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karabas

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Day 34-35/90

Sleep: all over the place

These past two days have been crap in terms of productivity. It all started with me with going to a Qur'an memorization lesson early in the morning. We've put those on hold for a while and tried to restart. But I went to bed late that night, so I was super tired. And when I'm tired I don't focus and I laze around and am not productive. I ended up going to bed late again and then sleeping until the afternoon. So today ended up being a bunch of the same stuff. I also lost a bunch of my habits.

But the issue that I'm realizing is: they're not really habits because they're not anchored around a particular activity or time. That's something I need to rethink.

Also, I think my evening habits are too late in the day. I do them after evening prayer, but that's past 7pm now and I need to be in bed by 11 (10 in Ramadan), so it's just not enough time. I think I'll move them back to the afternoon prayer (~4pm), that should give me enough time.

I also went over my finances today and realizing our spending has been like 150% of our target for the past 3 months and we don't really know why. That's a problem because our next year and a half are all about saving up. I'm going to start a morning routine of assessing finances and got a tracker app. We really need to be on top of this.

And finally, since I came back from my trip, I stopped tracking the number of hours I work. This is a problem, because it kept me more accountable. I've been slacking off recently, so I think going back to tracking it would help. I also want to start a morning routine of checking my tasks and goals for the day and listing them out. And tracking how much time I spend on what, like I started out doing.

That's a bunch of stuff to do, but I'm really tired of having every day turn out to be a flop even after quitting games and videos.

Productivity: Had maybe 8 hours of being productive over the past two days.

Cravings: Not much.

Feeling: Really annoyed with myself for lack of productivity.

Minor habits:

  • Morning/evening spiritual routine: check
  • Religious study routine: have to restart this one :(
  • Career-related study routine: 7 days
  • Personal to-do list: 6 days
  • 15 minutes of working on my business idea: have to restart this one too

Major Habit - Sleep by 11pm (we had our daylight savings adjusted back for Ramadan... makes no sense): kinda. It's just past 11pm now and I'm getting ready for bed.

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its a brilliant idea to get a tracker app for managing your finances. I think it will definitely help.  I identify with your feeling mate. I think the next step after quitting game and video is about how to improve our productivity. 

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On 4/10/2018 at 2:10 AM, karabas said:

Day 0 | It's darkest before dawn

Hey guys!

See my introduction here.

Today was the worst day I've had in a long time. Almost nothing done as a result of gaming, YouTube, and otherwise time-wasting. And I'm really sick of doing this to myself.

So I'm gonna take up the 90-day challenge.

Rules:

  1. No games: computer or phone or internet. Nothing.
  2. No YouTube videos, Netflix, or other movies/tv unless I actually need to (like for work, study, etc)
  3. I restart the 90 day counter if I break the above 2 rules in any way
  4. I get a prize for every week I continue this (going out to a nice place to eat)
  5. I need some kind of prize for making it to 90 days, but I'm not sure what that could be yet

Some additional things:

  1. I've been doing habit building before this for about a month and I'd like to continue. I've lost most of my habits as a result of this gaming problem coming back, but I still have a few. The rules are the following: keep each habit for a month, get a reward after each successful week, then move on to the next. I usually keep an easy and a hard habit at the same time.
  2. I need to work overall on reducing my distractions. I just created a new user account on my computer to keep my personal internet browsing/computer use separate to my work. Even while using different desktops, I was running into so many different tabs on each screen, it became chaotic and distracting. I've already started keeping my phone out of the bedroom when I sleep - I'm going to do the inverse and keep it in the bedroom while I'm working.
  3. I have a problem whenever I come across a "big" task that requires focus. My instinct is to avoid it by gaming/watching videos/etc. I'm gonna try to combat that by taking every task and breaking it down into smaller, easier to-dos on my notepad.
  4. I'm going to use a Pomodorro timer with 20 minutes of work and 10 minutes of a break. After 2 hours, I'll step away from the computer and do something else, as Dannigan suggested. I have PLENTY of tasks that I could work on.

