One day a month with no tech. Turn off my phone in the morning. No tv, no laptop. I listen to music, read books. It’s nice.

Every year, I purchase a physical planner. It helps me stay organized, remember events and tasks, and since I make notes of my day to day in it, also acts as a journal. I’ve used the same company to create a customizable planner for the last 5 years and I love it.

Focus more of my stretches on hamstrings. I get back pain due to an injury and sitting too much. Taking time every day to stretch my legs and pay close attention to my hamstrings has really helped reduce my day to day pain.

I’ve re-discovered the art of deliberacy.

By that I mean that my way of interacting with the world is (ideally) always through deliberate, careful, and conscious actions.

A good example: you’ve just written a note. Your instinct would be to drop the pencil. Instead, you should be deliberate in how you place the pencil down. It is gently placed in line with the page instead of being tossed to the side.

This sounds silly, and I feel like it gives serial killer vibes, but we are all so overstimulated and so much goes on in our subconscious minds. Being deliberate in your actions, big or small, is a soothing way of reconnecting to the world and thinking more clearly.

But damn if it isn’t difficult to maintain deliberacy. It’s shocking how many of my actions are effectively subconscious.

This idea was granted to me through Infinite Jest. A frankly detestable character hammers this practice into his son’s head, and while it doesn’t seem to help the character much, it has helped me.

Deleting all social media applications and blocking them on the PC. It improved my life a lot.

Important tweets will be quoted in news outlets anyway. The rest can be ignored, including the negativity and the flames.

Since last summer i put a series of repeating activities on my calendar, one for every day of the week. Their main effect is reminding me that my free time could be spent on personal prpjects that do not necessarily need to lead to something public.

It also encourages intentional boredom, as opposed to scrolling. I don’t know if it improved my life a lot, i end up ignoring the suggested activities most of the times, but it helps me keeping that frame of mind, and it probably allowed me to put effort in a few things i care for.

i moved one of those 8x2 cube storage shelves from next to my front door (where it didn’t get used) to my bedroom where i use it for “worn but not dirty” clothes

pile of clothes on the floor instantly fixed because now putting clothes “away” is the same effort as dropping them on the floor

Many years ago I learned to improve my electronics “hygiene” by being strict about how power is connected/transferred from household AC to my gadgets. One too many blown PSUs during thunderstorm season while on a deadline, I guess.

Don’t use power strips, use high-end surge protectors. Cheap ones can still get absolutely rocked and can’t be trusted. Always use high-end OEM charge blocks for phones and for laptop chargers, etc.

No good call to spend thousands on electronics then cheap out at the power-transfer part of the deal. Because that’s where most damage is done. Pay for the good stuff now and it will more than pay for itself in the long term. Fewer blown PSUs/inverters/transformers. Longer lasting batteries.

I feel like electricity is less like magic fairies floating down wires and more like ropes tugging and rams crashing. I always liked to think about it that way.

I started using a journal to write mini goals daily

I use a calendar. I know this sounds ridiculous to mention it, but I am continually astonished at how few people use it to remember tasks and events.

Making my phone’s home screen functional. Calendar widget on the left, notes widget on the right, 3 rows of frequently-used apps on the bottom.

Went from having no calendar nor a quick place to jot notes, to having a severely overengineered planner with built-in notes that I didn’t actually use and didn’t fit in my pockets, to now finally having my day organized and my mind clear.

Also centralizing my random notes into a single ~/Documents/quicknotes plain text document for each of my machines with a taskbar shortcut pointing to it.

Cycling to work. I happen to have a nice and scenic route largely within parks and nature, so starting to use it improved my life quite a lot. It’s a bit faster and more reliable than public transit, cheaper and a good exersice (30km there and back). And the scenery is way better than looking out of the window of a bus on an arterial highway.

I bought blackout curtains

Learning how to use AutoHotkey has been life-changing. There are many games I can’t play due to muscle disease, but AHK expands the amount I can play.

I do things like combine a series of inputs into one, map keyboard inputs to hardware the game doesn’t support, and even create mouse controls for games that don’t have any. I also made some GUIs to help me write scripts with fewer inputs.

AHK has the concept of hotstrings which are really handy. For example, if I want to expand an abbreviation as I type, it’s as simple as

::btw::by the way

It’s not limited to text replacement. You could easily use it to launch programs or whatever you want.

Another thing I did was change the “hold space to continuously paint” functionality on wplace to be a toggle controlled with the mouse. Which allows me to participate much longer before my arms give out.

When a workflow is bottlenecked I write it down in a list of things to solve in the future and continue with the rest of the work. And one regular schedule I make appointments with myself to solve bottlenecks and streamline things. Its really powerful. Instead of getting distracted during the day. Stay in flow, sort it later.

I use logseq for my notes.

i use two monitors instead of one

learned keyboard shortcuts and made custom keybinds, installed vimfx on firefox and now i can web browse with one hand, never moving from the keyboard