I’ve recently realized that my workflow can be a lot more efficient.
I thought it was fine, but as it turns out, it was just what I was used to. Humans can get used to anything, and if we don’t have anything outside us telling us that these conditions are unacceptable, we tend to just, well, accept them.
I started feeling like I didn’t have time to do anything shortly after I arrived in SF. While it’s gotten somewhat better, it still feels like I want to get more done than there are hours in the day.
I didn’t actually realize that was a warning sign for a while, because I had no reference group. I don’t succumb to the usual time traps: I open social media approximately twice a year, I don’t watch TV, I don’t make a habit of being intoxicated, I have no time-consuming hobbies that aren’t contributing to improving my career.
But I realized that not succumbing to the obvious time-sucks doesn’t mean you’ve evaded them all.
I’d previously learned that when something about your life feels chaotic, you’re probably just bad at predicting it; it feels from the inside like the thing is inherently unpredictable, but it isn’t. In the same way, I realized, when you feel like there aren’t enough hours in a day, you probably have some energy/time sink somewhere. That’s what an inefficient system feels like from the inside: not having enough time.
That was what I was missing: there is a difference between being actually good at efficiency and simply not shooting yourself in the foot. I had to do better than just not screwing up. I had to actively work on being better.
I’m currently in the process of optimizing my workflow and trying to get stuff done faster. There’s a decent amount of up-front work to make it happen, turns out.
Instead of taking notes in my plain-text no-frills Notes app, I’ve started taking notes in Vim. Learning the keyboard shortcuts for navigation, then forcing myself to actually use them, took an hour or so. I’d be reaching for the mouse to highlight and delete something, or reaching for the backspace key, but then I’d stop myself, push caps lock (which I remapped to escape for convenience), and type the shortcut instead. After I got the knack of it, I felt myself working faster as I laid out the steps I’d need to take to build an iPhone app I’ve been working on.
I also recently forked my friend Lahwran’s dotfiles repository, which downloads (among many other very useful tools) an excellent window tiling program called Amethyst. No more switching between tabs while trying to hold something in my head!
I’m making better use of my train rides to and from work now, too. I’ve found that physical books are good, because they don’t require wifi, so I’ve been steadily reading through the small collection I brought with me on the plane, plus borrowed a biography of Elon Musk from my boss, which I’ve been reading for life trajectory inspiration.
Finally, I’ve felt like I had no time to sit down and write blog posts on here. But I realized, I don’t have to. There are other methods of documentation that are faster to jot down: for example, Twitter. I was hesitant for a long time, because I was worried it would be a net negative for time, but I’ve been posting quick updates about projects and publishing quick thoughts on there, and it seems to work out well. (My handle is @JenyaLestina, if you’d like to take a look.)
The moral of all of this is that if your life is hard for some reason, it doesn’t have to stay that way. People like to complain about life, but that doesn’t mean it has to suck. If your life is difficult – even in a minor way – don’t stand there and take it. Fix it.