My main focus over the next week is to get back into my proper schedule. I wake up around 6:30 am to do my morning prayers (I'm Muslim). Optimally, I'd like to be in bed by 11:30pm and then take a 1.5 hr nap in the afternoon, but I'm gonna start with being in bed by midnight and doing the nap. That's 8 hours total (not the same as 8 hours straight, but it's something). Also, Ramadan is around the corner - not sure how I'm going to handle that. We'll be waking up around 4am to eat before dawn, but early bedtime is also unlikely. So I might need to do something like 11-4 and then something like a 10am-2pm nap.

The good thing is that I'll be traveling in 5 days for about two weeks. It's very easy to keep off of games and videos while traveling because you just don't have the time. I think I can handle 5 days, then I get ~14 for "free". At that point I'll be almost 20 days in, which is a good period of time to go without gaming/vids.

I've tried quitting many times before and failed many times, but I'm prepared to get up and try again if I fail. Fingers crossed I don't have to :)

Thanks for the forum and support, folks!

Hey karabas

I like your point 2 with the easy and hard habit.

I am pushing through my first week of game free having a  lot of work for school to do.

I m overwhelmed by the amount of tasks there are to be finished..

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Day 36/90

Sleep: 2am - 5am, 5:30 am - 11:30am

Didn't end up sleeping early at all. First was talking to the wife, then when I finally got to bed I couldn't sleep because it was windy and something metal was clanging really loudly in the street. Took me an hour+ to go to bed.

But despite a late start, the day was productive. Writing out the tasks and then figuring out how much time I had for work was very helpful. I listed out my tasks and saw that I had 4 hours left for work if I did everything perfectly. So I wasn't feeling all rushed to do as much work as I could because I knew that at best, I could just get 4. Positive urgency instead of negative. It worked!

The new moon was sighted today, so Ramadan started! I realized it's completely silly to try to go to bed early in Ramadan. We have to get up at 2:30am to make food for the pre-dawn meal and if I do everything perfectly, I can be in bed by 9:30pm at the latest. It's just not worth it. Easier to just sleep after the fast starts at ~3:30am. Basically 4am-12pm is my target for now and that seems a bit more straightforward.

I also realized that I need to re-orient myself for the month in terms of habits/tasks. I'm going to replace my career-related study and my 15 minutes of work on my business habits with more religious study and Qur'an review. I'm also adding another 45 minutes of studying purification of the heart (how to get rid of bad character traits, essentially), which is something I need to study and haven't gotten the chance to yet.

So basically, re-orienting myself in this month and focusing on what I'm supposed to focus on: spirituality. Obviously, I still have to work, but it's just a matter of adjusting focus.

Productivity: Pretty solid. Because of the late night I got more work done in one day than I have in a while. It's great.

Cravings: No time. Hoping this part will stay easy during Ramadan. I'd REALLY hate to break this detox in this month.

Feeling: Excited Ramadan's here and happy about my productivity. Looking forward to a good month ahead!

Minor habits:

  • Morning/evening spiritual routine: check
  • Religious study (jurisprudence): 1 day
  • Religious study (purification of the heart): 1 day
  • Extra Qur'an & Study: 1 day
  • Personal to-do list: didn't get to this, but I didn't really have anything important to do
  • Career-related study routine (on hold)
  • 15 minutes of working on my business idea (on hold)

Major Habit: on hold for Ramadan

13 hours ago, dirkj3 said:

Hey karabas

I like your point 2 with the easy and hard habit.

I am pushing through my first week of game free having a  lot of work for school to do.

I m overwhelmed by the amount of tasks there are to be finished..

Yeah, that can be overwhelming. Write the stuff you need to do out, then prioritize. Then just go down the list. If you need to, break bigger tasks into smaller tasks. This helps makes it lest overwhelming because you see a bunch of smaller tasks that are achievable. Good luck!

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I plan to study for 2 hours a day but there are huge amounts of material from over 3 Months to cover..

And I get distracted so easy and the work for the exams next week and in 2 weeks are requiring at least 5 or 6 hours It all is moving so slow..

 

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Day 37/90

Sleep: 4:30am-12:30pm

Ok day. Not sure what happened after waking up, I ended up starting proper work past 3pm. Otherwise day went by fairly smoothly. Working closer to the end of the fast got difficult (it's a 16 hour fast, so it's a while to go without food and water), I was losing focus and determination. But from experience this goes away once your body adjusts after a few days.

