Commitment to nothing is a distraction to everything

 The ones who are committed to nothing, are distracted by everything. I am thinking about this. Let's take for example, if you are committed to work, you are not distracted by random thoughts going around. Let's say you are committed to one woman, you won't get distracted by others. You are committed to getting promoted, you won't be distracted by other things in your life. What I am trying to say is that one needs to have goals in life and move the life in the direction of their goals. We are supposed to improve every day towards something bigger and better in our lives. I am sure that the software engineer that I was earlier, I am not that person anymore. I do believe in learning. I am still a huge believer in learning and I still believe that one needs to spend as much time in learning as possible. I am saying that don't try and change the learning part. Earlier I thought that content consumption is bad, but dude, content consumption is not bad at all. It's the attitude towards content consumption that is bad. I feel like learning for one hour everyday is not bad. It's rather focused and determined. It makes you better and improves the way you go about things. 

The point here is that if you are committed to learning on youtube, you won't be distracted by other things. You won't be distracted by women dancing on youtube. Your job is to learn as much as possible through that medium. If you are committed to creating, you won't be distracted by consuming. Now commitment is a very broad term, but the way I think of commitment is to be there in the place for a long period of time. If you are committed to learning on youtube, you won't mind reading or learning about Cal Newport. You would see it as important. You would see youtube as a source of progress rather than entertainment. I strongly feel that more you learn, the more you will know what you don't know. You still need to be focused and find depth in your life all the time. In order to find depth, you will need to leave certain places, certain areas from your life. My decision yesterday was to enhance the way I work towards my goals. 

The question is how do we promise ourselves of the commitment we want to have in our lives? How do we really plan our day? Yesterday was wonderful as I decided on what I want to learn and planned the day on paper. I think you should be doing something very similar for calendar as well. 

Simple Steps: 
1. Take a notebook.

2. Take a calendar.

3. take a pen. 

- That's all you need. Begin the day with a task list or the things you wish to learn in your mind. Say you want to learn docker. 

Todo: 

- Learn docker

- Complete pipeline work for yml

- Read for 1hr. 

Now in the notebook, start allocating time: 

Notebook: 

Learn Docker - 10-11

1:1 with manager - 11:00-11:30

- Have your points prepared before the day

11:45-1:00 - Work on pipeline

1:20-2:20 - Lunch and timepass.

2:40 - 3: 40 - Pipeline work again

3: 50 - Pipeline work if not completed. Try to get the pipeline ready by 5. 

5:30-6:30 - Reading

Calendar: 

Imagine you could not complete your pipeline task. Say that the last 3 steps were not completed. Put that in the calendar for tomorrow or day after. Remember you have to have a structure in order to live your life properly. 

Now that you have planned out your day, you just need to consider that. You will have a blue print on what to do and when to do. Similarly, you can plan trips to different cities. You can decide on where to go and how to go before hand and be clear before actually going to the trip. 

Imagine you now also need to plan a trip. Simply add that task in your notebook todos. When you shutdown at the end of the day, you give it to the calendar. You decide on planning the trip to Europe or any of your favourite destinations. 

This way when you are structured you will be still and you will certainly achieve a lot more in life. You will be still, and comfortable being silent. The important thing is that you need not look good all the time. Structure will take care of all the things. So ritualize this one thing that I said. Every night before sleeping just write down what you are supposed to do tomorrow and stick to the plan. No need to try out too many different things but just stick to the basics and I am sure you will be successful. So I currently as I think of this, just need to get successful and not worry too much about the external world. If I have to learn for one hour, I have to learn for one hour. There's no need to think about. Moreover, your socialization time is also predetermined through this method. Suppose you know there's a party on Saturday that you need to go, do one thing. Decide on. Write on the notebook, 6-10 Socialization. So you are in this way really structured and you will be able to do both, enjoy as well, as work. I would also add that you should add play time in your life too. When you add play time, suppose you decide to play cricket from 5:30 on Wednesday, decide that. You will know for that, you need to leave the office at 4:30 which makes things so much easier. Your life will only become easier through structure and planning. So make sure you add that in your life. 

I am still more and more tempted to check with chatgpt if it has more ideas. My thought out here is that when you have a structure you will totally forget about trying to impress anyone. But focus on your structure and add value everyday into people's lives.

There are some other books like GTD. One thing I really like about GTD is that it teaches you to write down everything, literally all the incoming things that you need to do. This is the only way your mind will know that you will tackle things as they come. While Cal focuses on blocking time, this guy, the GTD guy focuses on next actions and outcomes. He says that every outcome that we are looking for is nothing but a plan of next actions. While it's great for tasks that have less creativity, it is not good for software type of work. Software engineers basically need a structure of learning. Imagine if the next task in a particular outcome is to build an image. However, you don't really understand docker very well. Spending one hour on simply learning docker would be a great idea. So one has to understand the depth of things. After that building an image is just a cake walk. It's about sharpening the saw. As I said previously, sharpening the saw is just as important as cutting the tree. I would argue that sharpening the saw in software engineering is all about learning more and more. You can learn IDE techniques, you can learn some different concepts, you can some random things from a playlist like Piyush Garg. The idea is when you spend enough time on learning these things, everything else becomes easy. I would say learn everyday for one hour. I personally use forest to track my time on how focused I was during a particular time. Only through that sort of focus its easy to build something. I would say that open desk office is not a great idea. It does not help too much. Rather a focused part either in your house, or at any other place, where you don't see a lot of people is a better idea. 

Towards the end, I would say commit, commit, commit. Commit to life long learning. Commit to being better everyday. Commit to one person in your life and making their life better. Commit. Commit. Commit. Commit to being the best person that you can be. When you commit to the positive things in life, naturally all the negative things will go away. Commit to gym. Commit to being better each day. 

Okay, it's great that I did something for someone. I also need to understand how to add more and more value. Now I spoke quite in detail about what we need to do when it comes to learning. I would say teaching is also a great idea. If you learn. Why not teach it to someone? After all, till when will we keep writing blogs that are now becoming abstract. When can we give more valuable inputs and things to the world. So I am now going to start something on software. If you are bored, you can also decide to have certain amount of time dedicated towards socializing. If that is the case, if that makes things better. Go do it.

I will leave you to a statement again out here : 

"Commit. Commit. Commit. Because those who are committed to something are distracted by nothing and those who are committed to nothing are distracted to everything. The best beginning would be to commit to learning"