Divide your life into semesters, even when you’re not in school
vox.com
vox.com
Look at the art of the great masters. These were not acts of pure spontaneity. Music, even when improvised, leans into an acquired musical language from which the piece of composed.
And in engineering, there's experimentation, doodling, thought experiment, and a fair amount of hackery in many cases. Improvisation, too, can occur.
Poetry is a history of meter. Many poets consider free form lazy and the lowest form of poetry, as it is in keeping within the bounds of meter and maximizing within that structure that introduces a challenge and produces beautiful results.
So, the distinction isn't perhaps one between art and engineering (engineering is, technically, art), but temperaments or habit.
("Spontaneously" vomiting paint on canvas is not art. It's fraud or some act of superstition.)
For anyone who has been to Darwin and also to Melbourne, you totally get why. Melbourne says "what a chilly winter" while Darwin says, what winter? Melbournites look forward to it drying out near Jan, and Darwin prepares for monsoon season. Perhaps an equivalent is being to Whistler and to Miami. Same continent, different seasons.
All that is just really to say, it's fun to be in tune with your local climate, and for most people, the 4 seasons are kind of a convenience but not that accurate.
Enjoying the transition to fall right now living in such a city.
Im regents park london, they let some cut trees rot on purpose, years later there are still no funghi visible growing on them, while in a forest that happens. Ive also not met a single mosquito there in years.
Most city parks are mere deserts to me. It sure still is healing to be outiside, but calling that "nature" is a blunt lie in my ears.
One is like 8min from my door, could even take a bus since there are stops on the edges.
I've been trapped in the concrete-jungle part of SF for a while, and — while I do really want to escape to a better, greener city — it's oddly difficult to find an alternative. I wonder if NYC may be the only viable candidate.
I believe it is one of the greenest cities in the US, I used to know a few people from there that I'd connect with over the years at business conferences, and they absolutely loved it there.
They are not skyscraper-level breathtaking like many US cities and not as dense - but have lots of advantages (walkable, good public transport, rich cuisine, higher food quality in general, less homelessness or other social issues, … not even talking about working here with much more vacation/free healthcare/…).
Ultimately you mentioned museums - well Europe has stuff that is thousands of years old. Lots of stuff to see and discover. I personally like to go to authentic medieval festivals or viking meetups for example.
True for me as I enjoy reading and programming, but I'm not sure if it's true in general, at least not in the metro area where I live. It looks outdoor activity is a big deal in American life. Hiking, camping, fishing and etc are so popular that one has to book a camping site in a state park months ahead of time. The trails are always full of people. Stores like REI either have heavy traffic or run out of stock.
Seasonality is an excellent constraint already.
Last year I introduced her to a native berry and it turned out she actually like berries after a lifetime thinking she didn't. This year I've shown her more than 10 species that can be found nearby and we have moved our targets based on the season and which species are fading as others come into ripeness. It has been interesting to see someone learn how elevation can delay stages of the season, or how going to the dry side of the mountains moves the season forward.
Now we are in a stage where the blackberries are a gamble. Many are still ripe and ripening but some are fermented on the vine, some have lingered because they are just bland, and unpicked clumps are overwhelmed by drosophila that have been able to go a couple generations uninterrupted. When it finally rains the season will be over for good. But the less prolific Rubus laciniatus is about to ripen for one last batch of berries as summer fades.
In case anyone else is curious and wants to segment their year in 20% chunks, the start dates are:
- January 1st
- March 15th
- May 27th
- August 8th
- October 20th
Their are 485 leap years between 2000 and 3999, inclusive, for a total of 730,120 days.
something like that?
Oh good.
More productivity hacking.
Maybe I should come up with some KPIs? Put together quarterly reports? Find more ways to quantify my self-worth so I can maximize it?
Either way, enjoy it!
But I think "dividing time into semesters" is a way to be more aware of the passage of time. To help us be more aware, not less. I didn't see it as anything but a handy tool.