Productivity: After somehow wasting several hours after waking up, I calculated that I had 6 hours of available time for work. I ended up doing about 5. So not too bad. I didn't track my time, so I don't have a good grasp of where I lost time. Gotta do a better job of that tomorrow.

Cravings: None that I can think of. Crazy for day 37!

Feeling: Good day, looking forward to better and more productive days in Ramadan! I'm actually liking this sleep schedule, I get 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep, which I almost never do otherwise because of my late sleep habit and having to get up for the pre-dawn prayer.

Minor habits:

  • Morning/evening spiritual routine: check
  • Religious study (jurisprudence): 2 day
  • Religious study (purification of the heart): 2 day
  • Extra Qur'an & Study: 2 day
  • Personal to-do list: didn't get to do this, but I forgot to even calculate it into my day. will leave a note for tomorrow
  • Career-related study routine (on hold)
  • 15 minutes of working on my business idea (on hold)

Major Habit: on hold for Ramadan

10 hours ago, dirkj3 said:

I plan to study for 2 hours a day but there are huge amounts of material from over 3 Months to cover..

And I get distracted so easy and the work for the exams next week and in 2 weeks are requiring at least 5 or 6 hours It all is moving so slow..

 

Use Pomodorro timer to help manage distractions + spaced repetition cards (there are apps for that) to help learn material faster. Break sessions up into smaller chunks and set rewards for yourself if you accomplish a certain target goal. Should help. Good luck!

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Day 38/90

Sleep: 4:30am-11:30am

Today was about the same as yesterday. I did a bit better, pretty much on target with my predicted work hours.

End of fast and end of the night are both tough parts of the day for me. I really slow down. I need to resort to something that's easy to do in those moments. It also should get better in a day or two once my body's used to the new schedule and the fast.

I'm pretty sleepy also, despite a decent amount of sleep. I think I'm going to sleep with no alarm clock tonight (except an emergency one if I end up sleeping way longer than I anticipate).

Productivity: I had a bunch of stuff to do until 5pm. I calculated 4 hours of work and did 3:50, so pretty much on target!

Cravings: Too much stuff going on during the day to even think about this stuff.

Feeling: Looking forward to getting some rest and an even more productive day tomorrow!

Minor habits:

  • Morning/evening spiritual routine: check
  • Religious study (jurisprudence): 3 days
  • Religious study (purification of the heart): 3 days
  • Extra Qur'an & Study: 3 days
  • Personal to-do list: Still didn't do this. I think this needs to happen earlier in the day.
  • Career-related study routine (on hold)
  • 15 minutes of working on my business idea (on hold)

Major Habit: on hold for Ramadan

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Day 39/90 | Productive hours: 6:40 | Work hours: 3:55 (78%)

Sleep: 5am - 2:00pm

I really like @JustTom's system of putting key metrics up top and I finally realized what I want to track. So:

Work hours are simple: it's how much I spend working on looking for clients.

The percentage reflects the difference between how much work I did and how much I planned to during that day. What I've been doing over the past few days is starting my day by estimating how much time I'll spend on non-work tasks, how many hours are left in the day, and therefore how many hours I should be able to dedicate to work. So the percentage is basically a score of how well I can estimate my time obligations (I chronically underestimate how long things take, so this is a good exercise) and how much time I waste.

The productive hours is a combination of my work hours and other tasks I do that are purposeful and designed to fulfill some kind of goal of mine (things like the habits I list at the bottom). It's obviously not all of my productive time, because going shopping or eating are things that I need to, so they are not a waste of time.

My goal is to get the productive hours thing closer to 10 hours a day. I don't think that'll happen in Ramadan, but it's something to aim for.

Productivity: I had a few tasks which reduced how much work I could do today. I did 4 of my projected 5 hours, but the bulk of the discrepancy is spending more time on things like food and prayer, so I just need to adjust my estimation of those tasks.

Cravings: I had a strong craving for playing Fallout 1 (one of the first computer games I really got into and still probably one of my all-time favorites). I even looked up how to do it on a Mac. It's not simple to do, so hopefully that'll hold me off.

