Q2

I’m here on campus for spring break. I have to say it’s been a productive vacation thus far on multiple axes — CoreNLP-related work is coming along well, and I’ve reached just about my maximum level of tan after several day-trips to the city.

With so much free time I no longer have any excuse to postpone my review of the quarter. As befits a quarter dominated by engineering classes, this review will be much more analytical than the previous. This time around, I have the tools to begin major comparative analysis on two fronts: I can evaluate my behavior qualitatively in comparison with the previous quarter, and I can also use my timebox data to quantitatively evaluate that same behavior.¹

What changed?

“What stayed the same?” might be an easier question to answer. This quarter began with an overhaul of some central elements of my life, most notably concerning:

• Social interaction. I played the extrovert for a significant portion of the start of the quarter. As will be evident in a forthcoming timebox analysis for the quarter, this behavior eventually vanished as I regressed into a hermitic state, unfortunately not in the most healthy manner. I arranged my social life in a way that ended up causing undue stress by the end of the quarter.
• Time allocation. This will again be clearer once I’ve completed my timebox analysis, but the way I spent my time this quarter was just drastically different from how I acted the fall. I cut down social time by more than half, and also spent notably fewer hours per week on schoolwork. All this resultant free time I poured into the extracurricular projects of the season: personal projects, job applications, and interviews.
• Rationality practices and other rituals. I struggled to maintain my practice of periodic reviews and daily reading² as the quarter progressed. I failed to allocate the proper time for these high-value activities.

Projects

A large amount of my time this quarter was redirected from schoolwork to “extracurricular” projects.

Careering

The winter quarter is traditionally job-hunting³ season here at Stanford, and I played right along: I spent a substantial amount of time, especially in January and February, involved in career-related activities. This began with resume work and career fairs, and ended with (luckily!) a long stream of interviews and travel. I exited the whole ordeal with a summer research position here at Stanford, with the Stanford NLP Group under Dr. Christopher Manning.

“Ordeal” is the wrong word, however. I actually derived some outstanding benefits from the whole process, and don’t regret the decision to begin a job search at all.

I somehow made my way through my first two programming jobs without once doing a technical interview (or any interview at all, for that matter). I understandably felt a little threatened by the prospect of strolling into an interview this winter. After two or three, though, I managed to eradicate the fear, and began to understand exactly how I could rock these things. I can’t say I’d voluntarily do another one right now, but I have to say I enjoyed them in the end — these relatively free-form conversations and “tests” with fellow software developers were a real relief after several months of programming in a uniquely academic context.

Furthermore, preparing for and going through these interviews forced me to ask serious questions about my own value as a developer. I left each interview full of motivation and confidence, as each made me realize just how much my human-capital investments over the past half-decade or so are now going to pay off.⁴ Less formally put, the interviews showed me where all my hard work has been going over the past n years.

Programming

The remainder of my new free time was largely dedicated to coding projects. These involved building a site for the Symbolic Systems student group here on campus, and several small NLP-related projects (Clojure bindings for CoreNLP, and a simple DIPRE-like relation extraction algorithm).

Goal updates

Time for the meaty stuff. How did I do on following through with my goals for the quarter?

Timeboxing

I’ve been very happy with my timeboxing practice this quarter. It’s allowed me to keep my days wonderfully organized, and pushed me to be more productive. My timeboxing-related goals for the quarter were:

1. Maintain an early-morning timeboxing ritual. I hesitate to call what I’ve ended up with an “early-morning” ritual — what with my biphasic sleep practice I’m no longer up as early as I used to be — but I have indeed established a good habit of completely scheduling my day in the mornings. There have been very few days that have seen me go past my morning routine without also building a schedule.
2. Get better at allocating realistic boxes. Great success here. I seem to have improved at making estimations from intuition about the time required for everyday tasks.
3. Adhere more rigorously to the schedule. I didn’t end up collecting concrete data on the number of schedule changes per day, but I can say it was zero or very close to zero for most days. I’m really comfortable now with following through on the goals I set for myself each morning.⁵

Sleep

My goals in this area were squashed in some amount, overshadowed by my biphasic sleep experiment.

1. Fix weekday wakeup time. This has just not been realistic what with the variable-time waking segment of my biphasic schedule.
2. Establish an early weeknight routine. I failed here as well, but this time there’s less of an excuse. I did a pretty terrible job at sticking to my commitment of an 8:30 bedtime — I’m somewhat embarrassed I didn’t see the trouble ahead of time. This early bedtime does not jive at all with efforts to retain some semblance of a social life. I rarely made it to bed on time, and when I did I was too eager to sleep⁶ to think about doing some ritual reading.

Social activities

My social behavior radically changed this quarter, in some amount as a result of intentional effort and in some amount as a result of a lack of control on my part. My first try at social dance and my actions at the start of the quarter jetted me into the shoes of an extrovert for several weeks. Thus unmoored, I poured a lot of time into social activities. Things changed mid-quarter as I began a string of job interviews which dominated my time, leaving paltry remains for any outings with friends.

Post interview week, I found it too easy to return back to my familiar hermit-land. I realized that my behavior earlier in the quarter had really drained my energy, and that I needed to get back to life as an introvert. I bounced back far too harshly, though, and ended up in something of a social slump at the end of the quarter.

Some of the most positive effects of this rollercoaster ride manifest themselves in my goal progress, described below:

1. Increase the value of each moment of social time. I think I did an outstanding job here. I worked this quarter to completely eliminate low-value social engagements⁷ and was happy to find that doing so had very little visible negative impact on my relationships with others. The time I did retain for social activities was dedicated to higher-value things such as more formal intellectual conversations,⁸ one-on-one conversations and meals, attending clubs and academic discussions, running outside, and dancing.⁹
2. Reduce total social time. Sure, no problem. My timebox analysis (again, forthcoming) shows that my social time (relative to total time boxed) decreased by a staggering amount this quarter. I haven’t detected much adverse effect in my relationships with others as a result of this decrease, perhaps because of the aforementioned increase in high-value social activities which by definition do quite a lot to sustain good friendships.

Language learning

Ouch.

I ended up allocating very little time for language learning this quarter. Much of the time I did spend was spent not on German (as set out in my yearly goal) but on maintaining the other languages I speak (most notably Romanian and Spanish). It’s not worth going over the individual commitments I made at the start of the quarter: they all completely failed.

Summary

This was a quarter of progress: progress both in my career and in my personal development. I made great strides forward in many areas, but also made mistakes in too ambitious or misguided strides elsewhere.

Thanks are due to my friends here at Stanford, who kept me honest about my progress on my goals, encouraged me to keep up with positive rationality practices, and put up with all my weird experiments. They’ve been a great support in this respect, and I hope they benefit from my friendship in the same degree that I do theirs.

As I’ve covered in (excruciating?) detail above, I’m really happy with the effects of the goals I managed to complete. This practice of intentional living has thus far been unambiguously positive, and I hope to extend both the scope and depth of my plans for the coming quarter. Watch this space for a goals post sequel, coming soon!