Things that work, and things that don't work

This year has been a year of trying out new things...

And as per the title... I've been trying to find out more about what works for me and what doesn't.

Things that don't work:
1) Keeping a paper planner.
Nope. Just doesn't work. I hardly used planners in the past, and now, it's still the same. I don't keep track of time that way anymore. If I need to remind myself about some important event... Either I make a mental note of it (usually enough for meetings with friends, I'll remember), or I note it down in my phone calendar (for chores that I need to remind myself to do, and for work related stuff that I would otherwise forget, e.g. attending a seminar. Also for important things like attending a meeting or appointment, that I won't forget, but is too important and therefore I prefer the extra reminder.)

2) Using desktop/wall calendars
Unless it's at work... Then maybe the calendar can be useful. Like I used to jot down when I needed to feed my 'babies'... Or collect samples... Or the dates and times of meetings and seminars. But I don't do that anymore now so the calendar at work is pretty much useless. At home? Months can pass before I even notice that it's no longer February... Heck, it was two weeks into April before I noticed that the calendar in my office desk is still showing 'March'.

The downside is basically that... I hardly take note of the passage of time and therefore I often get surprise when public holidays roll around. And then I get frustrated and stressed because I'd planned a ton of experiments to be done on that day.... :X

3) Keeping my desk organised.
Gosh yes. This has been the struggle of the ages for me. Granted, my desk in the office is pretty neat... Kinda... Well more and more pieces of paper has been piling up and I've yet to bin them... But really... It's still pretty neat. Compared to my desk at home... There's barely enough space to put my books. Yeah. I'll just keep clearing till there's enough space to do whatever stuff when I want to get stuff done but that's it. The rest of it is a mess. An organised mess. I know where everything is and I can locate them within a minute mostly. But when I try packing... I couldn't find my item even after searching for a whole freaking hour. No seriously! I kept it away in some drawer and yes it took me like a freaking hour and a half to find it. Granted I wasn't looking for it all the time... But still! Talk about frustrating!

I'll keep things decently organised but that's it. It's not going to be very neat and stuff... Not with the HUGE amount of stuff I have compared to the space. I'm definitely not one for living a minimalist lifestyle, I know. I love my stationery... You can call me materialistic. Whatever.

It's been said that a more messy desk encourages creativity, whereas a clean desk encourages productivity... In which case it's consistent with how neat I keep my office desk and home desk...

I really do wish I had a bigger desk and home so I could have my mess and still have enough space to comfortably do work though... :X

4) Scheduling.
Well... This one... I can hardly even bring myself to schedule anything. Unlike work when I can say that I'll do X experiment when, or I'll run how many qPCRs today... and at what time... I can't do that outside of work. At all. Has always been the case for me. I'm not the type to have a study plan. Then again, I hardly ever even study so...

No. Even if I draw out some sort of a plan, I won't stick to it. Plans are just not for me... When it comes to me personal life, I can't plan anything. I can't even plan a holiday properly. It's too stressful for me. I'm more of the... Spontaneous, it depends on my mood kind of person.

5) Waking up early
Ok. The verdict is still yet to be out on this one... But after being a night owl for so long and never having been a morning person... It's hard for me to get anything done in the early morning. Like, at 4 or 5 am in the morning when my sleeping pattern was messed up. My brain just can't wake up you know? And then I'll be trying to fall back asleep... And before I know it, all the time would have passed by. Or even if I do pull myself out of bed, I can't do anything intense like studying... I only feel like doing simple things like reading the news. And then again, all my time would be wasted. Ok, reading the news isn't a waste of time. But after the news, I'll find more stuff to read. Like Quora. And once I get on there... I'll read. And read. And read. And read. You get the idea. And then all the time just flies by. I console myself by saying that at least what I'm reading isn't trashy stuff. Some are actually pretty useful and intelligent answers. But too much reading ends up being a waste of time. Unproductive. Too much consumption and no production. A screwed C/P ratio as they call it. Bear in mind that while I occasionally go on answering sprees, I usually don't write anything on Quora. So I mostly just consume things there and don't produce.