Feeling: Nothing specific

Minor habits:

  • Morning/evening spiritual routine: check
  • Religious study (jurisprudence): 4 days
  • Religious study (purification of the heart): 4 days
  • Extra Qur'an & Study: 4 days
  • Personal to-do list: 1 day (doing it earlier when I get groggy from the fasting worked)
  • Career-related study routine (on hold)
  • 15 minutes of working on my business idea (on hold)

Major Habit: on hold for Ramadan

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Day 40/90 | Productive hours: 5:15 | Work hours: 3:00 (67%)

Sleep: 6am - 2:30pm

For a bunch of reasons ended up staying up later than I'd like and also not being available to work on the stuff that I needed to work on today. That's OK. Overall I'm at almost 30 hours of work for the week, which is pretty good given that it's Ramadan. But I'd like to do better tomorrow.

Also, it's day 40! I'm almost at the 50% mark, which is quite incredible!

Productivity: Not that good.

Cravings: Fallout 1 craving is still there. Wanted to go watch some Lets Plays instead of gaming, but held off. Man, I hope these cravings go away...

Feeling: Tired, want to get tomorrow right

Minor habits:

  • Morning/evening spiritual routine: check
  • Religious study (jurisprudence): 5 days
  • Religious study (purification of the heart): 5 days
  • Extra Qur'an & Study: 5 days
  • Personal to-do list: 2 days
  • Career-related study routine (on hold)
  • 15 minutes of working on my business idea (on hold)

Major Habit: on hold for Ramadan

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Having thought about it for a while, I think that overall having these cravings is good. This is really the chance for the detox to work and wean myself off of this stuff. If I can get through this without gaming or watching videos, then I think my brain will eventually give up and leave me alone lol. That's the point of the detox.

I'm just dreading heading into this territory because it's been smooth sailing up until now.

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Day 41/90 | Productive hours: 4:10 | Work hours: 1:55 (37%)

Sleep: 5:30am - 3:00pm

Some personal stuff going on that really put me out of the mood of being productive.

Productivity: I kept up most of my non-work habits, but work itself barely got done. I have a pretty bad backlog.

Cravings: Just saw an ad for a Fallout 4 mod that's centered in Western Cali (home of the original FO1 and FO2 games) and is designed by a bunch of fans from the original games trying to recreate their feel. Looks like a solid project and got me really tempted to get back into FO. So far I'm holding off, including watching any more videos.

Feeling: So close to half-way through the detox, but it's getting tough. Also just want a proper productive work day...

Minor habits:

  • Morning/evening spiritual routine: check
  • Religious study (jurisprudence): 6 days
  • Religious study (purification of the heart): 6 days
  • Extra Qur'an & Study: 6 days
  • Personal to-do list: broken, will try to make up
  • Career-related study routine (on hold)
  • 15 minutes of working on my business idea (on hold)

Major Habit: on hold for Ramadan

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Day 42/90 | Productive hours: 5:05 | Work hours: 2:20 (67%)

Sleep: 5:30am - 3:00pm

Personal stuff still going on, but I think is close to resolution. But I'm traveling tomorrow, so that's going to take away from my productive time. 

Also, as previous logs have shown, I've been sleeping a TON. I'm not trying to fight it (I basically don't set an alarm clock). This is the first time in a while that I'm getting to sleep 7+ hours without a break in between, even if it's at an odd time of day. So I'm letting my body determine when to wake up. So far it's been telling me to sleep around 9 hours. That's fine, I think it needs the extra rest. I think I might need to start cutting it off at 8 hours to get an extra hour or two in the day, but for now I'm OK with it.

Productivity: Still meh. Hoping this will be resolved in the next few days.

Cravings: Fallout cravings have subsided, but still there. I'm traveling tomorrow and will be alone for 24 hours (not common for me). Hoping that's not going to be an issue.

Feeling: Just looking forward to doing it better tomorrow...

