It hasn't been super life changing, but I do enjoy doing it. Sometimes during the course of the day I'll think back about an aspiration I had that morning, and actually do something I might not have done otherwise.
About a year into this practice my hand started hurting a bit, so I've slowly trained myself to write using the muscles in my arm and shoulder rather than moving the muscles in my hand. My handwriting quality took a nose-dive in the short term, but my hand stopped hurting and I have moments now where my cursive looks nearly as good as it used to.
You can do exactly the same thing with a mead spiral bound and a ticonderoga pencil...
Or text notes on an existing device
Or audio notes on an existing device
Or for the price OP is advertising, get a whole drawing tablet to plug in
Or for the price OP is advertising, get a used android tablet
There are both cheaper options and, to me, better options that are also cheaper as they offer search, cross linking, algorithmic analysis (what have I been writing about lately, what have I stopped writing about), and easy duplication so that I don't lose my notes.
Personally, I use an obisidan vault in a cloud folder...easy duplication on any device, easy review, easy search, easy cross reference...
To do what I do on with my notes with a pen and paper, I'd be spending half of my time indexing and notating rather than producing results driven by the notes...which, I guess is valid if the entire goal is spending time with your notes, but I just personally feel like I've got to get something out of the process other than staring at shit I used to think about.
For instance, on paper, I'd have to underline or otherwise mark key words and maintain a live index in order to find: what's been worrying me lately, what was that dream that one night, what's my second most common topic of thought...and a million other things. Whereas in reviewing my obsidian vault all of those things are at most 30 seconds away, and I didn't have to do any work on top of writing the notes to get that functionality.
Some of the benefits are physical, you're literally warming up the muscles in your hand and arm, but it also has psychological benefits. If for instance you're nervous about the upcoming match, going through the warmup puts your mind in a context of "alright, we've done this a thousand times before, nothing new, just got to go through the motions". It also removes noise from your mind as your attention is going into the warmup instead of overthinking the task ahead.
I think there's a predictive phenomenon in the brain which primes us for activities when the precursors are present. For instance, working at home versus at the office - my experience has been that the simple act of physically going to the office puts me in a better emotional state to get to work than staying at home, almost like during that process it's killed the tasks associated with home and booted up the ones associated with work.
I shower before bed and put out my clothes for the next day before bed. When I wake up, I roll out of bed into a predetermined outfit and not have to waste precious pre-coffee clock cycles picking one out.
Do you not shower in the morning as well?
I hate to break it to you, but this isn’t accurate.
only shower in the morning
shower infrequently
only shower "when dirty"
don't shower
don't have showers
Might blow their whole worldview.
2. sun isn't out yet, so read a book for a while
3. make second coffee as it starts to get lighter outside
4. walk in the garden with second cup of coffee
5. fire up my computer and start checking messages
1. Power on laptop (it is powered off every day at 5 PM).
2. Log into VPN.
3. Log into Okta.
4. Log into AWS accounts, one per container (about 7 or 8).
5. Log into Docker Desktop.
6. Log into AWS CLI to get daily credentials.
The whole thing takes about 3-4 minutes. A former colleague referred to this as my "mise en place", or my daily arranging of my working environment. Like the article suggests, I find this offers me a "centering" before I open my email, calendar and missed chat messages and get started for the day.
But does anyone else think it's crazy how many logons you need to do on a repetitive basis?
Go ask your baker how early they had to arrive to make sure your croissan'wich was ready at 8:23 AM.
You can use aws vault to open the aws console using roles:
aws-vault --help
usage: aws-vault [<flags>] <command> [<args> ...]
...
login [<flags>] [<profile>]
Generate a login link for the AWS Console.
You can just to `avli some-role` and it will pop up in the browser in a new profile.
The only downside here is that you can't combine them into one window.
But it takes the pain out of logging in, and 2 factor, etc.
i suppose could be 'placebo' but would it matter if the result is what i want, and i can't easily attain it other ways?
i do feel it is somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy - i am essentially practicing something so getting better at it. not enough reason though to 'practice' an alternative, at least for me personally.
I guess us secularised, atomised people should just make our own.
The control were actually placed in what my high school described as detention. Sit still and relax for 30 minutes.
Did they measure how much rituals chill you out or how much stewing in your own juices for 30 mins makes you uncomfortable?