Alas I'm going off topic. Yeah. I tend to be a lot more productive at night than in the mornings. So sleeping late works better for me. Like today... I basically wasted the whole morning and napped half the afternoon. And only started writing near the evening. It's like... The day only started after my nap or something. It would certainly do me good to get rid of the habit of wasting my mornings away... But I do prefer a good night's sleep at waking up after the sun rises rather than at some unearthly hour in the middle of the night. Well I wasn't even trying to wake up early though. I didn't even change the timing on my alarm clock. It was just the stress that was screwing up my sleep. First making me wake up earlier and earlier... Than changing my whole sleeping pattern completely. I mean, who collapses on the bed at 10 pm, only to wake up at 4 or 5 pm? And that's on good days. On bad days, I wake up at 1 or 2 am. And I can't sleep the rest of the night.... Nope, I'd very much rather sleep at 3 or 4am and wake up at 8:30. At least I feel like I've slept. I sleep better if I go to bed late than if I sleep early... I can survive perfectly fine on 4 hours of good quality sleep... But of course I'll need more sleep that night. I've done 3 days of 4 hours sleep before and I really felt like a zombie on day 3. Had to nap a little in the office. Nah. I try to get at least 5 hours of sleep for the most part. 6 hours is luxury. Anything more... Well generally I can't even sleep that much. I just wake up. Let's hope I get back to that sort of sleep schedule soon. Think I'm almost there...

Things that do work:
1) Switching hard copies for soft copies. I love my kindle. It's thin, has a ton of books... And I can just bring it out and read during lunch without being judged by the kind of books this weirdo is reading. Well mostly science books I guess... But then I do love Rick Riodan's Percy Jackson series too, and I'm still looking for fantasy books as good as Harry Potter. Nope. No journal papers on my kindle. At least... Not yet. Lol. I'll like to keep journal papers to the computer. Or the phone. Yeah.

It's not that I don't love physical books. I do. But they are heavy... So I tend not to bring them out... And most of the time when I'm at home... I'm on the computer, on the phone, or sleeping. And so... I end up not reading anything... And returning the books to the library unread... :X Opps.

The same goes for writing too. I prefer doing things on the computer. And preferably somewhere in the cloud. Like Evernote, Google docs... dropbox... Things that I can do at work, then continue from where I left off at home (or even on the phone) is good for me. Google docs is more for collaborations with other though... Though if I try doing some sort of game calculator again I might do it on gdocs instead of excel. Previously with my own lappy, I was using gdocs because my lappy can't take opening another program. Takes ages to open up excel. Lol. But if I were to do it again... Yeah, maybe I'll do it on gdocs instead just so that I can work on it anywhere. Sure, you can do the same with dropbox too but... If it's going to be in the cloud, and it's not something that needs to be sent out to others in excel/msoft word format... Might as well just do it in gdocs in the first place.

That said... I do love writing though. Like, actually picking up a physical pen to write on physical paper. Even though my handwriting sucks but that's another issue. There's something nice about scribbling on paper. I've come to really enjoy 'scrapbooking'. By that, I mean recording on my lab notebook....

Writing physically is something that I don't do enough of for sure. I started a physical diary in addition to all my electronic ones... But naturally I hardly write on that physical diary. It's a good thing that I have multiple blogs though... Together with my private, electronic but unpublished diary (well, I use the app day one for that), I have a pretty complete record of my thoughts and things happening in my life. For my own reading pleasure (and others too) now and in the future... Recently I'll make a grab for that physical diary once in a while... Every few weeks or so... But often times months can pass between entries. So it's a good thing that I type a lot more than that.

I do want to write more though... As in pen and paper write. Because I've bought a few really lovely pens recently. And it's such a pleasure to write with those tools. I'm definitely going to get diaries with thick paper though... Because the inky pen refills in those lovely pens bleed all over and seep through the thin paper. Tsk. Alas it's been a year and a half since I started that diary and I'm just over 1/10 of the way through. I really need to start writing more often so I can finish up that book and get rid of it huh...?

2) Doing random crafts
Ok. Admittedly I don't get enough of this done recently. But that's fine I guess. Once in a while... When I get in the mood... It's been months since I did some eraser craving but yeah... I'm way, way better at crafts than say... Design or painting or drawing. I'd love to be able to do those at a passable level someday... But that'll probably take a decade or something. *shrugs*

I'm good with my hands... But not when it comes to holding a writing/drawing instrument. I can even carve things out just fine. Sis says that I can only do the '3D stuff'. Whatever that means. I wonder what will happen when I get my 3D simi 3D doodler. It'll probably come in June? Oh wells. We'll find out then. Been really excited about that ever since I pledge it on kickstarter last year... It's been quite a long few months and I sure can't wait to try it out!

Things that I need to work on/try out
1) Going out once in a while.
Have not been out on the weekends since... Since the last time I met up with my colleagues. Ok. That wasn't that long ago I guess. Just two weeks? But nope, I've not met up with anyone outside of work in that two weeks. At least I have a meeting with my jc friends scheduled this coming Friday. If it comes to fruition. And then after that... Nothing again? Oh... Probably a trip with a former colleague to JB next week. But that's about it... But no... I feel a lot less social already. As in, my motivation levels for going out to meet with people has decreased. A lot. I don't even feel like stepping out of the house. Yeah, I'm an indoors person... A little too much I guess.

