Week 39

I missed a day of journaling yesterday.

It’s not that I had lots of important things to say, but I hate that I skipped a day because I just want to stick to my habits.

I woke up around 4 am (yesterday) and got a lot of work done on my app until about 6 am.

After spending days battling with build management, I finally wrapped my head around how everything works, so it felt a little bit easier to work with the tools I’m using.

Since I discovered a lot of bugs after playing around with my app on my phone, and after discussing with my girlfriend who gave me some feedback, I had a pretty long list of things to tick off.

The tasks felt daunting at first, but somehow I was insanely focused working on them as soon as I woke up.

Even though I knew it wasn’t good for my system to have coffee before a certain hour, I still made myself one just to be sure and tackled the tasks one by one.

By 6 am, I had almost 80% of them done.

It felt great.

What was my goal for this week?

• (achieved) I wanted to finally get my app on my iPhone to test all of the functionalities.

What went well this week?

• After battling for a few long days, it took me a while to finally understand how build management works in the technology I’m using (React Native).
• While it took me a couple more days to get things done the way I wanted, I still feel proud that I’ve built a complete app from the ground up in about two weeks.
• In terms of self-management, I’m happy that my little experiment of waking up much earlier than usual showed me I’m definitely the most productive at dawn, before sunrise.
• I also feel happier when I get a lot of work done before I go on a walk.

What didn’t go so well?

• It’s still not easy, but I think I can improve at going to bed at a fixed time.
• For days I know I want to wake up early — say around 4 am — I’ll try to go to bed around 9 pm, leave my phone on the desk far from the bed, keep my laptop there as well, and just read a book to fall asleep.

My goals for the next week

• Submit my app to the App Store
• Work out or walk (at least) 30 minutes every day
• Write every day

Notes to myself

• I don’t want to give myself goals like “go to bed before 10 pm every day” or “wake up at 4 am every day” because I vowed to become someone who respects his body and energy levels.
• It feels okay to me (and pretty realistic) that there will be some days where I’ll be up until 1 am because I’m solving a mission-critical bug or working in a deep flow state.
• Breaking out of flow state and postponing something for the next day, for the sake of “respecting my schedule,” is unproductive. This makes you lie awake at night, eyes wide open, your brain unable to stop, and you keep thinking about what you did or what you could try.
• If I tell myself that “I’m someone who gets things done,” I stop being romantic and don’t care about those “unwind” or “wellness” routines.
• The above is just something influencers keep talking about because it fits the narrative that discipline is a key ingredient of success in entrepreneurship. I think the reality is different. Everybody has different physiological and neurological profiles.
• So you should not care about such “wellness routines” in general. You should just follow the signals your body sends you.
• In general, I find it much more productive to set goals that I know I’ll enjoy working towards. I prefer to create my own rules and succeed because I love playing within those bounds.
• I find it truer and truer that the more self-knowledge I have, the better I become at creating my own games with my own rules. Right now, I just love writing, and I try to find “tricks” so I don’t miss a day — because I hate “losing.”