One of the often-talked about supplements out there is Magnesium. I have a friend with some, so I tried it out of curiosity yesterday. This might be an anomaly, but I do feel a lot more energetic today (roughly a 25% energy boost, didn't feel a need to take naps and was quite productive), it's quite unusual.

One of the things this makes me think about is not underestimating the effectiveness of supplements. I used to think low energy to be somewhat an aspect of my personality, but now I'm not so sure? Anyways, I want to look into supplements a bit more now. Productivity is actually a bottleneck currently, not because I'm unproductive, but because the current environment does seem to demand a lot of it.

— Categorized under: #productivity

One of the more interesting people I've met during the sabbatical was Michelle Huang, who is currently starting an artist's creative residence in Japan. One of her tweets that caught my attention recently was the one in my post on existential angst, I think there are some parallels on how we think, but she's done a much, much better job of documenting her journey through Twitter. I'm interested in using her experiences as a bouncing board for my own personal sabbatical:

i bartered a month of rent in exchange for setting up an art installation in the house i stayed in

Designing as a way to sublet is really cool, and not something I've thought a ton about before. Neat!

given that i had spent chunks of my career “optimizing for choice”, moving from one reputable job to the other (investment banking → product, both requiring skillsets so broad, that you can basically “do anything” after), i realized i had little idea of what my ikigai was

I find myself falling into this too, which is why a sabbatical felt necessary.

the hardest part about this by far was managing my own psychology: i felt constant anxiety to produce, and kept weighing opportunity costs, which took away from my presence in my day-to-day work

I feel this at times.

additionally, i felt irrational financial pressure, even though i had enough personal runway

I feel this as well – the pressure is actually more social imo, and needs to be managed by being with a good community.

my second mistake was having too many broad and ambitious interests

I think it is worth pursuing just 2-3 interests at a time.

to this, i added flexibility to the hyperstructure (biweekly focus topics)

when there was a new, unplanned idea, instead of subscribing to previously-defined rigid rules, i would ask myself:

“is this project something i would be proud of finishing at the end of my sabbatical?”

I like this a lot – bi-weekly sounds like a great cadence. I was actually surprised to hear that it didn't work for her, the following section's interesting.

a better way of framing this was to allow myself to “chase flow”

the more i listened to it, the more i was able to sense it, follow it, and become 10x as productive (vs gritting my teeth and grinding through complications). and also have it feel effortless the entire time

Imo I'm pretty bad at listening to this and want to do it more.

i actually became a morning person during this time period (!!)

there were a few months that i'd wake up everyday at 4am – which was absurd to me, given that i never previously identified as a morning person

This was interesting. I think moving to a new country helped her, and it's something I could consider. And I also never considered myself a morning person, I wonder if that's just bad framing.

another thing i found super helpful was having accountability partners

i had weekly 2.5-hour coworking sessions with a few friends who were also on their own respective entrepreneurial + sabbatical journeys

we'd catch up, detail out our session tasks, and check in at the end

This sounds really good! Something that I should implement for Fractal.

after some experimentation, i realized i learn best by 1) actively being engaged on projects and 2) time-boxing these projects

by adding in number 2, i found myself completing many more projects because it would limit scope, and maintain my enthusiasm / reduce burnout

This sounds really good, like a sustained hackathon! Want to work on something like this, maybe not 30 days but 2 weeks.

the last thing i did correctly -and that i intend to do again- was to remember to treat myself kindly and with compassion

there will be bad days (and sometimes bad weeks), and there will be good days. but to acknowledge and create space for the humanness in between is important

+1 on this.

one of my largest takeaways was that more than anything, i loved art and interactive design, something i never got a chance to do in any formal roles

i realized also i get energized by collaboration, and dream of having a mad scientist research lab with friends

This is interesting, I always want to work on my personal vision, not sure why? Is this an ego thing?

But I think I might also be bad at converting people to new visions.

every sabbatical looks different, but TLDR during my 1.5 years, i got to: move to a new country, redefine myself as an artist, create art with my brainwaves, launch an DAO, learn motion graphic design, explore web3, give talks at conferences, meet many incredible people, and more

IMO this is a great way to frame sabbatical, and something I should write for my own as well. E.g.

