It's been a fun couple of months.

I am realizing that I need a framework for living - not as a ruleset, but as a guideline. One that permits failures, and has guidelines to return onto track.

Regularly, I'll have things to do, and I'll suddenly be really tired. Or really distracted. Or really want to do something else first (in one of those right now). Somehow I'm never getting to sleep on time, never getting home on time, never getting projects in on time, never getting to school on time. Never doing enough, always planning more than I can achieve.

This ultimately means that I'm less capable than I think. Whether that's because I lack the attention span or discipline to achieve what I would be ideally capable of, or because I set my sights far beyond even what I'm ideally capable of, I'm uncertain. What I am certain of is that I need to change, because I'm not in a good spot. There are too many deadlines approaching, too quickly, even after having made sacrifices.

So this is what my spare cycles will go into for the next while. Wait a minute, how can I have spare cycles with so much to do? Well that's precisely the problem. I feel like my programs aren't optimized to my hardware -- rather than packing 4 1-cycle instructions together for alignment, I've got empty space floating around and do nothing with it. So I'll make this my ambient thought-topic: what guidelines can get a person back on track, and keep them on track?

Off the bat, I see that I need goals. These goals will provide motivation and metrics, and from those I can set myself tasks and make plans. I can develop small heuristics to remind myself with whenever I suddenly decide "this'd be a great time to write a blog post", "I could hang out with Sophie later", or "man, I'm tired. Sleep is good for me -- I'll (stay asleep / go to sleep) even though I've got stuff to do."

Alright, hope I can stick to it even marginally. A first goal: report back on friday with some progress. A second goal: finish my philosophy paper this evening.