Week Forty-three! A minor update, but after many months of stagnation I’ve finally reached the Amethyst league in Duolingo! That 1st place in the Diamond league is one step closer to being mine, mwuhaha. Other than that, though, this week has been sort of blah.
I’ve had a couple derails this week, in /fitness and /distraction, overall I haven’t been as productive as I have been and I’m feeling rather disappointed in myself. But at the same time, it’s supposed to be winter break, right?
In truth I’ve set an arbitrary amount of standards and strictness when it comes to my daily work. A part of it is that it’s a little time consuming to go through each Beeminder one-by-one to schedule breaks, and having to remind myself a week ahead to do so as well. Though this is mostly my fault for edge-skating (see previous entry).
Over the years, I’ve been trying to “unlearn” (a silly word, huh?) my bias for perfectionism. I remember even in grade school that I’d not hand assignments in because I figured they’d just get a failing mark anyways. Or if they were late, I’d not even try to do them because there’s no point.
Of course in retrospect I realize how absurd this is: teachers just want to help you learn! Ultimately, doing nothing is always infinitely worse than doing something badly, or even very badly. I am trying to fight against this, like giving wiggle room to deadlines (a few days difference doesn’t count as a derailment in my book).
More than anything, I really need to just shut up and eat my own dogfood. Even with everything I have set in place, I’ve found myself getting aimlessly distracted and losing sight of the bigger picture, and that’s something I need to continue to work on.
Anyways, like I said, it’s Christmas in two days, so I’m not gonna fret about it all too much. The tricky thing is trying to set everything up for the new year (planners, resolutions, etc.) and there’s only six days between Christmas and the new year to do all that!
A totally random aside: In entry #6 I predicted (as a total layman) that vaccines would be deployed in September of next year. I can’t believe I was wrong by such a large amount! If anything, this gives my modest idealistic soul hope that we can tackle seemingly impossible problems in the new year to come. ❤️