2024 Q1 in Review

Before the end of Q1...

In January, I did a review of 2023, and I want to continue that practice by doing quarterly reflections. I’ll first purely walk through what I spent my time on, and then go into a more qualitative reflection.

I use Toggl to track all of the time that I spend on my laptop, so I’ll be making educated guesses for everything else. This reflection will be incomplete because I completely switched up my time-tracking categories in the middle of January, but I hope this will be more reflective of how I spend my time, and future reflections should hopefully be better.

Time

Here’s a pdf if you want to explore on your own. I gave up tracking reading and exercising pretty quickly.

• Reading: (estimated) 50 mins/day

• Competitive Programming: 42 mins/day

• Tools for Thought (reading and thinking about tfts + my tft garden): 42 mins/day

• Homework (only digital): 37 mins/day

• Misc. Learning (learning + using Anki to remember): 34 mins/day

• Programming Projects: 27 mins/day

• Blogging: 24 mins/day

• Guitar: 24 mins/day

• Journal (my pkm garden + keeping a diary): 16 mins/day

• Misc. Productive (anything outside of these categories): 13 mins/day

• Talking/Texting with Friends: 11 mins/day

Reflection

Outside the numbers

• Passed USACO Bronze!

• Discovered Hack Club and started a chapter in my school

• Participated in 2 hackathons (1-1 as of right now) → got humbled regarding my design and front-end skills

• Realized that tools for thought/human-computer interaction research is something I would be interested in as a career

• Realized that there’s a ton of stuff wrong in the world and I might want to work on that over my career

Tensions

This quarter I’ve definitely experienced a tension between “learning” + “thinking” and “doing” and I’ve finally started to internalize the fact that I simply don’t have the time to do everything I would like.

I’ve had pretty sizable reductions in the amount of time I’ve spent “doing” (competitive programming, programming projects, blogging, guitar) since the last review because of equally sizable increases in the amount of time I’ve spent learning and thinking about the world. This has been insanely difficult to balance, and I’m still not sure what the right ratio is.

I’ve also faced a lesser tension between breadth and depth. I would love to gain deep expertise in a specific domain, but I also like learning and doing tons of different things.

On a positive note, I’m proud of the amount of homework I’ve been able to do in school recently. I’ve saved a lot of time by just being more productive during lunch.

Looking forward to Q2

• I want to get competitive programming back up to 1+ hours a day.

• I want to work through some of the blogging backlog that’s accumulated over the last month.

• I’m going to be continuing my tools for thought “research” by investigating:

  • Information practices of the future

    • Search

    • AI

  • OS’ of the future (right now I’m most excited by Alexander Obenauer’s idea of the itemized operating system)

• Continue getting involved in the Hack Club community and build some projects to upskill in development/programming

• Explore important cause areas I might be interested in working on in the future