There’s a part of me that despises repetition. I’d rather eat live snails than listen to you repeat yourself, but I also like playing the same song twenty times back to back. Neurodivergence. I have learnt not to worry too much about explaining it, and to learn to explore, discover and possibly love it instead.
I’ve had lots of good experiences with tracking - time, activities, moods, workouts, food, anything at all. But I don’t actually spend too much time analyzing the tracked data. The pleasure, for me is in paying attention to things enough to make a record of them with care. It’s a more mindful way of living, and it feels infinitely better than not being able to remember what I had for lunch last week that I ironically claimed to enjoy so much.
Making records of things I observe and experience are simply ways for me to pay attention to myself. I’m sure there are ways to engage with that data better, I haven’t discovered them yet. In the latest of the tracking adventures, I digitized my routine tracking. I used to register my routine on a date grid, but fell out of the habit for the last few weeks. I find travel extremely disruptive of my habits, and that Thanksgiving weekend did not make it easy.
A very promising app called Routinery has come to my notice, and I built some morning and bedtime routines on it. I’m writing this little blog post right now in order to check off the “blog before bed” item. It is beyond thrilling to me that I can make a list I like, and now it’s my sole mission to check things off that list? It’s like magic. I’m also enjoying this so much, I’m very sure I’ll return to this every night. The counterfactual in this case was me dragging my feet all over the internet, trying to do things late into the night, but never being able to accomplish anything because I should actually be asleep at that time. Recently it’s been very difficult for me to grant myself bed time or rest, and I work myself till I fall asleep on the couch at an ungodly 3:56 am.
The app just told me “Writing is over, move on to transcribing something good”
Unbelievable how well this is working for me. It’s nice that a somewhat related task has been lined up right after this. Ok bye. This Substack has officially turned into my night time journal.