So it’s been a busy couple of months!
Not a great deal has happened with regard to my projects month – a quick summary is that Psyia is coming along nicely and should be released in a week or two, XRPanel is now usable, and while on holiday and away from my HMDs I completed Mountaineer 3.1 (more on that in another post!)
But the majority of what I’ve been up to over the past six-or-so weeks has been myself and my life. I finished reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, which crystalized a lot of my nascent thoughts about self-improvement, motivation and self-discipline. And so, all-at-once, I dropped some bad habits that I’ve known for a long time have been holding me back, and started some new ones that I knew I needed.
Most importantly, I’ve started sleeping earlier and more regularly than I have since I was about 12 years old. I sleep from 9:30 to 6:30 every night now! I realised that trying to get personal work done in the evenings is just too difficult to do regularly – stuff happens in the evenings! Someone wants to catch up, I’m feeling tired after a long day of work, my girlfriend and me find ourselves craving dumplings, etc. But waking up at 6:30 means that I have a solid 90 minutes in the morning to do whatever I want, and there’s absolutely nothing else happening that can stand in the way! I hope to eventually ease my way back to 5:30am wake-ups, but for now 90 minutes is a reliable chunk of time that I’ve been making great use of.
One of the ways I’ve been making use of my morning time is to exercise regularly! I’ve started pretty gently (since I’ve literally never exercised regularly in my life) by going on a 45 minute run three times a week. The biggest advantage of this (so far) that I’ve found has been that once I get home, I’m wide-awake and ready to spring into action. No more dragging myself out of bed and browsing Reddit for five hours then wondering where the day went.
Speaking of browsing Reddit, another habit I’ve been breaking is browsing/r/all – I think Reddit is a useful news aggregator when used intentionally, so I’ve been intentionalizing my Reddit use. The VR subreddits I’ve subscribed to can’t keep me entertained for more than 5 minutes a day, and give me quite a bit of value. /r/all can keep me entertained for multiple hours every day and gives me almost no value – so it had to go. Along the same lines as not browsing /r/all, I’ve stopped playing video games, with a few very specific and well-defined exceptions. This one is perhaps the hardest of all for me since I love games so much but I’m just not able to play games responsibly in a way that doesn’t encroach onto time that I’ve scheduled for other things. So they had to go.
The one other habit I’ve been developing is eating healthily. I weighed myself about a year ago and was horrified to discover that I weighed 70kg – well above the 60kg I’d hovered at throughout most of my young adult life – I moped about it and complained to my friends and family, but ultimately didn’t do anything about it. A few months ago I weighed myself again and discovered that I weigh 82kg – officially overweight. I was really frustrated that I hadn’t started getting my shit together when I first became worried about my weight, and I’ve channeled that frustration into determination to fix it now. So for the past six weeks I’ve been following a keto diet with great success – I’m back to 70kg now (that’s 12kg or 26 lb in six weeks!) and it’s left me feeling pretty empowered!
So that’s what I’ve been spending a lot of my energy on over the past six-ish weeks. Sorry if you’ve been hanging out for Psyia, but I feel like my life has a nice solid foundation from which I can work on my projects more effectively and more happily now. Apologies if you’re only here to read about Unity development and VR/AR, but this stuff will all feed into my work, and it’s honestly what I’ve been doing recently, so I thought it was appropriate to post!
Until next time (where I promise I’ll post more about my work)!