Minor habits:

  • Morning/evening spiritual routine: check
  • Religious study (jurisprudence): 7 days
  • Religious study (purification of the heart): 7 days
  • Extra Qur'an & Study: 7days
  • Personal to-do list: 4 days (I skipped it yesterday, but made up today)
  • Career-related study routine (on hold)
  • 15 minutes of working on my business idea (on hold)

Major Habit: on hold for Ramadan

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I just had this sudden realization that I'm crushing it.

Like yeah, I have productivity mishaps. And yeah, I could do things better. There's definitely room for improvement.

But there are some habits I've been doing fairly consistently for months now (some even before this detox). Aside from a week-long relapse before I started the detox, I've been limiting or off of games for nearly 3 months now.

3 months in, there's a lot of progress in some areas. Some others not as much (work), but it's getting there.

So overall, things are looking up!

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Day 43/90 | Productive hours: 5:35 | Work hours: 2:50 (57%)
Day 44/90 | Productive hours: 3:10 | Work hours: 2:40 (?%)
Day 45/90 | Productive hours: 3:50 | Work hours: 1:05 (?%)

Sleep: 4:00am - 12:00pm, 1:30-4:30pm

I had a 24 hour trip, but it really messed me up. I had to travel to an embassy and had a morning appointment. And my sleep schedule in Ramadan has been a very late night one. It started out great, I had a super productive train ride, and even a good few productive hours at the hotel. Then it just went downhill. I didn't game, but I wasted a hell of a lot of time. I was supposed to nap to compensate for the morning appointment, but that didn't happen. And then when I finally got to bed (~5am), I found that the bed was insanely uncomfortable. The pillow was hurting my neck, the mattress was hurting my back, and the sheets were making me itchy. I couldn't fall asleep until past 7am and I had to wake up at 9:30.

The result was that Thursday I was so tired, I barely got anything done. I couldn't do most of my habits because I couldn't keep my eyes open. And today (Friday), I ended up sleeping in and just overall being a lazy bum.

I feel like I've finally caught up though, so I'm hoping tomorrow will be a solid, productive day.

Oh, but I made it to 45 days! I'm officially half-way done!

Productivity: :(

Cravings: None! Been too tired, to busy catching up on what I need to do to think about them.

Feeling: Want to get tomorrow right.

Minor habits:

  • Morning/evening spiritual routine: check
  • Religious study (jurisprudence): 9 days
  • Religious study (purification of the heart): 9 days
  • Extra Qur'an & Study: 9 days
  • Personal to-do list: 6 days
  • Career-related study routine (on hold)
  • 15 minutes of working on my business idea (on hold)

Major Habit: on hold for Ramadan

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Low productivity is indeed a problem and you need to work on that. But I think it's a good job on your part to not let yourself down for that by negative self-speak or watching gaming videos or any other destructive thing. Really good approach, keeping the hopes up!

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Day 46/90 | Productive hours: 4:10 | Work hours: 1:25 (?%)

Sleep: 6:00am - 3:30pm

Waking up late had a bad effect on me today. And then a friend called about something important. It was a long conversation and then I went to discuss it with my wife and by then several hours were gone and I got even more lazy about getting things done.

This is the problem with my productivity plan overall. Any "special" occurrence throws off my whole day.

A couple of resolutions:

- I need to get back to planning out my day when I start it. It was overall very helpful

- I think I need to start setting an alarm. I can't be sleeping 9+ hours a day anymore (but I was happy to do it for the past week+)

- I've been prioritizing religious stuff since it's Ramadan, but my work has taken a knock as a result. It's not good. I have stuff I need to do for my clients and that's also part of my religious responsibility. I'm going to reduce some of the stuff I'm doing to give myself more time for work. Let's see how that goes for the next week and I'll re-adjust again if necessary.

Productivity: Picked up around midnight, but it was too late. Hopefully better tomorrow.

Cravings: None.

Feeling: Want to get tomorrow right (again)

Minor habits:

  • Morning/evening spiritual routine: check
  • Religious study (jurisprudence): 10 days
  • Religious study (purification of the heart): 10 days
  • Extra Qur'an & Study: 10 days
  • Personal to-do list: 7 days (I did a lot of this stuff today.. I think i'm going to skip the next 2 days of this habit)
  • Career-related study routine (on hold)
  • 15 minutes of working on my business idea (on hold)

Major Habit: on hold for Ramadan

10 hours ago, JustTom said:

Low productivity is indeed a problem and you need to work on that. But I think it's a good job on your part to not let yourself down for that by negative self-speak or watching gaming videos or any other destructive thing. Really good approach, keeping the hopes up!

