Jan 4, 2025

How I Want to Use My Time

How I hope to keep myself accountable to my goals regarding the person I want to become

Scott Bowers

goalsplanningself-improvementroadmapmind-maptime-managementproductivityfocus

2656 Words | 12 Minutes, 4 Seconds

2025-01-04 01:00 +0000

New Year, Same Me - but with a bit more focus

PXL_20250105.jpg

About 16 months ago my first child was born. I’ve been learning a lot about myself and my priorities in that time. I’m lucky to have a wife and family that love my baby and I, and I’m grateful for the time that I’ve earned with them.

Since October of 2023 I’ve been relearning how to serve my family and myself and one of the most difficult parts has been time. I tend to hyperfocus on one or a few things at a time and with only 16 waking hours in a (good) day, I’ve been trying to find ways to more readily interrupt and redirect that focus in order to provide for my family financially and paternally while also finding my own fulfillment in the many many hobbies I’ve considered or subjects I’ve wanted to study.

That’s a weird way of saying that I need to stop working more than is necessary. I need circuit break that focus when I’ve met my commitments and reserve the remaining patience and energy for my family and myself.

Redirecting Obsession: Converting Raw Energy into Meaningful Output

Twitter/X nerds that come across my screen say things like - “the mediocre vilify obsession” and “its the obsessed that truly innovate”. At first I liked hearing that because it felt like an excuse to let my hyperfocus run free sometimes, to learn something, anything, in detail even if there’s seemingly no practical application for it in my career or my hobbies or my life in general. But I’ve come to realize that is not the obsession they meant.

Obsession with one actual outcome, I think, or at least I’m choosing to interpret this ‘wisdom’ as such now, is what they actually meant. Hyperfocus, but with the driving obsession of a single outcome of work product. Whether it be something that is sold or something that is shared for free, the obsession is the same. Some thing that can be shared with the world.

It could be as simple as an improved resume ( like a portion of this site is meant to be ) or a demo repo showing a new skill or idea. My new criteria for completion/success is delivery. Or “shipping” or whatever you want to call it. In the same way that publishing my writing in wildandlimited was a big step for me in publicly sharing my work I want that public delivery to become my normal habit.

I think I’m no longer afraid of the world seeing me?

Meta-cognition and Bootstrapping

Premise A: For as long as I can remember I’ve been interested in my own meta-cognition. Probably thanks to a very silly and wicked smart mom, and a dad who’s always been willing to follow me into the next obsession.I’ve been interested in how I think and how I can improve my thinking. How does my thinking compare to people I admire? People I … dis-admire? How much control do I truly have over my mindset and thinking processes? What does that control look like? Just pure willpower or something more elegant and learned?

Premise B: Similarly I’ve had much more success self-teaching than retaining information from the American education system. These two things together have allowed me to deeply immerse in various subjects for weeks or months at a time, and while I’ve scribbled notes and diagrams along the way its never been in a systematic structure that I planned to return to. I don’t have the receipts.

These two bits of self knowledge coalesce for me as evidence that I’ve trusted my unconscious mind to do a lot of filtering, cataloguing, sorting, selecting, and prioritizing of information. I’ve been able to learn a lot of things without a specific plan, but I’ve also lacked many tangible outcomes from all my joyful meandering.

This year that changes. I’m going to be more intentional with my time and the willpower or elbow-grease or stick-to-it-iveness that I’ve made a core part of my self-understanding will be used to deliver tangible outcomes.

This blog post is the first one!

The Plan

Know myself.

I’ve logged 11,810 days on this planet, and in that time I’ve learned a lot about myself and my willingness to expend energy. I’ve got plenty of effort to pour into anything that I’m passionate about, but I’ve got to choose something to finish. Something to tangibly progress on. I owe my sister-in-law and a colleague from work so much thanks for their encouragement, insistence, and even the occasional prying nagging annoyance about my writing because it’s thanks to them that I finally shared my writing publicly by hosting wildandlimited and later crawlonizer.

Neither of these is a demonstration of “finishing” anything, but they are both a demonstrations of “delivery”.

