina is the city of the Prophet and it's serene. The crowds are still there, but somehow you just feel at peace as soon as you enter. People don't push and shove. And it's amazing that you can still pray in the spot where the Prophet prayed. They know which columns he prayed next to, which he leaned against and rested, where he gave the sermon. It's hard to access that part of the mosque (the current mosque takes up an area larger than the city of Medina was at the time of the Prophet) because of how many people come, but you can usually find a spot around 3-4am. And most of all, both cities are like a prayer vortex, lol. My wife has a list of the prayers she made while over there, we've seen them come about one after another, many times out of nowhere. My experience is similar. So it's also just a time of pouring your heart out to God about everything that's on it, big and small. So, looking forward to it, God willing.

Cool man, sounds good. Rest is definitely good ?

Day 0/120 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Pomodorro Lvl 2 (62/100) Sleep before midnight x0 (longest streak: 4) Spiritual Routine: 2/7 Sleep: 3:35am - 7:15am, 7:45am - 12:35pm I haven't been doing great with videos lately. And yesterday I stayed up late due to going over to a friend's and coming home late. But it's actually not as bad as it looks. My video consumption hasn't been overwhelming and I'm still being quite productive. I'm hoping I can actually hit 40 work hours this week, which I don't think I've done for over a year. That would be huge. And I'm hoping I can go back to my early sleep schedule soon. I think I figured out the solution: I make a mental target of going to sleep at 11pm (so I have to stop working by 10pm). At best, I'm asleep by 11. But worst case scenario is if stuff comes up, I'm still asleep before midnight. Well, except yesterday... lol

Day 1/120 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Pomodorro Lvl 2 (58/100) Sleep before midnight x1 (longest streak: 4) Spiritual Routine: 0/7 Sleep: 11:00pm - 7:15am Relapsed again the day before, but yesterday went by well. I've been aiming my workload every day to add up to 40 work hours per week over 6 days (that's 6:40/day). I successfully did that Mon-Wed, adding up to 20 hours. I relapsed Wed night and stayed up super late, woke up late on Thursday and was very groggy. Didn't get a lot of work done and wife wanted to hang out, so I decided to make it my day off, forget work, and head to bed early. So I slept at 11! For the first time in ever, I got 8 hours of (nearly) straight sleep. I say nearly because I woke up randomly at around 3am, got up for a few minutes, and then went back to sleep. But either way, I woke up feeling refreshed and for the first time not having to fight myself about staying up. I'll still nap during the day, but I think I'll make it a 15-20 minute nap. And I'm going to try to be asleep by 11 again. Overall this should save me sleep time as I'll be totalling around 8.5 hours instead of the 9-10 I was doing by sleeping at 12. Sleeping at 11 should also make it possible for me to occasionally get up before dawn so that I could fast & pray some night prayers. Dawn is late nowadays, around 6am, so if I'm up at 5 (still 6 hours of sleep), I'll have time to make a meal, eat, and do some prayers. Not bad!

Nice! Do you have some time off after midterms? If so, what are your plans?

-_-;; Dude, I was an overachiever in school/uni too, but 97.5% is pretty damn good. Although, good on you for having high standards for this stuff.

Nice man! Looks like you've got this in the bag. Not to be a downer, but be particularly careful in this period of time since you're going to be tired. Also, once you're done, you're going to have an urge to relax probably. Make sure it's not through games and the like.

Day 1/120 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Pomodorro Lvl 2 (56/100) Sleep before midnight x0 (longest streak: 4) Spiritual Routine: 1/7 Sleep: 3:00am - 7:05am, 7:45am - 12:45pm Yesterday was better. Went to bed late mostly because I was working. Once I realized I'm no longer being productive, I wrapped up and went to bed. Hopefully today I can get back to sleep before midnight...

Yeah, I'm down man. How would you keep my password tho? Should I just type a random string, message it to you, and delete my message?

Day 0/120 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Pomodorro Lvl 2 (48/100) Sleep before midnight x0 (longest streak: 4) Spiritual Routine: 0/7 Sleep: 6:45am - 12:45pm Gah! I hate you, Netflix. Gonna try this BlockSite extension @JustTom recommended. If not, might need to do some more hardcore blocking, but I'm hoping this will just serve as a reminder not to watch crap. EDIT: Just got the extension... it seems that you can just toggle it off? Is there a way make that more difficult?

True, although I'm going to try to use a white label platform and be active in continuously developing the course over time. The audience is huge, I don't think it'll be possible to exhaust it, as long as I continue to be active in content production, etc. Nice! Thanks. Maybe I should do that for Netflix & YT...

