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#productivity #minimalism #coding
A software engineering wisdom says that premature optimization is the root of all evil. Note the modifier “premature.” Optimization is great; it's not so great in the prototyping stage though.
This is exactly what I am feeling in life. I have obsessed so much over the optimization of the minutiae of the daily grind that I have forgotten to stop and reflect if I am going in the right direction in the first place.
I feel like there is an instinctual and incessant urge to publicize everything on the internet ingrained onto us. Personally, simply reading an opinionated post online can trigger a desire to make an account to deliver a clever rebuttal.
I recently revisited the book Digital Minimalism. This time, however, I borrowed a physical copy through my university's interlibrary loan program.
The purpose of moving away from my exclusively digital reading habit is to rediscover some of the lost values of analog: analog reading, analog writing, and analog existence.
As an experiment, I am going to fully commit to a month-long digital detox as suggested in Digital Minimalism.
This is what my Macbook's desktop looks like. It is free from all possible sources of distractions.
It would be difficult to focus if your workspace was littered with loose documents, empty coca-cola cans, stationeries, and doodles. The same principle applies to our digital environment.
As a tech-junkie and a computer science student, my laptop is the space that I spend most of my time in. So, I made it into the most focused setup possible.
As someone who has academically excelled since a young age, the most difficult transition in college has been an acceptance in my mediocrity.
I am the poster child of a success-driven society. I was raised in South Korea, a country with incomparable academic pressure. In primary school, I received special education for high-performing STEM students. Later in high school, I was my grade's top-performing competitive mathematician.
As an international university student, I rely on a 13-inch MacBook Pro to get work done wherever I go, whether that be a library, café or in a different country. As such, the highlight of Apple's World-Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2019 for me was the new macOS Catalina.
These are the new features in macOS Catalina are most pertinent for a mobile student.
The Green New Deal is still a hot topic in politics, which is remarkable considering that conservation biologists, climatologists, and Bill Nye have been shouting into the void for what seems like an eternity.
It is great that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and others demand immediate and drastic action, for moderate market-based policies have failed. It is the cold, hard truth that without drastic action, the biosphere will be irreversibly damaged.
I will soon be doing a deep dive into several popular “distraction blocker” apps. These are tools that make it very difficult to access distractive apps or websites.
Distraction blockers can be an invaluable tool when we are first learning to sever our dependency from our digital addictions.
However, they come with a huge asterisk that their product pages often omit.
Multitasking on the iPad currently just kinda sucks. Heck, trying to use the iPad Pro as a “pro” device is a cumbersome experience in general.
Rumors about the upcoming iOS 13 hint that there will be a heightened focus on making the iPad into a true laptop replacement.
A home screen redesign for the iPad will likely better utilize its larger screen real-estate, multitasking will be smoother, and the Files app may see some improvements. Furthermore, users might be able to use an iPad as an external monitor to a Mac.
Multitasking on the iPad will become easier than ever. Is it a future worth looking forward to?
I recently shared my strategy for finally making reading into a habit. The key takeaway was to redirect my habit of checking social media on my phone into reading a few pages of an ebook.
In order to make this change stick, I deleted every single source of distraction from my phone. That shaped my environment to be conducive to reading.
In my further research about forming reading habits, I came across an interview of Erik Barker, the bestselling author of “Barking Up the Wrong Tree” and the writer of a homonymous blog. (It has an amusing address: bakadesuyo.com.)