2) All my random side projects
Still need to work on getting everything done. My crafts blog... The gaming blog that got abandoned again... Well, none of those will become anything... So I'm not enforcing my weekly post rule on them. But weekly posting on Nihongo Manabu is a must, and it'll be nice if I could make more than a post a week. Managing my time and motivation levels is a huge challenge though. Motivation levels especially...? How to manage my time with all the things that I want to do... Things that I have to do... Things that I need to learn... That's definitely a challenge. I'm a procrastinator for sure. Doing things last minute is my speciality. And heck, I actually get good quality work done in that short amount of time. But last minute work doesn't work for learning something. For that you need a continuous effort over a period of time. But how I'd work that out with my lack of ability to follow schedules and plans remains to be seen. Currently I'm aiming to learn about 1 chapter of my Japanese grammar book each week. And it seems like it'll be left till the very last minute for this week's requirements... Lol. We'll see if I can actually keep this up.

3) Listening to podcast/videos.
No, I actually don't like watching things... I prefer to read things. Like books VS movies. Or even just reading the wiki page about the movie is enough for me. Or anime VS manga. I prefer to read. Takes less time IMO. Though there are things like Arashi shows, varieties where there is no substitute for watching... (Then again, remember I've not watched anything Arashi in a whole year!) But otherwise... I find that watching takes up too much time, and the amount of satisfaction, the gain I get is too little. If you talk about CP ratio, yup, watching too much videos is a surefire, easy way to screw that up. All watching and no doing. I've not tried listening to podcast in place of music for when I'm in the lab etc though. I'm not sure how that would work out. If I need to concentrate on the experiment, I don't pay attention to the music, and I'd prefer to listen to a set playlist of songs that I like and am familiar with, because I'm already familiar with the music and it doesn't take any addition brain power to process the tune, lyrics etc. Of course, not having to spend time putting down the micropipette and hitting the play button twice on my earphone remote is a huge plus (For that reason, my earphones must have remotes). A lot of people trump audio books as a way to be more productive... But I really.... Doubt it... I tried listening to audio books once, and boy, they talk so slowly that I felt like strangling the narrator throughout. Like. Just give me the damn book and I can read myself way faster than that. Even though I'm not a speed reader.... But I bet I can still read faster than they read. Sure it's supposed to be for when you're doing something. Like, exercising, or cooking... Or doing something else. But I can't... Unless I'm paying full attention to something, my mind will just drift off. It's different for songs. I don't actually listen closely or carefully to songs. Often times I find that many songs passed by without me even noticing it. My mind is thinking about other stuff. And I like my thinking time....

(Case in point, I can barely concentrate on my writing now cos I'm paying attention to the song that's playing now... A song that I've never heard of before. But just before that, I can concentrate perfectly fine because it's a song I'm familiar with.)

4) Ingress.
Still wondering if I really should play Ingress again. It's fun and all, and I only stopped because my phone died last time... But... Using the time spent on commute to play Ingress instead of doing other stuff...? Maybe I'll play it less after I hit level 8... Or only play it part of the commute... Or only on the way there or on the way back. But yeah... I actually get quite a lot of things done on the commute otherwise. Especially on the way to work. Like firing a short status update in Chinese or Japanese to weibo... Post something on instagram... Read my favourite tech news.... Clear my emails if I've not already done so after I crawl out of bed in the morning. Daily training on elevate... Maybe even make a blog post on LJ.... I'll probably play it less often once I hit level 8... Or limit it to just the commute home... Since the commute back is usually not productive anyway... Or maybe I'll get bored of the game again and drop it completely... We'll see.

Other games... Not been playing vainglory again... Maybe I'll pick it up again in a few months when I'm more free. Would definitely like to play some sort of games on the 'puter occasionally as well... Would also love it if I could cure myself of motion sickness... But I guess those will be year long projects... As with all the electronics that I got... Gotta learn enough about programming to play with them so... That'll take years too... Though hopefully by the end of the year I would be able to start doing something with them already... We'll see. Too many things that I want to try out, that often times I'm just lost in myself and have no idea where to start.

5) Writing.
I'm definitely writing a lot more now... But as for writing something more than random blog entries? Now that's something I need to do more of. Like more posts for NM, and get back to writing fanfiction again. You know, something more than just unstructured, random blog entries. I was keeping up with my 1 fic a week thing for quite a while last year... Before fatigue set in and I ran out of inspiration... And well experiments swept the rest of my writing ability away.