I must Write

I’ve got these two novels that I often say I’ll never finish as a kind of self-preservation - avoiding the pressure of a deadline and keeping the non-committal exploration of ideas alive. I think I’ll keep it this way. No need to progress or finish them on any timeline, but I do want to keep them alive and hone my writing. A person I am incredibly lucky to know and be motivated by, the same colleague I’ve mentioned before, taught me about the concept of kattas - and I want to employ his advice and apply that to creative-writing. I want to write like nobody’s reading and meander more consistently toward feeling confident in finishing the real stories I want to tell.

I must Build

I’ve got my career that I’m immensely passionate about and proud of - being a capable engineer is incredibly rewarding. I’ve been beyond lucky to spend ten years working at a place where anything I want to learn is mine to try, and the peers and mentors around me have always supported that exploration and growth. I’ve reached a point where I’m looked to, unofficially, as a leader and teacher of many skills, practices, and technologies. I think I’ve been able to accrue a lot of worthwhile knowledge and expertise in the last decade that I’m eager to share and further hone.

Clarity of Purpose

For the longest time I’ve known that the most important think in my life would be fatherhood. Now that I’m here and I’m living it in between paragraphs of this blog post I’m finally able to believe that there is room for fatherhood and my passion as a simple human being. I want to create and share.

Not only create the life of children and share in their joy, but also create the lives of my imagined characters and their growth towards ideals greater than themselves, and simplest of all I want to create value for the people around me. Make their lives easier or better or more wondrous.

Budgeting My Time

I really wish I had a time-turner like Hermione’s. I’d use it only for studying and writing. I promise.

I’ve got a hundred other minor interests or hobbies that just cannot all fit in the 168 hours of a week.

So I’ll budget my time to the following:

  • 56h sleep
  • 40h work
  • 47h family
  • 30h ?

Weekly Time Allocation

gantt
    title Weekly Schedule
    dateFormat HH:mm
    axisFormat %H
    section Sunday
        Sleep    : 00:00, 8h
        Family   : 08:00, 11h
        ?    : 19:00, 5h
    section Monday
        Sleep    : 00:00, 8h
        Work     : 08:00, 8h
        Family   : 16:00, 5h
        ?    : 21:00, 3h
    section Tuesday
        Sleep    : 00:00, 8h
        Work     : 08:00, 8h
        Family   : 16:00, 5h
        ?    : 21:00, 3h
    section Wednesday
        Sleep    : 00:00, 8h
        Work     : 08:00, 8h
        Family   : 16:00, 5h
        ?    : 21:00, 3h
    section Thursday
        Sleep    : 00:00, 8h
        Work     : 08:00, 8h
        Family   : 16:00, 5h
        ?    : 21:00, 3h
    section Friday
        Sleep    : 00:00, 8h
        Work     : 08:00, 8h
        Family   : 16:00, 5h
        ?    : 21:00, 3h
    section Saturday
        Sleep    : 00:00, 8h
        Family   : 08:00, 11h
        ?    : 19:00, 5h

Maybe I’m a crazy person for trying to plan my time via a Gantt chart in a mermaid diagram in a markdown file, but I’m going to try it.

I generally expect that nobody but myself and the LLM scrapers will read this, so my self-consciousness is low.

What is this ? in my budget?

That’s all the things I’ve always wanted to do for myself, or for the world, like “leaving a mark” or non-biological “legacy”?

Clearly with only 30 hours a week I’m not going to be able to continue following every single rabbit hole that interests me, but I’m going to list them here and see what I can do.

Ideally included in this ? block of time is my exercise, meditation, writing, learning, and most of all building. I have an irresistible neurotic urge to build things. I must build worlds and characters and crises in my writing… probably just as a way to cope with the reality of our world’s complexity and uncertainty. I must also build computer systems - mixing hardware, software, and real-world data/sensors/telemetry is an idea thats been running around my head for a long while. I love citizen science and decentralization as concepts. They feel like necessary parts of a future I want to be a part of.

The options are many and varied - my biggest challenge in these personal endeavors is focusing in and staying on track until delivery.

So here’s my commitments to myself:

Writing

Daily Katta - 1000 words a day.

  • No excuses, no exceptions, all public.
  • No shame, no self-consciousness, just write.
  • Blog posts count - I know that’s a cheap loophole but I’m gonna need it.
  • Where do I want to get my prompts from when focused on creative writing?
    • I should start keeping a prompt list.