An online course. It's a niche with tons of interest and only one decent (but super expensive) course to serve it. It's not a simple 5 videos course though, I'd need to record quite a lot of material + all the marketing content. So it's a lot of upfront work, plus I'm completely clueless in the legal & tax department, so I have to spend on that as well. So I'm going to try to get all my marketing content done by new year, launch the company and marketing in Jan, work on recording key lessons (that I've already outlined) and sell a "beta" course to test the waters, then finish the course and hopefully scale up the marketing once it's been optimized. It's a lot of work and I don't get paid properly until it's in full swing, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to meet my deadlines. But let's see. If it works well over the next couple of years, I have a lot of other idea for how to diversify the income.

Day 5/120 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Pomodorro Lvl 2 (42/100) Sleep before midnight x0 (longest streak: 4) Spiritual Routine: 4/7 Sleep: 1:20am-7:05am, 2pm-4pm I ended up not napping during the day yesterday, which made me really tired towards the evening. And you know how being tired affects decision-making. I stayed up late for absolutely no reason. At least I got a ton of work done.

Day 4/120 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Pomodorro Lvl 2 (40/100) Sleep before midnight x2 (longest streak: 4) Spiritual Routine: 3/7 Sleep: 12:35am-7:05am Staying up two days ago did help me reset the schedule... but for some reason I couldn't sleep at night despite the exhaustion and only fell asleep around 3:30am, despite going to bed at 12. Last night was bad too, I woke up maybe 4 times during the night. Still, feeling a lot more rested today, will take a nap again in a few hours, so hopefully this will be a productive day. My body is probably just confused by my going to sleep earlier than I'm used to. Might take a few days to adjust. And yeah, I was late to bed by 35 minutes last night, but that was out of my control. I stopped working at 11 sharp, so I'm counting it as an early sleep day, partially just to give myself some momentum. My productivity isn't as great as it was last week, but I'd say it's at about 80%. It's definitely hella better than when I was hardcore gaming or binging Netflix shows. And I'm now on day 60 of no games! So a lot to be thankful for. Videos are still a problem... not that I binge watch or stay up late, but I do watch stuff on occasion. I don't generally watch "random" stuff, I end up reading something online and wanting to watch a video about it. And I started reading news websites again and they also have some videos, so I occasionally watch those. Gah, I hate the news. And it looks I'm replacing my video habits with reading news. As much as I hate it, it's probably a healthier habit than video, so one thing at a time. Oh and one more piece of good news: I've been taking ~25 minutes a day to work on my business idea. It's not a lot, but it's actually yielding some results, which is a welcome change. My goal right now is to try to finish up marketing materials before the new year. That was I can actually register the business in 2019 (to avoid doing taxes for 2018), build the website, launch a beta of my product, and then plugin the ready marketing. It's still a ton of work. I've dropped the ball a lot of times (I started working on this idea at the beginning of this year and was hoping to launch in the summer originally), likely I'll drop it again. But the feeling of actually working towards it is good. I've spent my life daydreaming about stuff I'd do in the future. I've started projects many a time, but I never finished any of them. Actually accomplishing something would be a gigantic milestone in my life, even if the business idea itself fails. Anyway, my job is to try. God is the One who grants success (or doesn't). I'm OK with either, as long as I don't stop trying

Day 2/120 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Pomodorro Lvl 2 (25/100) Sleep before midnight x0 (longest streak: 4) Spiritual Routine: 1/7 Sleep: 1:30-7:00am Better, although I had some "life admin" tasks (like booking flights and hotels and the like) that I had to do that ended up taking up half my day. But once again, no videos and fairly productive. Went to bed late still yesterday and talked in bed with my wife for a while too, so I'm pretty exhausted. Hopefully staying up today will help me get back to my early-to-bed schedule.

Trust a guy who worked with stem cells for a living: medschool grads make a ton more money. That's the problem with research (at least in the US): it's fun, but you get paid crap. An engineer with a B.Sc. from a good university makes more money than a Ph.D. in biology does in research.

Nice man. I get why you're doing a journal here - I'm hoping to keep my journal going even after I succeed completely detoxing off of games and entertainment, because I don't know of another community like this. It's interesting, I have similar goals in terms of wealth, health, etc (love Elon... although Tai not so much lol), but I'm 30. So man, you're way ahead of the curve. Good for you! Hope this project works out well!

Day 1/120 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Pomodorro Lvl 2 (20/100) Sleep before midnight x0 (longest streak: 4) Spiritual Routine: 0/7 Sleep: 1:30-7:00am, 7:45-11:45am Back on track (almost), although I didn't get to bed on time. Pushed too much stuff off until close to bedtime because I was trying to squeeze enough work in. But no videos! Also, got an email that my Steam account is deleted. $500 worth of games gone (couldn't sell it because it's against their terms of use, plus most of my games are actually old, so they weren't worth that much). It's been 57 days since I last gamed and aside from an occasional pang of a craving, I don't really miss them. I'm definitely still struggling with YouTube, TV shows, etc, but I'm hopeful that gaming is behind me. Of course, I still gotta be careful about triggers: once an addict, always an addict. My spiritual routine isn't completely broken, by the way. I've maintained reading Qur'an in the mornings, it's the evening part that I've been missing out on. I leave it until too late and then I'm sleep and I just go to bed. Thanks, man. Yeah, I don't mind overall. I'm back on track today, so it was just a small hiccup for me, but hopefully it was a big help for him.

