14th January 2022
So, this week is the first official week where I now have to work at it again and do as much as I can. Surely, having a break was all well and good, but you also have to put in the work, as well as having an important work/life balance. I’ve reintroduced using to-do lists again, but I’m slowly starting to find loopholes in that as well, by moving things forward and putting them off.
To be precise, I’m using a weekly agenda again, where I can see all of the tasks that I have to accomplish during the week, now with estimated times to complete them (in this case, I’ve given myself about an hour to do each task, but I’m starting to feel like that’s too much time, since I tend to do the task either really quickly or I procrastinate it because the idea of spending an hour on something usually feels too long, and I end up wasting time just to make that hour, so maybe I should set myself 30 minutes to do each task so that it seems a bit more doable), but I’m starting to find it not as effective as I thought it’d be. Maybe I need to get myself an accountability partner who sets deadlines that can’t be changed, so that I have no choice but to just do the work within that time frame, because I realise that I work best when I know that I have a deadline to work towards, along with being told what to do, especially when it’s set by someone else. I’m slowly but surely getting there, and I have to realise that it’s just trial and error, by figuring out what works best for me.
At the same time, I’m slowly unlearning hustle culture along with the need to be productive 24/7 because I’ve realised that it’s not only unrealistic, it’s also really toxic as well, and that I can only do so much with my time, not to mention that I usually associate hustle culture with entrepreneurship, which is probably the reason why I feel a bit disappointed in myself for not achieving as much as I should have done by now, because according to the laws of the hustle, my business should be up and running by now, but I’m still in the research and development stage, and I have to realise that it’s normal for these things to take their time.
Maybe I need to view starting up a business in the same way as growing a plant; you can’t force a plant to grow really fast by a certain time, you have to allow it to do its thing as well as letting it grow in its own time. For me, I’ve had 2 seeds of a business idea, but I had to let go of one because I realised that it was keeping me in my comfort zone, and it wouldn’t allow me to grow. The other seed, however, is just now starting to grow into a seedling, and I have to accept that these things will take time, whereas hustle culture will tell you that the second you think of an idea, it has to be quickly launched and make millions on day one, which is impossible unless you’re already really famous and have a few businesses under your belt already.
I’m also making a start on contributing to open source software, although at the moment, it seems really hard to do, and whether it’s GitHub that’s making it hard, or the level of experience I have with it, I’m not entirely sure, but I’ll get to it in my own time, no matter how long it takes, because I also have to remember the pace that I work at, as well as accepting the fact that I can’t be productive all the time. The main reason why I’m deciding to contribute to open source software is that I use it often, sometimes without realising that it’s open source, and also because I want to be able to contribute to non-profits more often, mainly to prevent huge monopolies and megacorporations from taking over, like they haven’t already taken over everything already, along with open source software (along with all the reasons behind it) becoming somewhat of an important issue as well as an evolving interest for me, because I like to look at the alternatives sometimes, along with knowing that there’s more to the internet than just walled gardens with their ads and their algorithms as well as a few paywalls, which I personally think is unfair and gives an elitist vibe, which I personally do not like.
This idea to contribute to open source software also stems from the fact that I’m essentially an anti capitalist, which I looked at in depth last week, and I’d actually rather help others out than just hoarding lots of money for no reason (I understand earning money to able to live comfortably and to be able to have savings as well as having emergency funds, but having literal billions of pounds seems a bit overkill, plus the capitalists are never happy, no matter how much they earn), and also because I want to code more this year, mainly by improving my coding skills by being able to contribute to projects other than my own, plus it would give me some experience so that I can go on to do other things with that skill set and expertise, because without open source software, we’d all be living in highly monetised walled gardens covered in ads along with algorithms and dodgy practises, where we’d have no choice but to be at the mercy of the elite few as well as being targeted and surveilled guinea pigs at most, so yeah, open source software is important, very important.
So, that’s it from this week, and I have to accept the fact that things will take time in order to work properly, to go at my own pace within a fast-paced world, but still keeping up with the times to some extent so that it looks like I’m aware of the changes in the world, although unlearning hustle culture will take its time, mainly because it’s a US-centric thing, and I have to realise that most of the world work less hours than them in order to have a decent work/life balance as well as protecting their sanity.