Current Self and Going to Libraries

May 31, 2022

I often feel like my past self and my current self are different people. My past self has big, healthy plans. My current self has lazy, short-sighted plans.

My past self was worried about spending the entire summer working remotely from home, and having the summer race by without me realizing. Because of that, my past self came up with a plan: visit as many local libraries as possible, and work from there instead! A very nice plan. The only problem…

My current self has realized that staying at home and working is just easier. And I feel like my current self takes the path of least resistance. Even though my past self knew better, my current self chooses to ignore that.

But I have a new idea for a daily working routine: wake up, go to the gym first thing in the morning, come back and work until my daily meeting around noon, and then drive to a library and keep working there.

It’s an experiment. I hope that changing locations in the afternoon avoids the slump that sometimes comes from staying in the same place all day.

It’s something that I observed my roommate doing that I thought was very smart: every couple hours, whenever he felt his attention wavering, he’d leave and go to another location to study. It’s a practice I’d like to adopt, but it requires a certain dose of self-awareness and discipline.

So I’m writing about it my new schedule here for some accountability. Perhaps a way of forcing my future self to listen to me right now. I’ll update you on how that goes.