Hours, days, weeks, months, quarters, years, decades, mid-life, before death.
Time dilation is powerful, while life division is also undervalued.
I think in terms of accomplishments with deadlines and progress. My son had to dress himself by 3. That was the goal starting at 2.5. And 1 year later, it's accomplished.
The goal pushes progress. I require effort, not the result. The discipline gets easier as the effort is measured.
Yearly is too long for most objectives & hopes. Months probably too short for many things. Quarters or semesters could be great.
(1) Write a monthly plan that's broken down by weeks, and then review/iterate on it weekly.
The weekly review alone risks having too small of a focus, so blending it with a monthly planning horizon has felt like a nice balance.
(2) Yearly planning is surprisingly useful, but it's best done as a solitary thing.
Most people view the whole "new year's resolution" thing as a cliché, and — separately — most people don't respond well to seeing someone else's ambition. Silicon Valley promises to be some sort of magical land where everyone's working on big things, but — same as everywhere else in the world — people largely respond negatively to seeing someone succeed (or even want to succeed) on a long timescale.
[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_the_power_of_tim...
Hint: we are Hong Kong people. Don't assume people don't save up because they don't earn enough. I'm not saying the system isn't problematic, but I hope I prove your statement wrong.
Reading this article makes me think that I could also apply a similar systematic approach to other goals.
Love it!
I have a very different perspective of college than you. Some semesters I only had ~6 hours of classes on Tuesday and Thursday, so the majority of my time was spent not learning, but rather reinforcing through rote memorization (so-called "studying") and busywork (homework).
I don't think college is a good model for how to schedule and manage your life, because I don't think college is a good model for anything
I'm forever indebted to my college
Some classes were exactly like that: the professor taught straight from the book, so I stopped going to class and just read the textbook instead. I showed up for the finals and got an A (or turned in a project at the end of the semester and got an A)
But other than the CS classes, there was a ton of filler crap meant to line the pockets of the administrators. Various math and science, art, history and english classes wasted the vast majority of my first 2 years at college. If you were to cut out the filler and allow students more flexibility in how they learned, you could cut a bachelor's degree down from 4 years to 1 or 2.
However, I think that the excruciating length of college is a selling point: Americans who go to college are looking for an all-inclusive resort at which they can fuck each other's brains out while they defer the real world and adulthood for another 4 years, only becoming marginally useful to the world 6 months after graduating, when they've been fully de-programmed at their jobs of all the useless and incorrect information they were provided during their degree. I truly believe that most people go to college in an attempt to prolong their childhoods into their mid 20s.
College, to me, is just a bloated jobs program for middle management types to suck up tens of thousands of dollars per student in tuition while providing dubious value in return.
> I'm forever indebted to my college
I am, too, but not in the same way as you.
Some of that is nostalgia and beer goggles: we remember the good times and the grades that were recorded in our transcripts, but we forget the weeks of intense stress and the feelings of barely managing to juggle it all or hold it all together. We remember the parties fondly but forget how much those parties were designed to help us forget some of our struggles and drama before and after those parties.
This is effectively isomorphic to the obesity epidemic. You can try to white knuckle it with sheer discipline or run 80 miles a week, and some people manage to do that, but mostly it's a matter of food environment. If you have a genetic predisposition to frequent snacking, typically the only way to avoid it in the long run is to not have shitty snack foods available to you at all. Expecting to just control yourself when the option is there not to usually doesn't work at some point. You can't binge on screen time if you have no screens around.
Among many other reasons, one of them is to eliminate the fabled and apparently widespread phenomenon of "plan to start a thing at 14:00; oops it's 14:03, guess I'll keep procrastinating and start that next thing at 14:30 instead". With no hard boundaries aside from sunrise/sunset, this would probably be a much more difficult excuse to lean on. Remains to be seen whether new excuses come to replace the old.
As a bonus, you won't have to worry about what you're doing or eating, because all of that will be taken care of for you.