• Moved to a new city
• Travelled
• Found love of design and travelling
• Experimented with different forms of living
• Made a lot of new friends.
• Built a community space for ~50 people

second, i experimented with a lot of different organizational frameworks to project manage myself and develop my exobrain

main takeaways: high-level quarterly planning, GTD + weekly kanban in @NotionHQ , and knowledge management + daily task tracking in @RoamResearch

there are endless possibilities to an empty canvas – equal parts intimidating and empowering

I have all of these in Obsidian, hmm... but I think Obsidian itself may be powerful enough for this. Though I don't necessarily do a lot for GTD. I think going back to looking at GTD each day would be a good idea, since it keeps the GTD system powerful.

Imo what is missing is: > Quarterly Planning > Kanban for Projects > GTD daily checkins > Weekly overviews.

Overall takeaway from reading: – Use sabbatical to explore radically different living structures – Keep in mind that you have a good financial runway – Think about a project in terms of “whether I'd be proud to have finished it by the end of by sabbatical” – Sleep schedule for a person might not be as fixed as how you thought it might be – Be compassionate with yourself – Think about how to be a better collaborator

Todo: – Habit planning on wake should be #1 habit, not necessarily any other routine. Everything follows from habit planning. – Reinstate GTD – Reinstate Weekly reviews – Use Kanban/sheets to track timeboxed projects to track optional features – Think about how to chase flow – Remind myself of my runway – Use “proud to finish it” as a metric for understanding my sabbatical projects – Keep an open mind about moving to different places to study

— Categorized under: #creativity, #sabbatical, #productivity

Thinking about the last post on Existential Angst, one thing I'm noticing often now is that my day tends to be pretty unproductive when I sleep late and wake up early, this is even if I get some naps in.

There are a lot of other social inconveniences too that comes with a shifted sleep schedule.

A while ago I wrote a Twitter thread on how I have to viscerally experience consequences to learn. Overall, I think I may finally be learning this lesson for sleep.

Also note: it takes like 2 hours for me to get from the “time to get ready for bed” phase to actually sleeping. This means I should start getting ready for bed around 10.

— Categorized under: #sleep, #productivity

The Mechanism of Dreams

I didn't feel inclined to consume media yesterday but consumed some anyways to move away from CBD. Had another long, drawn out dream last night, completely unrelated to the media I consumed yesterday. It was about doing a small river boat tour with some friends.

One thing I noticed with CBD-induced sleep is that there are no dreams. Perhaps this makes sense to some degree, media consumption & life experiences often leads to dreams for me, and I have a feeling that I'm waking up early prior to CBD because there is a part that looks for narratives and didn't find any. This either leads to discomfort or a faulty algorithm that causes me to wake up.

CBD-induced sleep feels like it skips this altogether. There's a sort of dizziness that CBD creates that makes my thinking process fuzzy and induces artificial tiredness. For some reason I get no dreams on it. It's something I didn't notice until I started dreaming again. I wonder if these vivid dreams from the past few days have been me finally processing that backlog of dreams. It certainly explains the complete lack of interest in narratives recently, and the intensity of these dreams.

Dreams as Guardian Angels

My favorite function of dreams have been their guardian functions. I've had quite a few dreams that does one of 1.) warn me against a future threat, 2.) prepare me for grief, and 3.) indicate to me when I am currently stressed. I find 1.) and 2.) particularly salient. There are times when I unconsciously gravitate toward life decisions that probably won't work out in the end, and dreams have sometimes been ways to bounce myself out of that. I'm pretty thankful for it. I think that this is another good reason to skip on CBD.

The Prolonged Aesthetics State

One thing I notice when I fall low on sleep is that aesthetic things (particularly music) become much more salient to me. I can't help but stop what I'm doing to appreciate music. This is distracting but also fun, I guess a part of life in that sense.

Sometimes I wonder if music is a way for me to make up narrative content, but this seems untrue. Music consumption does not improve sleep for me, and you would think that with the lack of dreams on CBD music would have become less salient for me, but they've become more.

