you don’t find time, you create it

a list of things i want to get done (in the order i think of them):

• finish this blog post. (if you’re reading this, that means i succeeded.) finish this other blog post i’m working on, which is about my last visit to mit, three weeks ago. it was supposed to be on the fifth anniversary of my first mit admissions blog post, but now it’s too late for that, but i want to finish it soon anyway

• galactic puzzle hunt 2024 is ending soon. it means i need to wrangle people to help get wrapup written, run the postmortem, and archive the hunt. there’s also work i want to do on extracting this year’s gph server (an exciting socket-based message-passing library) into some nice abstractions for use in other galactic infrastructure

• there’s work, and i’ve mentioned liking my job so much that i needed to slow myself down, but that’s because i want to get work done! lots of cleanup and new features and infrastructure and design and bikeshedding and whatnot. we have a work offsite starting tomorrow that i’m looking forward to, which means a few days of being around work

• i’ve started playing inscryption. it’s a fine game—as with every deckbuilding roguelike, i’m enjoying it, and i want to play more of it, though perhaps i’m not enjoying it as much as i have other games in the genre. in any case there are video games in my steam library that i want to play (like pentiment or an airport for aliens currently run by dogs)

• then there’s remeda, an open-source project i help maintain. i think it’s the best typescript utility library out there, and that everyone using lodash or ramda should switch. i want to rehaul the docs site. it’s fine right now (it’s about as good as, say, lodash’s or ramda’s), but it could be much better

• there’ll always be people i want to talk to and hang out with. that hasn’t changed. somehow i keep ending up having busy nights, and it’s great, to be clear, it’s wonderful. it’s a high priority for me to hang out with friends. but it’s coming into conflict when there’s all these other things i want to do. and it feels bad saying no to an invite for lunch or dinner, and much easier to push back working on my hobbies

• and speaking of my hobbies, oh there’s so many other blog posts i want to work on. the idea list only ever grows longer, and at this point i have like three drafts that are half-written, which is way more than i usually do (one on endings, one on emotional intimacy, one on iterated desires), and then there’s our sparc jc blog too oh god

• i want to redesign my personal website again because it’s been so long and it only gets longer and my picture only gets more outdated, and there’s a million coding projects i’ve put on pause because of all these other things that take precedence, and more math that i want to write, and i guess pmo is coming up soon so i’ll help critique problems, and i don’t know how much the noi needs my help these days, and, and, and

in the absence of evidence showing otherwise, i should assume that, on average, i’m getting the same amount of things done every day. there are human limits to how much i can do, and the answer is not working harder, for that lies the path to burnout.

(the tech analogy: if you’re receiving messages and you’re overloaded, you have several options. you can crash (burn out), you can buffer (postpone other things), you can drop messages (not do unimportant things), you can raise an error (ask for help). this is a post in itself, i’ll write it up later. another thing i want to do, huh?)

if i feel like i have too much to do, it’s not because i’m getting worse at doing things, but because i am wanting to do too many things.

if i feel like i don’t have enough time for something, it’s probably because i’m doing things that i consider to be more important, right? revealed preferences, the purpose of a system is what it does, etc etc.

if i’m busy it’s because i lack priorities, right? there’s always going to be an endless list of things to do, and it’s a matter of what goes above or below the cutline. there’s always going to be sacrifices, always something that’ll slip, always going to be painful.

prioritizing is hard. everything feels important. the negative framing, of “how bad would i feel if i don’t do this?” doesn’t help, because i feel like everything would make me feel bad if i don’t do it! but i do things anyway, because paralysis is worse. i wish someone would tell me what’s most important in a sea of things vying for being above the cutline.

(other things you don’t find but create: love, luck, who you are. thinking about these is an exercise left to the reader.)