Edit: a better name should be “QOL projects” as my proposition didn’t hold well; I will change the name later. 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 have hence named these “pareto projects” - projects that follow the pareto principle, here my interpretation is that “20% of my time being spent on these things would increase my QOL/happiness/workflow efficiency by 80%“. But I do 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.
- 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.