What music DOES correlate with is the lack of cardio. I find that not running increases my artistic sensitivity & perfectionism tendencies (e.g. OCD). Along that veins, it might even increase anxiety. Music are particularly aesthetically beautiful things and may appeal to my heightened artistic sensitivity at that state.

Is not running good for my creative process? It does improve quality in detail-oriented work, but I think it may be bad for creative thinking. At least in non-artistic realms of my life, I find that not running causes me to fixate on unimportant life decisions.

These are my notes on CBD and sleep currently. I may have some more to write, but a part of me also wants to summarize some thoughts about social interactions yesterday, so perhaps I'll write more about dreams later.

— Categorized under: #dreams, #sleep, #productivity

Over the past half a year or so, I've been experimenting with CBD for improving sleep.

The way CBD works on me is a bit different than melatonin, the effect seems to be more in sleep maintenance, rather than just falling asleep. I have trouble with sleep maintenance if I:

1) Did not expose myself to narrative content (animation, TV shows, manga, personal adventures) during the day, and: 2) Did not do at least one short intense burst of cardio the day before

CBD straight up removes the need for both of these for me, and I usually have no trouble sleeping through the entire night. This saves about 45 minutes a day, which is really huge.

As another benefit, I feel like I passive enjoy music more in the past few months, and I think CBD might have had an ambient effect on this. I listen to music a lot, and the passive affect bonus this gives is pretty significant.

However, I think there are issues with continuous usage. Recently I've been decreasing my doses of CBD, and despite this I'm feeling several side-effects (with very, very slow onset over the course of a month or two): – Increase in brain fog – Worse sense of time – More easily distracted – Less inclination to follow routines

One of the things I enjoy the most is quiet thinking time when I can organize the events of the past few days & weeks; the brain fog makes it harder to do this. The distraction & routine hit is also something I believe will culminate to longer than 45 mins per day of penalty. This would be the case even if those 45 minutes were completely wasted, which I believe cardio and watching shows are actually very-much non-wasted time.

The above makes a pretty convincing statement that I should stop CBD, though one of the effects that I might be the saddest to let go is exactly how much I've enjoyed music on it.

I think CBD basically amplifies music for me, and I had a recent peak experience with music where I was moved to tears and felt personally transformed by a track, I think CBD probably did help facilitate it. Nowadays most of the music I listen to are quite positive and prosocial, so I think the amplified affects are very positive and prosocial.

It's ironic, but I do find my appreciation of music sometimes to counter my productivity. Like I'd work and get distracted by a song that hits particularly hard, or I'll have days where I feel compelled to just listen to music and bask in the vibes instead of doing whatever intellectual work. Those are some of the most fun moments for me, there does need to be a balance though.

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche outlined Apollonian aesthetics and Dionysian aesthetics, where the prior focused on rational, sharp-edged, elegant beauty whereas the latter focused on passionate, impressionistic, and melding beauty. I think about the difference between these two a lot, and believe that there should be a balance between the two types to continue to motivate both progress & enjoyment in life. What CBD offered me in the realm of music feels like watching a particularly striking sunset. It's great to be there in the moment and immerse yourself in its alluring beauty. But part of the value is that the sun will eventually set and we will find ourselves moving about, making progress on our dreams to build a more beautiful tomorrow.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #productivity

Went on a quick 17 minute run yesterday, for the first time in a while, and the improvements I felt today were pretty miraculous.

1. Strongly improved mood, I think on the order of +3 or +4 on a 10 point scale.
2. Much improved sleep quality, I think also a ~30% improvement.
3. A lot of mental clarity upon waking, beating an old drum here, but maybe 30% as well?
4. A strong motivation to do productive things. I've been struggling with mild burnout for the past few days, and it was pretty unthinkable to me how I woke up basically eager to tackle these things that I've been dreading to do the previous two days.
5. No longer feel the desire to go back to sleep all the time.

Recently I went to a week-long festival and felt quite happy there even though I didn't get a lot of sleep. Thinking about it, a part of that might also have come from biking a lot during the day and getting my cardio in too.