Chapters of Crawlonizer

  • However many it takes to feel like the intro sequence is gripping and sets the stage for the larger narrative.
  • Details of the world and physics of the setting matter for this opening sequence and I’ve been stuck imagining the back-and-forth strategies of the parties at play.

Learning and Skills

Refine my professional skills in provable ways. https://roadmap.sh/ is a really neat resource for a visual person like myself.

  • Git (there’s always more to learn, always)
    • https://roadmap.sh/git-github
    • Check off what I know and target what I think will make me better in my day to day use of git for personal and professional efforts.
  • Data Structures and Algorithms
    • https://roadmap.sh/datastructures-and-algorithms
    • I’ve got a lot of real-world and intuitive experience with data structures and algorithms, but I’d probably choke if I was asked to whiteboard anything remotely complex. I want to develop a better intuition for the concepts so I can more fluidly apply them.
    • One of the first hobby projects that really made me want to develop a better intuition for the concepts was a series of astronomical simulations I explored in python and c. Having downloaded the 656gb of zipped Gaia data and begun unloading it into a pgsql database I very quickly realized why public agencies and universities are the groups doing this kind of work.
  • Technical Writing
    • The sbowers.dev group of blogs and repositories will have plenty of content to write about, essentially just stretching my legs in the CICD and simple
    • I want to challenge myself to be more consistent, concise, and clear when writing for a technical purpose, while maintaining the ability to write engaging narrative work otherwise.
  • Megastructure Simulation/Visualization
    • As part of thinking through my Crawlonizer project I’ve been thinking a lot about the megastructural concerns for an arcology, generation ship, or other slow-and-steady approaches to humanity’s first splintering into the stars.
      • (Obvious huge shout out to Isaac Arthur’s work on isaacarthurSFIA for being an incredible inspiration and constant resource for new and rejuvenating ideas.)
    • I’ve created and recreated a few O’Neill and McKendree cylinder worlds in both godot and ue5. It’s incredible to try to “stand” in these megastructures and imagine the physics of the world and life.
    • I’ve also been thinking a lot about the physics of the solar system and how to simulate it in a way that’s both accurate and easy to understand, I know I can’t really beat GMAT or Cosmographia but It’s been fun to fiddle and see why those efforts are so complex.
    • To keep my focus on the deliverable and attainable I’ve decided that the smaller steps in this arena will likely be some Manim animations that help me capture my imagined scale and structure for the Itaque megastructure which will eventually be the home of the Crawlonizer project’s splinter civilization setting course for any non-sol system.
  • CICD for many modern languages
    • gitlab.com/sbowers.dev/pipelines is my current home for writing pipelines that layer together to serve the needs of some detailed/fully-featured CICD pipelines for otherwise simple projects.
    • golang, ruby, python, rust, zig, and c++ are my current ideal targets for building comprehensive pipelines - halfway to prove to myself that I can do it in a way that’s pleasing to me, and halfway to show employers that I’m worth a couple bucks for my time..

If you are a human being and you’re reading this, I’m kind of impressed and kind of flattered and kind of embarrassed but I’m thankful for your interest.

AKA all the things I wish I could spend more time on, but may not fit into the commitments above. I’ll look back on these later this year and see what I forgot to list and what I never thought about again (smile).

My stuff:

Citizen Science and Decentralization:

Space & Astronomy:

Writing:

Indie Game dev in Godot:

Simulation & Scientific Computing:

Low Level Programming:

Edit (Excuse) 1/12/2025

I don’t mind being wrong. I haven’t written or even gotten very far in imagining a Writing Katta in the last week. 1000 words a day is overly ambitions - classic. A lot of my ? time has been monopolized by the pressures (and depressurization) of everyday life - but that’s a-okay. A big part of what this blog is meant to do for me is provide a point of realistic comparison. So I can figure out what accountability and progress actually look like for these personal and hobby projects.

We’ll see where I find my stride in another week. 🙇 Maybe 1000 words a week is a better goal for my current momentum.

Regardless of how much I’ve written I have been coding and learning, so I"m still pretty satisfied with my progress though there’s not yet much to deliver publicly.