Yeah, but on the minus side, it's not putting enough pressure on me to do better. But this is a pretty long detox streak for me, so I guess it's better than putting myself down. Also, I pretty much write out my day hour-by-hour, so I'm not overall too concerned when things don't go exactly the way I wanted them to.

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Day 47/90 | Productive hours: 8:05 | Work hours: 5:20 (105%)

Sleep: 6:00am - 2:30pm

YES! Today has been an awesome day. I actually did more work than predicted (to be fair, I think it's going to cost me by making me go to bed later than I'd like). But more importantly, I had stuff come up that I didn't expect and it didn't derail my day!

The key was waking up a tad earlier (alarm clock) and assigning enough time to the different things that take up my day + giving myself some cushion. I overestimated some things and underestimated others, but overall I ended up being just 10 minutes off in my schedule, which is great. I think it's just been a learning process of figuring out where my time goes and giving myself enough time on all those things accordingly.

Also, I didn't do the night prayers that are typically done in Ramadan. These take 45 minutes, so they added that much time to my productive hours. I think it's the right decision. I finally caught up on a lot of work that I needed to do.

Productivity: 100%

Cravings: None! Too busy crushing it.

Feeling: Happy about today, want to repeat it tomorrow to make sure it's not a one-time success.

Minor habits:

  • Morning/evening spiritual routine: check
  • Religious study (jurisprudence): 11 days
  • Religious study (purification of the heart): 11 days
  • Extra Qur'an & Study: 11 days
  • Personal to-do list: 8 days (I did a lot of this stuff yesterday.. I think i'm going to skip the next day of this habit)
  • Career-related study routine (on hold)
  • 15 minutes of working on my business idea (on hold)

Major Habit: on hold for Ramadan

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Day 48/90 | Productive hours: 6:00 | Work hours: 3:15 (78%)

Sleep: 6:00am - 3:40pm

Started off the day very late because I ended up sleeping later than planned (just talking to the wife). Also, forgot I had some time-consuming plans for the day, so didn't include that in my projection. So it's just an estimation issue, not really a productivity issue.

Productivity: Got as much as I could done, given the commitments. No complains here and work is still progressing well.

Cravings: None today - no time, really.

Feeling: Pretty good. Apprehensive about tomorrow: getting up really early (9am) considering my bedtime. Usually I'm fine the day of, but I'm afraid of it derailing me in the days after. Heading to bed ASAP after this.

Minor habits:

  • Morning/evening spiritual routine: check
  • Religious study (jurisprudence): 12 days
  • Religious study (purification of the heart): 12 days
  • Extra Qur'an & Study: 12 days
  • Personal to-do list: 9 days
  • Career-related study routine (on hold)
  • 15 minutes of working on my business idea (on hold)

Major Habit: on hold for Ramadan

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Day 49/90 | Productive hours: 5:10 | Work hours: 2:25 (67%)

Sleep: 4:30am - 9:15 am, 1pm-5pm

Ugh, it's kinda like I predicted. Poor sleep = bad productivity. I'm pretty confident now that it's an iron-clad rule for me. And this means that I need to make every possible effort to get good sleep every day. I think overall this has been happening as last couple of days I would actually take ~20 minutes to fall asleep. That's actually a sign of not being sleep-deprived and I've rarely been in this situation.

So that's good, I guess?

Productivity: Tired = wasted a lot of time doing things like reading news articles and the like. I need to have a better wasting time outlet like reading books or something.

Cravings: Mild, since I was tired and wanted to do something that wasn't strenuous on my brain.

Feeling: Want to get good sleep tonight and bounce back tomorrow.