Cardio is often one of the first things I let go of since the immediate impact is not that visible, and QoL decreases very slowly, but this experience is making me realize that running should probably be close to #1 priority to me, especially when I find burnout hindering my productivity (but ideally before this situation even comes to pass).

Small mental note: the run yesterday was also a lot more intense than my usual jog from last year. I feel like that might have contributed to the huge effect as well. To investigate.

— Categorized under: #productivity

Chatting with some friends recently and reflecting on my past year's experience, there's some general agreement that “outside of a full time job, there's time for two active hobbies at most”.

By active hobbies, what we mean here are hobbies that you are either growing or trying to incorporate into your life. For example, taking skate lessons twice a week or studying one chapter of Japanese a week. I think anything that fits into the sentence “right now I'm working a lot on _____” can be considered an active hobby.

Having two active hobbies outside of work might already be a stretch for a lot of people – I think pulling this off for many requires some sort of social sacrifice for many, unless the hobbies are already social in nature. A reality you notice when talking to people in a full-time job is that they tend to tire out after work as is.
Generalizing a bit more, I think a reasonable approximation here is that a full-time job might account for the time of two active hobbies. So if you are not employed, then you get four active slots.
This heuristic works pretty well, and I think is a good way to keep optimism about how much you can do in check. Reflecting on the past year, I definitely overloaded myself by taking on way too much (1 meeting new people, 1 improv, 0.5 art, 1 Japanese on top of work), and I do believe the quality of everything suffered as a result.
Having that heuristic acts as a good reality check. I now pick up new things much more carefully. I do think the quality of what I do improved as a result, though.
The heuristic of four units of active hobbies (or at most two outside of work) is very counter-intuitive in part because we seem to see other people who can do a lot more. In practice I think there are a few addendums to the heuristic:

• You can downgrade an active hobby to a passive hobby if it's something you can set up a routine for. For example, learning about how to work out correctly is an active hobby. But once the routines are set up, it becomes fairly passive and might only take 1/5 to 1/3 of a normal hobby slot. I don't believe all hobbies are amenable to this, though.
• If one of the hobbies are what you do to recharge anyways, I don't count it within the four. For example, a lot of people play video games to recharge, and I don't consider video games as taking up an active slot. It happens that most of what people do in order to recharge are not considered “productive hobbies” in the traditional sense (case in point, video games). However, some people gets recharged by strenuous and stereotypically “productive” hobbies – say running or tennis. If that's what they need in order to recharge, then it might seem that they actually have three productive hobbies going on outside of work.
• (Hypothetical, I have never seen anyone do this.) With very careful time management and possibly a lot of caffeine, I surmise it may be possible to handle three “productive” active hobbies outside of work. I don't think this is much achievable without some direct introspection on productivity, and possibly a lot of prep/planning work.
  When you drill into the details of each individual's life, I'm sure there will be lots of counterexamples and room to optimize. However, I think thinking in terms of four units (or two on top of work) makes for an excellent reality check against taking on too much.
  As a tiny bonus, I quite like how reality seems a lot more like a video game or board game this way.

— Categorized under: #productivity

In a random walk the other day, I realized that the typical fashionability of bisexuals and the typical social awkwardness of neurodiverse people are actually quite related.

One of the important facets of social skills is to understand how people will react to what you do. We implicitly use this skill to avoid doing awkward or offending things. Neurotypical people have an advantage on this because they can use themselves to simulate how most people will react to the situation. On the other hand, neurodivergent people will struggle because they could only learn this from observing how others react to the situation. This has the further effect of making socializing much more painful to neurodivergent people, further reducing their opportunities to get feedback.

The generally-higher fashion skills of bisexual (and gay) people serves as an illustration of the opposite phenomenon. Because these people are attracted to people of their own sex, they are often immediately able to use their own emotional responses to simulate how attractive they will be to others of their sex. This is something that heterosexuals don't have easy access to. Unless there is a way to tap into increasing their own attraction to their own sex, the best that they can do is to either run simulations from other pictures of attractive people of their sex they have seen, or to have friends who are attracted to their sex give tips for them.
In productivity literature, there are a lot of verbiage on how important having an immediate feedback mechanism is. Thinking about examples like those in my life, the salience of that type of mechanism suddenly becomes amazingly clear.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #productivity, #social, #fashion

From every productivity strategy I've tried (and I've tried quite a few!), the most useful productive strategies have been by far to increase startup friction for things I don't want to do, and decrease startup friction on things I want to do.

