everyday-systems/

[utterances-bot]

Everyday Systems That Help Me | Tania Rascia

At some point in my life, I read A Case Against Optimizing Your Life , and I took it to heart, and I lived by it. Now I think Wise People…

https://www.taniarascia.com/everyday-systems/

[Lawnmowerrobot]

Interesting read thanks - can recognise a lot of these struggles / approaches myself :)

[mattwelke]

The most effective way to keep up a flossing habit is to surround yourself with people who don't floss and rant about their dental bills to you. 0.0

[rafa1944]

Lovely recap of systems! Thanks Tania, very inspiring!

[Sysop-deb]

Thanks for sharing! I used to adopt a similar approach with the first one, but now I'm more focused on the second. I'd say that I'm trying to blend them together.

[luci4n]

hi! thanks for sharing! I am so surprised how similar your conclusions are to mine. I work and live in Romania and am curious if you get a lunch break during your 9-5 schedule. over here we work 9 to 6 and get 1 hr lunch break.

[xplosionmind]

Thanks a lot for sharing, it's been very insightful! Just a question, out of curiosity: since you wrote that emails about certain topic are automatically marked as spam, may I ask what's your email provider? (Both work and personal)

I'm struggling to find the right one for me. Right now I'm using Protonmail, which is awesome, yet it's very pricey for a student as I am (even though they offered me a 50% student discount), and other services I looked for lack some functionalities which are crucial to me. I considered self-hosting, but I don't have enough technical skills.

[alebarbaja]

You have a habit of learning programming or web development outside work?

[megafomar]

Hello everyone, quite amaizing reading .. I felt so close to some of the things you talked about, Written words caress my heart .. thank you!!

[aboutmedicine]

That was beautiful. Thank you for writing it.

[DavLiendoProgramming]

Hey Tania! I've been reading you since a while ago.

I'm commenting in this article because you reminded me of a book called "Atomic Habits" where the author says that one of the ways of changing your habits is by changing your identity which is what I feel youre doing here, you have defined yourself. Anyways, thanks for the content. Keep up the good work!

[SixStringsCoder]

Thanks for the wonderful articles, Tania! Yes, on the flossing every day (at least once)!

I can also say that doing Vipassana meditation over the last 28 years has helped A LOT! Everything from life's existential crisis to musician anxieties to coding pressures to childhood fears have abated since taking up meditation. Like flossing, I do it every day and I can't imagine my life without it.

There's something to be said for turning everything off, closing your eyes and attempting to focus the mind on a single object. I've learn a lot about how my mind works doing that.

[theague]

I currently have 4,604 emails in my gmail inbox. Sometime in 2020 I had it down under 3000. At this point it takes a LONG time to go back and remove all the old stuff. I have found myself unsubbing a lot more often lately though. Thanks for the article Tania!

[naxxfish]

Great post :) and I can relate to several of these!

Avoiding infinite scroll is something I have also been doing almost by accident, as a side effect of avoiding social media and similar platforms. Maybe an efficient way of capturing attention and optimising ad revenue might not be that healthy for humans!

I’ve been doing a version of Inbox zero for a while, but lately I’ve been slightly more relaxed about it as I was feeling pressured to have everything “dealt with” immediately. I guess you could call it “Inbox one-page” - where I only have enough emails to fill one screen on my smallest device. It has its drawbacks, in that sometimes things can be left in-done for several cycles. But since my email provider has a “snooze” function which makes the email disappear from the inbox this means it doesn’t end up being clutter until I am ready to deal with it again.

Thanks for sharing !

[rgammino-epower]

congratulations girl, congratulations, just a great post. So she's beautiful, she's a great programmer, and now she's wise too? Please stop! go no further, you may find another dimension. :-)

[charlytron]

Thanks for addressing the distractions that plague us all.

I do use Takenote.dev to write my journal notes when Markdown in Vim starts to feel a little sterile.

I suppose I could just as well use VS Code, or maybe find a Vim plugin that also does Markdown preview. Then that separation of concerns calls again, right?

[natpbs]

I just found your website through takenote, and this post felt very close to me, pretty much everything and especially the conscious use of social media and work / life separation seem to apply perfecly to myself.

I'm still a beginner in both fields and seeing someone more experienced adopt a similar strategy is quite reassuring.

I might consider cutting out infinite scrolling entirely after reading this (I currently set a daily 30 min time limit for it, though I rarely reach it).

Thanks for sharing! :white_heart:

[Gregfanyan]

thanks for sharing

[JaerenTredway]

I like this article! Thank you for good ideas. It is heart warming to know I'm not the only one who thinks about these things.

I also set up blockers on my internet browsers that prevent me from wallowing in news media (get the Block Site and Impulse Blocker add-ons, then just add the offending URLs of all major news outlets). I will turn the blockers off about once every 2 weeks to check and make sure that the news is just as toxic and worthless as it was before, and make sure there wasn't a nuclear war, alien invasion or anything significant like that.

But keeping that mental garbage out of my life most of the time has had a huge positive effect on my state of mind.