I frequently post on this blog about things I want to achieve, more specifically, good habits of life I want to acquire. Many of these I fail at, I drift off target, I don’t get sorted. However even if I get a sense of failure at the time I’ve realised that a lot of them sink in anyway, simply by telling myself that it’s good enough times, it becomes good. And then randomly at some future date, I’ll suddenly start acting perfectly in line with the habit, and then a few days into this I’ll realise, and realise how effortless it is, and feel wonderful about this fact.

This is not to suggest that I’m taking the wrong approach by trying to drill habits in more directly. This is clearly a necessary part of the process I’m describing, with this positive outcome. What is shows is that it’s important not to be discouraged.

The thing that has sunk in these past week or so which has left me really happy all the time is letting go of worries without merely crushing them, a form of mindfulness I think. Secondly a feeling of freedom from three or four things, two of which I will mention: from a style of reading for study that was painful, with its associated note-taking, and from caring about my software setup so much, since I’ve now made a clean break with large chunks of it (a process I completed last night and this morning when I installed Debian on my laptop).

The next thing I’d like to tackle is a weird sort of procrastination I have been experiencing. It’s strange for two reasons: firstly, I’m not doing the usual time-wasting activities of surfing the web or whatever, instead I’m sitting around socialising or going to too many talks or whatever. I seem to have moved my sleep later and later, to something like 1am–8:30am on average, and then I’ll find myself just sitting and thinking for like two hours. This is fine but it does require me to work at the end of the day, which I haven’t been doing. Thus, not very many hours left.

Secondly it’s not because the work is as painful as it was, as mentioned above. So why the reluctance? My thought right now is that it’s just out of habit. I’m habitually procrastinating, it’s just what I do. So it would be good to replace that habit with one with action.

Up next of course is the Oxford Finals Honours Schools game I’m about to start playing. Will write about the various absurdities of that soon enough.