Since last week, I’ve been putting more focus on consistently carving time to learn. One of the challenges was—and still is—reducing mindless distractions and being more aware of the present moment, instead of being on autopilot for long stretches.

Social media, specially the doom-scrolling part, is one of the biggest distractions. Like the crisps’ slogan: “once you scroll, you can’t stop”. It’s not always like that, but on the days when I’m not feeling great mentally or emotionally, it’s effortless to fall into it and evade.

I manage my social media time by blocking the apps during my focus hours. For example, in my phone there’s the distractions profile, that runs every work day from 7:30am to 9am and from 5pm to 8pm, and blocks the apps and websites I get the most distracted with. The profile mostly works, if only because when, out of habit, I open an app, it brings awareness to the moment and my emotions at the time, and that awareness acts as a circuit breaker.

Even if I’m not in “productive” mode, I don’t think spending lots of time on social media, constantly reading the news or always connected, is healthy for me. Perhaps I want to relax and do nothing, but doom-scrolling is not nothing, being hooked on mindless scrolling for hours takes the moment away, it sucks the awareness out of it.

Unsurprisingly, when I get the ball rolling and start to have days with less mindless distractions and more things that I truly wish to do—even if it’s doing nothing or just relaxing—, at the end of the day, I feel way more satisfied, it’s a virtuous cycle.

Another thing I do, which was something I learnt back in my lucid dreaming explorations, is to have reminders during the day that ask me: “Are you on autopilot?” Answering the question honestly—and the vibration from my wristband—makes me aware of the moment. When I was experimenting with lucid dreams, the question was slightly different and written on a card inside my wallet: “are you dreaming?” It was a question during the day with the goal of making me examine reality and discerning if I was in a dream or not. Every time I read the card, I observed my environment and myself, and tried to seriously come up with an answer. With enough practice, the habit carries over to the dreams, and you find out that, as real as everything looks and feels, it’s just a dream—which can be, in and of itself, a transformative experience.

The common thread is mindfulness, being in the moment, in touch with your feelings and what’s going on in your mind.

With all the non-stop stimulus in our day, news, likes, retweets and companies competing for our every second in the name of engagement and profit, it crosses my mind that I’ve been sucked in, I’m a product. The thought of going further and cut more of that time sounds appealing and healthy, though somewhat challenging.

In terms of learning, I’ve been doing a max of two hours, one hour in the morning before work and another one in the evening. I’m also happy if I can only get ten to thirty minutes to go over flashcards or write a bit of code, that’s better than nothing. As I wrote last week, I’m currently going over Hands-on Rust and Learn Rust in a Month of Lunches, interleaving them in 30 minute chunks. The former gets me to code in Rust in a fun way, and the other goes into the actual language, so it’s a good mix.

Interesting links

• Could the Blackfoot Wisdom that Inspired Maslow Guide Us Now? “In Western culture, you earn a degree after paying tuition, attending classes, and proving sufficient mastery of your area of study. In Blackfoot culture, it’s like you’re credentialed at the start. You’re treated with dignity for that reason, but you spend your life living up to that. While Maslow saw self-actualization as something to earn, the Blackfoot see it as innate.”

• It’s Like Coding in the Dark. Fantastic talk by Dr. Cat Hicks about—the lack of—learning in teams and how teams end up in a reinforcing cycle of discouraging learning, which makes developers’ learning hidden, covert, and unhappy.

• The Mediocre Programmer by Craig Maloney. The book, which you can read online free of charge, describes a journey to become a better programmer as well as Craig’s memoirs as a programmer. “Every day we can improve in small ways. It's these small changes that transform us from being mediocre programmers into better programmers.”