~/diary/March Madness
Updated Apr 1, 2021

🖊 March Madness Thursday, Apr 1, 2021

The month of march begun with a feeling of being lost. As more and more opportunities, projects, ideas started to materialize I found myself burning a lot of mental cycles thinking about time management. Questions such as:

• How should I spend time?
• Is this thing I’m doing a good use of my time?
• Am I wasting my time?
• …

The worst part of this is getting distracted by these questions and doubts. They would constantly weight on my shoulder while working at something, and even more so during relax time.

Another thing I consistently find find myself asking is:

• Am I doing this because I’m avoiding that?
• Am I doing this because I find it pleasant, but it’s not worth the time in the long run?

Voicing these thoughts helped me come up with a plan to deal with this overhead and constant doubt.

As a first step, I’ve drawn a map of all the possible things I can do. Then evaluated each one across different metrics: difficulty, personal interest, reason for consideration, potential payoff (monetary or otherwise).

Writing everything down helped it get it out of my head, which helped focusing on things I decided to do.

However the landscape is ever-changing, so I see myself doing this periodically.

One surprising fact surfaced from the mapping exercise. While bucketing the project based on “why am I thinking of working on this”, I realized one of the buckets was essentially the FOMO bucket: things I’m not necessarily passionate about but have great potential or opportunity. Ignoring these ideas and projects feels wrong. It feels like leaving money on the table.

Nevertheless, I resolved to avoid pursuing items in this bucket. My heart is not in it. Someone else will do it, I wish them luck!

March was a good month overall, I feel like I did quite a few things, and I don’t regret any of them. Either I learned something, or made new friends, or inspired new ideas, or had fun.

Among other things I earned my first ~dollar~ xDAI, which helps to tame the voice inside of me that worries about money.

I’m liking the daily and weekly routine I’ve gradually switched to during the last month, described in the last post. I’ve added a day per week where I try to completely disconnect. Either by not opening my laptop at all, or by going somewhere that has no cellphone reception.

I’m still not sure what to do next, the landscape offers too many possibilities, and new ones come up everyday. But at least I’m making progress building mental tools, processes and maps to deal with it.