I used to spend more time than I would like on Twitter. To change that, I intentionally made my password some random string that I don't write down, and log out after each browsing session. This way, I have to go through the painful password recovery process each time I want to log in. Eventually I don't log in to Twitter anymore.

Recently I picked up piano again after a 1-year hiatus, and it has replaced a lot of rote gaming as something I do for break. The impetus has been moving the digital piano from the living room to my next to my computer, directly next to where I work. This way, the piano is by me for about 8-12 hours a day. This actually didn't work for a few months and I got as far as unplugging the piano, intending to move it back, but eventually worked out nicely.

What surprises me a lot is how far you can take this strategy. It's almost always further than you expect it to be able to, both in the types of habits you can apply it to, and the complexity of obstacles you can set up to make it harder to do unproductive things. My Facebook account requires me to log in to a second email account, which is needed to log in to a third email account, to be able to log in. My phone has a byzantine process that I have to go through to unlock access to news sites. And in a classic fashion, I don't have candy in the house (and often throw them away if I get a batch somehow). This kind of thing often requires a one-time investment to eradicate habits that eat up just as much time every day.

And there's something about utilizing opportunities when I have willpower to control my behaviors when I am low on willpower that is quite neat and appealing to me. Although I've had successes as well with effortful productivity tricks (say GTD), after some significant recent successes I think I should just default to this strategy whenever possible. The process can get to be incredibly hacky (like having 3 emails accounts), but the results are almost always impeccable.

— Categorized under: #workflow, #productivity

A friend reminded me of Overjustification Effect (Wiki Article) recently. Despite having heard of this effect a long time ago, I'm only recently realizing that Overjustification is an elegant solution to why creatives often burn out and find it hard to find inspiration.

Namely, when the external motivation of money/fame/recognition starts playing a role in creative projects, the Overjustification Effect states that intrinsic motivation will decrease over time. If the positive feedback of money/fame/recognition is not manifested for a while, then the creative endeavor will lose both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation altogether, and the creator will find themselves running on fumes (or face the common “I've lost my passion” phenomenon).

If a creator wants to avoid this, is seems that by necessity they will need to have a sense for their currently ratio of intrinsic-to extrinsic motivation, and intentionally try to sustain the intrinsic part. Maybe some people can do it naturally, but to be host this sounds challenging, unless one has an overwhelming amount of intrinsic motivation, and that seems a bit rare in adults.

In children, however, intrinsic motivation doesn't seem like a scarce resource. I recall having almost effortless concentration, curiosity, and motivation to play with things when I was little – legos, board games, mazes, brain teasers. Those motivations had no connection to external rewards.

So even though extrinsic motivation is effective on kids, it seems that there are less sources or concerns for extrinsic motivation when one is young, so it's pretty easy to sustain a passion for something.

At some point around adolescence, extrinsic motivation seems to take over. Hobbies not only need to be interesting, but also have a “point”, and so toys and games, among with other unique hobbies, lose their luster.

This got me thinking. Perhaps our intrinsic tendency to play with things still exist as adults, but are just suppressed by an overwhelming amount of extrinsic motivation that inevitably need to come out of our hobbies. So we gradually lose the ability to indulge in things that have no “point” – unless like the artist, we also find some way to cultivate intrinsic motivation against the usual social pressures.

The challenges that the learning adult faces is not so different than that of the burned-out creative. When extrinsic motivation takes over, it becomes pretty much impossible to sustain something unless one is frequently very successful.

What causes the overjustifaction effect? I'm a bit surprised that there doesn't seem to be a good evolutionary explanation for it yet. It would be cool to hear what science has to say on the cause one day, since I think the influence of this effect on how we behave is really underrated.

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Categorized under: #psychology, #productivity