Day 0/120 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Pomodorro Lvl 2 (15/100) Sleep before midnight x0 (longest streak: 4) Spiritual Routine: 0/7 Sleep: 1:30-7:00am, 7:30-11:00am I had a hiccup over the last couple of days. That day of my last post, I found out my Qur'an teacher's wife is in the hospital. He's a sweet old man who spends his day teaching the Qur'an and nothing else, he's dirt poor but doesn't mind. The problem is that public health insurance here sucks - it only covers about 50% and you still have to pay the full sum up front and you get the money back later. And the hospitalization cost was what he makes in a year. Thankfully, this is a "developing" country and for a Westerner, the cost isn't all that much. I posted about it on Facebook, some friends of mine who know the teacher shared, and we raised the full amount (and more) overnight. I was able to give him the cash the next day. Gotta love Muslims and their generosity (average donation was $80 and somebody sent $500... and vast majority of donors don't know my teacher and don't live in this country). So overall great news, but the downside for me personally was that I stayed up late handling this fundraising stuff, woke up early to give the teacher the money, and was super tired... and you know what happens when you're tired. I totally relapsed, rewatched a favorite TV show of mine, stayed up late. That Khabib vs McGregor fight didn't help, although I didn't watch it live at least (very happy that McGregor got his butt handed to him after all the vile crap that he said to Khabib... also, who the hell tries to pull that with a Dagestani?). Anyway, hoping that today will go better. I went to bed late, but not crazy late, got decent rest, and I feel like I can get back on the horse. So let's hope this was just a short blip. I got 3 more weeks until I'm traveling again and that's probably going to mess up my routine, so it'd be great if I squeezed everything I can from the next 21 days.

Exciting! Congrats ?

Day 4/120 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Pomodorro Lvl 2 (12/100) Sleep before midnight x4 (longest streak: 3) Spiritual Routine: 4/7 Sleep: 12:20-4:30am, 5:30-10:30am Yesterday was a bit messed up. I watched some videos at the beginning of the day because this stupid song from a video was stuck in my head on repeat for the last week and I thought that maybe listening to it would help get rid of it. No chance, not making that mistake again. I still had a productive day, got a lot of stuff done. I've been putting in a lot of work hours - feels pretty good! Went to bed a bit late because wife is dealing with some stuff and she wanted to talk about it. She was up late and I randomly woke up at night to use the washroom and we talked some more. Hence my weird sleep routine last night. Today's probably not going to be a 100% day, but I'm going to try to make the best of it.

Day 3/120 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Pomodorro Lvl 2 (7/100) Sleep before midnight x3 (longest streak: 3) Spiritual Routine: 3/7 Sleep: 12:10am - 6:50am, 1-3pm Another awesome day, super productive. So far all 3 days I've wasted a lot of time right after my nap, not sure what that's about. I gotta figure out some kind of habit that'll get me back into productivity after waking up. I also remember that I did manage to have about 2 weeks like this half a year ago and I remember being on this high where I thought that I cracked the code and that I'll super productive like this for the rest of my life... and then I relapsed on games hard. So I'm also kinda nervous about losing this awesome track record. I think the key is to monitor my energy levels... if I find that I'm getting too tired, I need to rest more. I'm pretty sure last time I just wore myself out. Anyway, so far going well, but I just have this anxiety in the back of my mind about losing this productivity streak. Hopefully this time it's different, since I think one of the main reasons I'm doing a lot better is that my wife's in the same room as me and this forces me to be semi-productive at minimum.

Day 2/120 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Pomodorro Lvl 2 (0/100) Sleep before midnight x2 (longest streak: 3) Spiritual Routine: 2/7 Sleep: 12:00am - 6:45am, 12:40pm - 2:05pm Another good, productive day, and I was in bed at 12:00 sharp. I know it's not perfect - I should be sleeping at 11, but one thing at a time. I'll continue my long naps during the day - I'll definitely need them, especially since my body's not used to sleeping this early and it takes me time to fall asleep and I wake up in the middle of the night on occasion. I got 6 work hours in today, plus other productive stuff, which is really what my goal has been. I'd like to be able to fit workouts and a few other things, but for the time being this is good. If I can keep this up, I'll be able to take a weekend day off (or at least work less), which I think I need. My desk is a mess and it'd be nice to clean it, plus I need to do a bunch of other stuff like get a haircut, file some belated taxes, etc. Finally crossed the 100 pomodorros line today, will start today at a new level. I kinda wanted to move slowly & incrementally to 21 mins work, 9 mins rest, but my app does work in 5 minute segments. So I guess I'll be doing 25-10 for now.