My current daily routine
Here is my current daily routine, which I’ve been following for a few months now with some modifications over time.
Morning
- Check email, Messenger, Facebook, LessWrong, EA Forum; I usually do this from my tablet while I’m still in bed.
- Check news (RSS subscriptions, urlwatch, and Andy Matuschak’s notes). I’m considering doing this only once every three days or so, because I’ve noticed that this is pretty time-consuming, even when I try to go through it quickly.
- Check Slack (for a project I am working on).
- Check Telegram.
- Start doing work: writing down ideas, reading things, thinking about things. This step continues throughout the day. My writing/reading/thinking process is pretty complicated and I won’t try to describe it here.
Day
- I continue working.
- Throughout the day I also continue checking email, Messenger, LW, and EA Forum. I should probably stop doing this, but it’s not a huge time-sink so I haven’t put much effort into getting myself to stop.
- Late in the afternoon I check Hacker News once. I think HN adds very little value to my life, but I still feel an urge to check, and there’s occasionally something interesting on there. (I think if there was never anything interesting on there, or if I could reliably be sent just the things I find interesting, then I wouldn’t feel an urge to check it so often.)
Evening
- Tao Analysis Solutions blog: I try to write one more blog post. Some of the exercises have multiple parts or are otherwise time-consuming, in which case I often make partial progress on writing a post without actually publishing.
- Anki review. This consists of a few things:
- All my normal cards (e.g. about math, AI safety, economics)
- Incremental reading cards; see Incremental reading in Anki for details.
- Math problems cards; see Spaced proof review routine for details.
- Russian; I currently have a very simple alphabet deck and a “frequently used words” deck, both of which I just downloaded from shared decks on AnkiWeb.
- Duolingo (Russian): I average around 40 XP per day, which takes 5-15 minutes.
- Russian immersion: At the moment I’ve been spending about 30 minutes per day just watching random videos on YouTube, e.g. setting my location to Russia and going to “Trending”, searching up random topics I am interested in, searching up names of TV shows or cartoons. I’m still figuring this out, e.g. how to make it more enjoyable.
- About once a week, I check Twitter, using this list (nitter).
- About once every couple of days, I check Jonathan Blow’s Twitch stream. If he happens to be live, I watch for a few minutes (usually around 5 minutes, maybe up to 30 if it’s especially interesting). Regardless of whether or not he’s live, I also check out the new clips.
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