I haven’t posted anything since April 24, 2026. The thesis process and a few other things slowly consumed most of my time for a while. The last few months have mostly felt like being carried by a current. Although honestly, “carried by a current” isn’t even fully accurate. I wasn’t disconnected from work. If anything, I was working constantly.
People around me call me a workaholic pretty often, and I don’t really want that to become my identity. Not because I think workaholism is purely evil or morally bad or anything dramatic like that. That’s probably a different discussion. I just don’t want my entire life to collapse into work and obligations. But if I’m being honest, most of my adult life has looked exactly like that.
A few months ago, I started logging my daily tasks into Notion. Sometimes at the start of the day, sometimes retroactively after finishing them. Not because I thought it would magically make me disciplined, optimized, or “my best self.” Mostly because I wanted data about myself.
That sounds much more mechanical than I mean it to. A little too close to the whole 21st-century productivity obsession. Maybe it’s just another way of creating the illusion of control. But my logic was pretty simple: do I actually have patterns, or do I just live through completely random months without noticing?
So since February, I’ve been categorizing my days a bit.
| Category | Feb | Mar | Apr | May |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Work | 42% | 38% | 35% | 31% |
| Study | 28% | 32% | 26% | 25% |
| Exercise | 7% | 9% | 11% | 17% |
| Social | 13% | 5% | 14% | 6% |
| Reading | 2% | 4% | 5% | 11% |
| Other | 8% | 12% | 9% | 10% |
Looking at the results made me slightly uncomfortable. My time distribution wasn’t really moving in the direction I wanted it to. Work and study kept swallowing everything else, which wasn’t surprising but still felt strange seeing it visualized like this.
So I decided to try making May look slightly different. Usually, this is the part where I get intensely motivated for three days and then abandon the whole system, but whatever.
I started exercising more regularly again. I had almost completely stopped skating at some point. I also randomly started jumping rope every few days. I genuinely think the last time I jumped rope was in elementary school. The first attempt was terrible. I kept tripping over the rope, and somewhere around 20–30 jumps. I completely lost my breath. Right now, I still do it in 5 or 6 sets to reach 100 total, but at least it no longer feels like cardiovascular collapse.
I also tried making calisthenics a little more focused instead of vaguely “doing some exercises sometimes.” Mostly core work for now. Nothing ambitious.
Actually, that’s something I’ve noticed about myself in general: I’ve never successfully fixed all my habits at once. Whenever I focused on nutrition, exercise disappeared. When I focused on exercise, something else collapsed. So this time I deliberately started small. I made myself a two-week exercise plan where nothing took more than 30 minutes, and I just tried to follow it consistently.
There’s also the reading part of this.
Before university, I used to read constantly. Mostly literature and philosophy. Then I moved into technical fields, and over time, my reading slowly turned into technical books, papers, documentation, and eventually almost nothing outside of that. At some point, I realized I had basically abandoned literature and art entirely.
I think I missed that more than I realized. There’s something very specific about sitting alone with a book that nothing else really replaces for me. So this month, I also started reading again. Right now, it’s Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl and The Psychology of Money. Neither is literature nor philosophy exactly, but both feel relevant to the weird period of questioning and reorientation I seem to be going through lately.
I don’t really have a clean conclusion here. This post is probably less “advice” and more just documenting a phase.
Maybe this whole tracking experiment disappears in six months, like half the systems I build for myself eventually do. But I think I’m slowly realizing that what works for me is almost never intensity. It’s lowering the friction enough that things don’t completely disappear from my life.
This is just my own experience. I’m sure there are many better and more professional ways to approach habits, routines, or self-management. I’m only sharing what has and hasn’t worked for me so far.
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