Week 1 Reflection

Today marks the end of the 1st week of the Fall Semester, so I feel it is a good time to start a blogging practice.

The purpose of this blog is partly for self-improvement and self-reflection, and partly to share what I feel may be helpful to others and myself years ago. I will take entries from my journal and organize and expand them. Some of these posts will be self-help tips from books/articles I read. I plan to also write reviews and reflections on books/articles/my experiences. Everything will be highly subjective and my own opinion and does not reflect anybody else’s.

Below is my weekly schedule for the weekdays (with non-weekly events removed). My weekend schedule can be very arbitrary from working on the house/yard trips with family, shopping, etc.

I think the major details are as follows: 1) I am planning to focus a lot more on research by scheduling at least 4 hours of deep work (for intense projects) with breaks on as many days as possible. Examples of deep work include designing a new architecture, analyzing the theoretical bounds on performance, coding the algorithm, and writing the thesis. In other words, deep work is work that requires some thought.

2) I just have two long-term projects that require a bit work (besides research):

• contributing to open source projects (started mostly because of jobs): Thursday, Friday, and the weekend
• blogging (which I’m doing here): mostly during the weekend (but I write everyday during the night daily).

3) I also schedule better habits before 8pm (reading during breaks, playing piano, light coding problems), and more shallow habits at the end of each day during “Play” (youtube, Ted, Twitch, surfing the web, etc.,).

4) For exercise, I plan to run on Tuesday and Thursday, and either Saturday and Sunday. On Friday (and potentially Monday), I will practice yoga with at most 1-2 others. On Monday and Wednesday and Saturday, I plan to do a bit bodyweight exercises (with an iPad when I don’t need to pay as much attention)

There are a lot of other details that I will leave for another post.

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My first and most important tip is forming a habit to write and reflect everyday starting with at least 2 minutes, preferably near the end of the day. I started this habit by scheduling just 5 minutes of free write before I slept on what I am grateful for and what I feel can be improved. Some days, I spent just 3-4 minutes listing these things. Other days, it ends up being 10 minutes. Since it is short, I have missed only a few days so far.

This reflection practice can be incorporated into meditation practice (and I probably will eventually, but now I am still focusing on developing concentration). I will write more on meditation in another post.

I think keeping a diary/journal is one of the most efficient ways for self-improvement. As long as we constantly reflect on our actions, we can eventually improve.