20 things, one week, and one me.

Has it ever happened to you that you want to say so much, and yet you don't know how to put it? Or how to start it? It happens to me all the time. Most often than not, it occurs when I am trying to write papers. Academic papers have to have structure, and they always have to have an introduction where you define or explore your thesis. I remember holding off on starting the introduction until the second-last day of the submission. Why? It's something that I always wondered. It's not like I come up with something interesting to write on the second-last day. It is the constraint of time that would make me write whatever gibberish I could come up with and finish it before the deadline. Don't get the thought of me not doing that nowadays. I do that with every assignment.

But not finishing chores on time and waiting until the last minute has its own way of making us deal with them. One way is to make us nervous and anxious all the time. The other would be to make us give up rather than making us believe we could finish them on time. Twenty things are the result of such a scenario. But this time around, it wasn't because I was lazy or anything. It was a little bit of distraction, a little bit of a rusty brain, and a little bit of everything.

I often plan my week at the start of the week. I plan to the minute. But there is a problem with that approach. Once one goal is not met, every other task after that has to collapse, and they collapse until the deadlines. Then all I'm left with is a couple of hours and anxiety. But then I change my strategy every once in a while to have a certain block of time spaced out between tasks so that if one task takes longer, I could have a couple of hours of extendability. But the extendibility goes two ways. One to extend the important task and one to extend the gap task or fun task. More often than not, it is the fun task that gets extended.

So, this week was the mix of two strategies where I had a couple of days planned out to the seconds and also days where I had time separated out for fun things to do. Guess what, it worked mostly, but when you have too many things to do, it isn't about time management; it's about not being able to finish it at all. Out of those 20, I had 1 exam, 2 project submissions, 12 backend code problems, and other major things that I couldn't miss. One whole day was spent just ticking through 21 different tasks that I completed one after another. If I had counted the number of things that I had to do, I probably would have quit in a couple of hours. Sometimes, being unaware of how big of a mess you are in is the best way to deal with things. As I was writing this, I was thinking about what I did this week and came up with the count of 20 tasks I completed.

It doesn't pain me to say I have to do all of this. I, kind of, in a weird way love putting myself in such a scenario. But having a perfectionist personality adds to that. I have to finish things perfectly. I get worried sometimes more than anyone else. In last week's blog post, I talked about the frontend project that I submitted. I was the only person who was really worried about that in our team of 6 people. At least that's how I felt. Being worried, I think I coded about 90 percent of the final code, read 2 books in the process, and learned AWS EC2 instance setup, Linux system management, and many more skills the other 5 missed to learn. It might seem impossible at times, but we all learn from experiences like these, and we learn to show resistance for similar upcoming endeavors. Also, sometimes such efforts get noticed. So, I'm happy to say that our team was announced as the best frontend prototype out of six teams that participated, which felt like a big win for me.

Wins, small or big, I think we should celebrate them. Celebrating doesn't mean go out and spend tons of money. Sure, you could do that too if that's what you feel like. But at least congratulate yourself for the smallest wins and feel proud of small steps toward big things. Your soul needs some appreciation. If no one appreciates you, you can. You always can and you should always appreciate your own efforts.

I always tell myself not to write too long, and here I am after 6 long paragraphs. I like to keep them as short as possible, but one thing leads to another and another to something else. Yet, here we are.

Pickly:

It is Pickly time. I came up with that word; I don't know and don't care if anyone else ever used that before or not. I thought that was a cool section in my weekly blogs for the weekly pictures.

I feel most creative when I'm in a complete mess. Creativity was overflowing last Wednesday, and I was trying to make a video about personal thoughts on Rabbit R1 situations. I don't know if you are familiar with that or not, but it is a tech product or AI in a box. There was a lot of controversy happening on Twitter, and I wanted to say something about that. I did but didn't feel like posting. I might in a couple of days. All that blabbing to say, I did something that isn't ready to share.

I did take a picture of a protest on campus and a couple more that you can see here.