Or, time investments that should pay off. These include some QOL optimisations as well as activities that definitely deserve time.
Here I will list some things that I have been postponing for too long now (because of other immediately important events or responsibilities) that should definitely pay off time/productivity wise if I were to commit to them. I recognise that every one of the “projects” I have listed below are a massive time sink (even my routine would be intelligence augmented), but I’d argue that all of those give me happiness, which is something I should optimise for.
I know that it’s kinda hard to sit down and “waste” a day or two on activities like this but the long term pay off is so worth it, and I say this from experience. One of the best decisions I’ve made last month (March) was ditching my VSCode + vim setup for neovim. It made me feel excited whenever I would sit down to code, because I could code in neovim! It was this joy that I had been depriving myself of for too long, the joy of tinkering, or here maybe the joy of having a setup where vim is front and center. My neovim setup took me about 4-5 days to settle on, I was doing nothing except working on my neovim config because I was so obsessed with it. That is not a healthy or productive thing to do, and I should perhaps find a better model for integrating these “side” activities with a main idea I am working on at a moment.
Enough said though, here are some things I should definitely put time into:
- Migrating my entire setup to arch linux: Ubuntu’s betrayed me too many times by now and it’s been screaming for more space lately. This makes me want to nuke my windows installation and install another distro on the entire 256gigs of that partition. Why choose arch? I was initially going for nixOS because of its declarative nature (a style I appreciate so much from all the config stuff) but I think it’s got a steeper learning curve than arch. Another reason for arch is that it could be a good beginner distro to build on. I don’t intend to use archinstall but want to fuck around with partitions and settings as much as possible, not because I care about having things “my way”, but because it’s a great learning opportunity into how an os distribution really interacts with the lower level stuff. This could easily take a day or two, and I will have to backup both my windows and ubuntu (and surprisingly enough, mint too - I am triple booting on this machine) installations to make space for this. Or maybe I’d just give it 256gigs of space, who knows! But I want to ditch windows because it’s a “safe fallback” at this point and I don’t want that.
- Updating my neovim config: I have been getting errors in neovim because I couldn’t be bothered to go into my .config and fix them. So there’s that, and the fact that in 0.12 they’ve made changes that make handling plugins a lot easier. I am definitely into that, and I’ll maybe customise the way neovim looks too along the way :) Right now I am on kanagawa, but I’d very much want a custom colorscheme.
- Learning docker: I have used docker too many times now but I have only copy-pasted commands from documentation/guides. I think docker is a beautiful piece of technology and putting time into learning it the “proper” way (i.e. following the quickstart guide on docker docs) would serve me well in the future. I should perhaps dockerize some of my own apps along the way!
- Creating a routine: I should definitely create a routine by now. I hate the rigidity of it and my schedule is so fucking weird because of school obligations too but a routine should do me more good than harm. I do have a “general” idea of what I want to work on on a particular day but having a routine would give me a telescopic view into my ongoings, for ex. “does this subject deserve more time than others this week” and whatnot. I might use an AI setup for this. EDIT: I thought about this and realised that I should maybe do this manually. This sounds more like a discipline problem than a “systems” problem. I could easily sit down on the weekend and block out time for studying machine learning, for example. Or for working on assignments. A major variable to consider is that I hate rigidity, and don’t want to feel hostile towards this system. I really don’t know how I will crack that.
- Creating a resume with typst. I choose typst for no other reason than the fact that it’s cool and I can flex about creating something with it.
- Looking into more obsidian plugins that help me make the most out of this software; I want to map out my brain as much as possible (which was the reason for the creation of this digital garden to begin with) and I believe obsidian makes it easy for you to do just that.
- Get tmux running along with a window manager for faster access. And bufferline is a must; might I want to go lazy on my new config on my new linux machine?
- RSS feeds curation: I want to curate high quality feeds from different sources like hackernews, certain twitter guys, youtube and whatever. The goal is to create a system where I am able to keep up with the latest and greatest while not feeling overwhelmed because I have to browse youtube or hackernews everyday to keep up. This is another attempt of mine to solve the Unknown unknowns problem.