I’ve been working more at my job. I’m considering accepting a full-time position there which would give me more responsibility and higher pay and allow me to learn and do some things that I think will be fun and satisfying. The downside to it is that it would be a full-time commitment.
I’m doing spaced repetition learning with the Anki app for a bunch of numbers that I want to memorize for work.
I finished the mindfulness meditation intro course in the Waking Up app. I’m trying out the meditations in the UCLA Mindful app. It seems like mindfulness meditation is helping me, but it’s hard to say how. Maybe I’m noticing my thoughts and body sensations more, and maybe I’m being nicer to myself and less self-conscious, and maybe I’m more willing to see reality.
I’m doing the six-week plan in the book Say Good Night to Insomnia. My sleep isn’t terrible, but it’s not great either. I’m trying to improve it.
In my karate practice, I made up a schedule spreadsheet to make sure I continue to practice things I’ve worked on, with diminishing frequency. I continue to practice for 15-30 minutes per day on my own, and I’ve gone back to in-person classes too. I’m starting to use the Anki app for some karate stuff too, like memorizing language or facts or a short series of moves.
I stopped doing my coding study. I liked it, but other things are more important to me now.
I’ve made some big changes in focus. I don’t know how to judge if that was a mistake.
Friendly comments or questions welcome about how I’m spending my time or about how to decide what to spend time on, or about whether I’m overreaching, or about particular things I’m studying. I think friendly meta would be okay with me, but I’m not sure.
I like the Mochi flash card app. It does spaced repetition too. It also uses markdown. I find it easier to use than Anki app. I always found Anki app kind of annoying.
Thanks, Justin. I originally tried the Quizlet flash card app. It didn’t have spaced repetition, which I found to be a drawback. And I found it awkward to edit cards once I had made them. Anki is better in both of those respects. I’ll stick with it for now because I’m happy with it, but keep Mochi in mind for if I develop issues with Anki.
One question I have is about how to learn about the new job position, which is the first rung on the management track. I expect that the training I get won’t be very organized. I will take notes as I learn, write things and organize the writing at home (maybe some trees?), and research things that I think would be useful to know. If I’m working full time, I won’t have much free time, so I might have to do all this at a slower rate than I’d like. Any other general ideas for learning how to do a job and getting better at it? I’m starting to go into work each day with a short list of things I want to ask about or do that day. These could be procedural things or attitudes or specific questions for a specific person.
One worry I have is that I’m not: studying anything academic, posting much here, making trees, doing thinking exercises, or writing for anyone besides myself. Maybe that’s bad. Maybe I’m avoiding this group (do we call it CF now instead of FI?) because of my history of having a bad time here, and I’d be better off continuing to spend a lot of time thinking and studying.
You should try integrating activities here into your life rather than seeing your life and CF as separate things. E.g. If you’re spending a bunch of time learning about a management-track job, maybe that’s an opportunity to read and discuss Goldratt stuff.
A problem with reading Goldratt and discussing it here is that I have much less time for reading and discussing than I have in the past. But I could still read and discuss a little at a time.
Another problem with reading Goldratt and discussing it here is that I won’t want to post much about my particular situation to maintain privacy for myself and others. But I could just post about what Goldratt says and not about how it relates to my life.
I don’t remember much Goldratt, but one thought occurs to me now about it.
In The Goal, Goldratt talks about the goal of a business, which is usually to make money. But in businesses with multiple layers of management, individuals might not care how much money the business makes. They might care more about their personal advancement, which is likely to be dependent on social stuff and might also be dependent on sales (not profit), or on whether their department passes inspections, or on whether their boss is getting yelled at by his boss, or something else that doesn’t necessarily correlate with the amount of profit made by the company.
Is the best thing for a low-level person to do to try to increase the company’s profit and try to advance their own career?
As a low-level worker and a novice to business stuff, it’s hard to know what will increase profits for a company or what has caused profits to increase or decrease in the past.
I think I should start with learning to do well at whatever I’m taught to do and expected to do.
You could also come up with hypotheticalized versions of the stuff dealing with in life. And if you find that hard, you could work on the skill of hypotheticalizing stuff, which is an important skill anyways, since it’s basically about figuring out what parts of some situation are important and can be abstracted out from the particular details…
I think that making whatever stuff you’re supposed to be learning from your company a primary focus is compatible with spending some free time learning and discussing other stuff that might be helpful.
I wasn’t trying to strongly suggest Goldratt in particular btw. It was just the first thing that struck me as an example of something that might be helpful and that you could talk about here with knowledgeable people.
I have continued to try out meditation apps. I did some meditations on Insight Timer, including a 40-day course called Mindfulness Daily at Work, taught by Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. I might go back and do some of the exercises they suggest to do in your daily life. I tried out some stuff on headspace.com. They didn’t have a lot that is public and they wanted a credit card for a free month, which I didn’t want to give them. Now I’m trying different people’s stuff on Insight Timer.
I’ve continued my karate practice and my spaced repetition practice with the Anki app, adding in some world geography.
I finished the insomnia program I mentioned in June, and it didn’t seem to change the amount of sleep I get very much. I didn’t do anything else on that topic.
I did move to full-time work. I’ll stick with it for a while and see how it goes. But I’m leaning towards going back to part time after a while, either there or somewhere else.
I started a project about social stuff. I might post about it in a separate thread.
I have not posted here for several months. I want to start posting again. I don’t understand much about why I stopped or why I want to start again. Roughly, I have a history of negative emotions associated with FI/CF, and I wanted a break from those negative emotions. But I also think I learned from posting here and want to learn more. Maybe my time spent on meditation and on thinking more about social stuff will make it easier for me to be happier here now, or maybe not.
If I do start posting again, I’d like to not pressure myself to post as much as I did in the past.