It's a balance. Two sides of the same coin. If I'm doing tons of science, I can't write. The science and the creativity seems to be on opposite ends of the seesaw. (I'm guessing scientific writing is not included here, but then the last time I did scientific writing proper... Like really properly... Was during my FYP thesis. Granted, I wrote some stuff in my previous job, but that was also more than two years ago. So it's really a good thing that I'm writing online. At least some writing practice is better than none.... Scientific writing is something that I need to work on for sure.) Keeping things balanced... Yeah I have to work on that so that I can keep on writing. And not have the case of having no posts appear on NM for months repeat. The lack of updates really did a huge number of the site rating... *Sigh*

6) Taking notes and making notes
*Sigh*
This is something that I'm *still* working on now. Well, I can take notes in class just fine and all. But now that I'm self studying... I'm the type who loathes writing in books. I'm trying to make myself highlight things and all in the books... Or at least my notes... I mean... I bought so many notebooks and fooscape pads and pens... I gotta use them all up right?

Well at least for Japanese I think notebooks are good because it's troublesome for me to type in Japanese. Switching languages is troublesome. Well. It's not troublesome, just slow. Really slow. Thanks to all the crap that I do on dad's lappy... It's slowing down too. I mean... But... I don't even know what I do...! I mean, there's only chrome open right now, though it has about 20 tabs open, but hey, just 1 window. And then Line is open... But that's all... Stupid ram guzzling web browsers. I'm not even running any pages with flash or games sheesh. Sure there's a bunch of stuff in the background, but it's mostly just chrome gobbling up all 8 gb of space. Somehow I've also managed to used up tons of hard disk space on my dad's lappy too... I think the photo backups from my phone to dropbox is currently eating up a lot. My Arashi songs also take up like... 10 GB at least... And I might have some videos that I downloaded years ago still sitting in the downloads folder... *shrugs* But in my defence... This lappy is old too! It's late 2011! Sure, it's 1 year younger than my mid 2010 lappy, but it's almost 5 years old already too! Yeah. I really need a new lappy. Or should I get a desktop...? Dad wants his lappy back later this year anyway... And I really need to give him the lappy back in decent working condition... :X

7) Catch up with Arashi shows
Definitely this... Have to catch up with their shows... And do a few bangumi reviews too I guess. I can put the reviews on NM so that'll be killing at least 3 birds with 1 stone. Still takes me way, way too long to do bangumi reviews though... But it's good because I'm preparing for JLPT now and watching Arashi shows and doing reviews especially is in line with my Japanese learning efforts. As for subs... They still take way too long. I think I'll leave it for now and start watching shows instead... Would be nice if I can watch at least 1 show before collapsing dead on my bed every weekday... We'll see...

8) Miscellaneous stuff that I should figure out
How to export my LJ entries... and automatically have them imported into day one. Similarly for blogger. So that if LJ ever dies one day... I'll still have my entries elsewhere to read. I still regret not having a copy of all my entries from that moblog thing that MOE did last time in collaboration with whoever. All my science loving craziness and love proclamations for chemistry... That was my first blog... I wrote all that in sec sch. This one only came in JC... By then my enthusiasm was already dying out....

Either way, it's nice to have all my entries together in the same place. And I tend to write way longer entries on these blogs than the personal diary that I keep so... A lot of the events and happenings can be traced on my online blogs, but not in that personal one. It's like, after typing a long entry on my blog... Why would I want to write the same thing again on my Day One entry? Plus Day One is a a daily thing (I try anyway), so I usually just type like... One or two sentences entries about what I'm doing at the moment. And not because I genuinely have something to write about...

It's funny how when I was putting together that video last month... I was using my blog as a tool to trace back when things occured and to remind myself of what happened. On the other hand, my personal diary only contained fairly useless information like 'I'm so bored today.' or 'Tiring day.' Lol. Pretty useless indeed... That's why I've been linking my instagram and fb statuses to it... It says a lot more than my daily entries... But my blog entries says a lot more so... :P

Yeah, time to get working on it. Automating the process is the part that's more challenging... Especially for LJ with their outdated tools...


That's all I can think of now I guess. This is a really long entry eh? Definitely something I'll like to save in Day One for sure. I wonder how much of this will remain the same 10 years on. Or even just 5 years. Would be interesting to look back and compare eh? That's the good thing about keeping things electronic. It's there, in the cloud. I can search it anything. Plus, I can use the search function. You can't 'search' in a physical diary... And there's labels/tags too. :P