And I am very aware of it. About five days ago, I made a promise to myself after my last experiment with quitting youtube failed. I thought that I would be able to curb my Youtube habit by limiting myself to only watching what I came to the site to watch. This way I would not browse and fall victim to their powerful recommendation algorithm.
This failed, and it failed by slow loosening of the rules and gradual slippage back into prior habits. Because of this, I made a decision to stop watching Youtube completely for the time being. This means I cannot go on my laptop, cannot go on the app, cannot watch it on the Tv, and cannot watch a quick video that a friend may have sent me. It is a strict ban for probably forever. If I ever wanted to use the platform again, I am thinking of a couple of ways that I could do so in a completely non-addictive and fully informative matter. One method is that I must download the videos (that I was thinking of watching) first on to my device to seperate myself from the platform. I would not be allowed to let Youtube’s algorithm serve me what to watch but instead I must know it beforehand. This will be far into the future where I can live completely seperate from the need to watch video.
On another note, I have been reading Automate the Boring Stuff with Python by Al Sweigart (which I will abbrv. as ABSP) and so far I have really enjoyed it. I am currently on the filesystem chapter and the section that details how to use python to compress (“zip”) files. I am looking forward to later chapters, particularly the ones on webscraping and sending emails and texts 😮 with python. Last night, on a short call with my friend Matt Keating, we discussed python and a few programming things over the phone while I toured the cathedral that he was building on the ski guys minecraft server. He reminded me of a website that I have been fond of but have only now come back to: Project Euler is a collection of programming puzzles on algorithms, data-structures, optimization and more. Solving the problems it presents is a unique challenge (much like Code Abbey or Code Golf) that is rewarding. I have signed back up and hopefully the python that I have learned from this book, I can properly apply for some good problem solving.
A list of priorities is always important, especially for the person who likes to work on a thousand other problems before solving the big daunting problem that has been hanging over their head for weeks (me). I read an article this morning from Harvard Business Review about self-sabotaging behaviours which is what has inspired this section. So here is my current list of priorities to myself:
And priorities to others:
Thinking about doing a power-hour week sometime soon: One article each day for a week that I just write down my thoughts and day in great detail. Just a thought for now.
Until later this week, Jack