Minor habits:

  • Morning/evening spiritual routine: check
  • Religious study (jurisprudence): 13 days
  • Religious study (purification of the heart): 13 days
  • Extra Qur'an & Study: 13 days
  • Personal to-do list: 10 days
  • Career-related study routine (on hold)
  • 15 minutes of working on my business idea (on hold)

Major Habit: on hold for Ramadan

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Is sleeping during daytime a part of Ramadan? I thought it's about fasting. Seems pretty tough if that's the case huh. That kind of sleep is always less effective due to the hormonal cycles of your body. For example, the growth hormone production is at max at around 3-4am, which is when you should optimally be deep into sleep so that the body recovers best. So it should get better once you switch the regime back to normal. 

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9 hours ago, JustTom said:

Is sleeping during daytime a part of Ramadan? I thought it's about fasting. Seems pretty tough if that's the case huh. That kind of sleep is always less effective due to the hormonal cycles of your body. For example, the growth hormone production is at max at around 3-4am, which is when you should optimally be deep into sleep so that the body recovers best. So it should get better once you switch the regime back to normal. 

Lol, no, it's not about sleeping during the daytime. But the month moves around the year (lunar calendar is 10 days shorter than solar) and right now it's in summertime (long days and short nights). That means you're praying the night prayer at 9pm at the earliest and you have to get up at 2am to make food because the fasting starts around 3:20am. And I personally never go to bed as soon as I can, so the likelihood is I'd get around 4 hours of sleep before having to wake up. So it's break up your sleep into halves or sleep after you start fasting. I chose the latter because I'm currently in a Muslim country and that's generally how people do it here. If I was in the US then I'd probably sleep at night and catch a nap after starting the fast. It should get easier in a few years once Ramadan is in winter-time and the nights are longer.

Yesterday's thing was because I had to get up early, so it's a one-time issue. Overall I feel pretty good being able to sleep continuous 8+ hours.

But yeah, after Ramadan I'm going to back to sleeping at night. But sleep has always been a problem for me. I find it very hard to maintain a habit of going to bed early and it just screws me up.

And Ramadan is a perfect example: I've been super consistent with my sleep times over the past 2 weeks. I couldn't consistently sleep before midnight at all before this habit. So I can keep a habit of sleep at 4-5am no problem, but I can't do a habit of before midnight. I'm not sure why that is, but I think I need to focus on it hardcore after fasting's done.

It really feels like proper sleep is key to both the success of this detox and of my productivity. Good sleep is also good for losing weight, which is my next big target.

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Day 50/90 | Productive hours: 6:55 | Work hours: 4:10 (96%)

Sleep: 5:30am - 2:30pm

Still paying for that early wake-up day. Tired, groggy, and lazy overall. Somehow I managed to put in the hours I aimed for, which I think is mostly due to giving myself enough slack in estimate how much work I could do. I also am starting to spend the first couple of hours of being on awake on just mindless browsing. Not a good habit.

On the plus side, 50 days! Exciting to be this far into the detox.

Productivity: Ok. Wasted a lot of time browsing and reading articles online.

Cravings: I had some strong gaming cravings today again. Might be the fatigue. Might be the new Fallout game that Bethesda teased. I watched like 10 minutes of a Fallout 1 Let's Play, but that just got me wanting to go do it myself since these people don't know what the heck they're doing and I grew up with that game.

Another thing is that I feel like I need some "mindless entertainment". I hate the word, but I do want to just tune out. Since I'm not doing games and I'm not doing movies and I'm not doing videos, I have little left. I wonder if this is because I haven't been gardening as much upstairs. Since I only have a few hours of daylight, I often times don't catch enough free time to go up to the roof to do it. That was a good activity to get my mind off of stuff. Need to bring it back.

I really don't want to relapse because my schedule is super tight as it is. I'm doing just enough to get by in terms of work and just enough of studies that I really want to do. Anything less and one of them would suffer and I'd hate for that to happen.

Feeling: Pretty happy with how much I got done despite the laziness.

Minor habits:

  • Morning/evening spiritual routine: check
  • Religious study (jurisprudence): 14 days
  • Religious study (purification of the heart): 14 days
  • Extra Qur'an & Study: 14 days
  • Personal to-do list: 11 days
  • Career-related study routine (on hold)
  • 15 minutes of working on my business idea (on hold)

Major Habit: on hold for Ramadan

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