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Perhaps I failed. I had hoped to take a walk outside in the morning and focus on course work in the afternoon. In actuality, I spent the morning cramming unintended programming in for Panfrost before Mesa's branch point. Though I did some homework in the afternoon, an embarrassing amount of time was spent mindlessly flicking my eyes back and forth between IRC and my inbox. I never left the flat.
Framed that way, today was a failure.
As I gemlogged about yesterday, the days I hit the digital spotlight are rarely productive. I committed to avoiding searching the coverage of the Panfrost milestone, and I committed to avoiding the news. I did hear from a colleague that the update was signal-boosted by LWN, Golem, and Phoronix, and I did hear that the election results were still pending. Neither piece of information affects my day-to-day decisions. True, the final elections results will matter, but the hourly state-by-state breakdowns are irrelevant to my life. I have not opened any of the links I was sent, nor have I opened the news to learn the details. I committed not to, and I kept that commitment, something I wasn't sure I would manage.
Framed that way, today was a success.
The framing does matter, but this entry is not intended to be motivational.
I'm not some Christmas special here to make you feel better about your life! --Friendship is Witchcraft
I'm frankly uncomfortable labeling days as failures based on productivity levels, let alone when expectations were overambitious. Still, there is value in self-reflection in service of kicking some loathed habits.
The list of successes is immense. I went to sleep on-time. I ate three meals. I bathed. I was present for all of my scheduled classes and for an important personal appointment. I did not open any Bad Sites (henceforth known as B.S. for short).
Those metrics are _meaningful_. Struggles with daily functioning are not personal failings. In some respects programming is easier than meal preparation.
A day where I create no capitalist value but attend perfectly to the basic needs of life is a successful day, and the pervasive assumption that these tasks are trivial for everypony is ableist.
This entry is not intended to be philosophical.
On the capitalist value front, I piped through basic `gl_FragDepth` support in the free software Bifrost compiler in preparation for depth/stencil reloads. I merged this routine but surprisingly large change set. While depth/stencil reloads are still not working, there are theoretically no blockers, so once the relevant bugs are identified, I expect the patches to be small and if necessary backported. None of this is ground-breaking technical work, but for a morning I expected to be roaming around in open air, it was nontrivial focused effort.
Even on the academic side, I still attended a few hours of class and completed an hour or two of homework. All in all, writing out my completed to-do list is underscoring the point that from a "productivity" standard, today was a resounding success, since the distracted mid-afternoon slump was offset by extra hours worked in the early morning.
Perhaps my unrealistic self-expectations are the problem, not my lack of superhuman productivity.
Setting aside the loaded questions of productivity, the only nontrivial failure I reported was the constant cycle of synchronous chat and email. I did not talk to any friends on XMPP, and I now have IRC in +g mode, so what gives?
For chat, I am still in an IRC channel or two; any channel I can part, I will to boost the signal-to-noise ratio. Unfortunately the remaining content on #panfrost _is_ relevant to me. Unlike reading B.S. online where quitting cold turkey deprives me of absolutely nothing of value, quitting IRC is not viable. Similar concerns apply to company discussions.
It appears the issues are the time _distribution_ and the interruptions as opposed to the raw message count. I can attempt a strategy of using IRC "asynchronously", reading messages in bulk during planned synchronization points, responding all-at-once, and closing the window until the next sync point. I concede this is culturally inappropriate, but given we have contributors in North America, Europe, and Oceania, time zones alone give legitimacy to the asynchronous approach. Blocking unsolicited private messages on IRC (via +g mode) can further reduce the cognitive load. This strategy should more or less reduce the issue to email.
What's the issue with email? None, in theory. Technically it should be possible to download all my email once a day, reply to all of it, send all of the replies, and forget about my inbox until the next day. Even without setting up a true offline-first approach, simply opening my inbox online once a day to reply to everything should suffice, as I don't receive enough email for new incoming emails to trigger unbounded recursion inducing ~~a process hang~~ digital zombie mode.
Indeed, the actual issue is consciously _refreshing_ my inbox an unbounded number of times, even if the time spent at each sync point is small and bounded. This is a smaller issue than a Reddit addiction, and the consequences are less severe. Nevertheless I'm unsure I have the discipline to limit email sync points to once or twice a day. I do think it is a goal to work towards. Part of the issue is a lack of accountability. For tomorrow, on top of the usual constraints around avoiding B.S., I will attempt to log all such sync points.
Better yet, whatever the results are, I'm planning to post them on tomorrow's gemlog. Nothing like the fear of public humiliation to keep me from my inbox, eh?
First, if I claim that I cannot quit IRC or company chats because of my job, it follows that if I am not on the clock, there is zero excuse for me to be on IRC or the company chats. Given the drama of the Mesa release branching today and the blog publication, I'm planning to take a four-day weekend off. I can catch up on #panfrost IRC logs online later, so there's really no reason for me to even be online there. I just quit my irssi process for the weekend :-)
Second, I note that such a strategy of reducing IRC to short form email could be effected literally, emailing daily digests of logs and sending a set of messages in bulk. If that proves necessary, it should be technically simple to hack together. I am quixotically yearning for the days of the mailing lists.
Finally, for completeness, I also text some ponies over Signal, but for various reasons these discussions tend to command less of my attention, since I leave my phone off as much as possible, and as of today, I disable notifications.
Tomorrow is a new day. If today was a failure -- and I am inclined to say it was not -- I can do better tomorrow. To summarize, I have identified the following specific changes I'd like to effect:
In addition to the usual requirements of no B.S.
See you nerds tomorrow~