Though I highly doubt my interest in Linux’s new CFS has anything to do with it, lately I’ve been scheduling my life completely different. In the past, I’ve always tried to clear my schedule so that I have enough “down time.” Always feeling tired lead me to believe that I just needed more time to rest. This, however, was not true and I’ve just started figuring this out.
My hypothesis is that I was tired because I didn’t get enough sleep, not because I didn’t get enough down time. Since I had scheduled so much time to just sitting around and “resting,” I wouldn’t ever be truly exhausted and therefore never sleep well. Since I wasn’t sleeping, I would schedule even more down time! It was a viscous cycle. What finally broke the cycle was when I realized that I was finishing college in a little over a year and I hadn’t done all the stuff I’d wanted to do. I started working out more, trying harder at school and then as a result, being more exhausted and sleeping better.
Now that I’ve rid my life of down time, I have so much more time for other things. This year I’m president of PLUG, secretary of ACM and SIGOS, I’ve started swimming laps every morning, I’ve joined the Crew team, and I’m a TA for the intro CS class at Purdue. On top of that, I’m also taking programming languages and a software engineering class; both of which are super involved.
Also over the past year, I’ve started using online web applications to help me schedule my time and tasks. I’ve moved my task manager from Remember the Milk to a to-do list manager called Todoist. The reason for the move is that Todoist has a feature which no other to-do list manager has: you can delegate emails from Gmail to your to-do list! At first I thought this was just a novelty, but after using RTM for a while, I realized that my inbox was constantly full of things I still needed to do and which RTM really couldn’t help me with. Essentially I was maintaining two to-do lists. Todoists fixes that and has really proven itself through the first week of school and a re-org of PLUG.
I’ve also started using a website called BillMonk to manage what I loan and borrow from others. I realized that I’ve been loaning a lot more money than I borrow and it really adds up! Also, I am always loaning books to people and this helps me keep track of where they are. Today, BillMonk implemented a new feature which examines the directed graph representation of your loans and borrows wrt everyone else and basically just minimizes the graph and consolidates your debts.
Great web apps can totally make the administrative tasks of life easer so I can spend more time learning and working on real projects!
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