journal

Day 46 – New Video, and New Month for My Journal!

I love when a new month starts, it’s so exciting. I know I could start anything at any time, but it’s just something about starting a project or goal, or whatever it is at the beginning of a new month. Like a breath of fresh air. For my bullet journal, I created a couple new pages for August which include an ‘at a glance’ calendar, color map for my daily activities and a goals/bills page. I plan to put in more pages for the days specifically to cover any other thing I do in the day that isn’t already in my color map. Overall the design is much neater but I would like to buy better pens and markers later on. I’m thinking I’ll stick to what I have for a few months and if I keep it up, it’ll be a little treat to myself to buy all those nice things!

For my channel, I finally found a software that’ll record your screen. This is perfect for what I wanted to do! Now I can work through ruby problems and not mess around with my phone. That’s another story. The video camera on that thing is utter garbage. It’s so grainy and the video camera zooms in so close to my face and I can’t figure out how to switch it to the front camera to record anything in front of me!! Soooo annoying. Until I get a better one, it’ll have to do. Maybe for Black Friday I’ll do some shopping for a new camera also! Tomorrow I’m planning to meet with another student who is further along in her LS studies, Melissa, who will help me try to wrap my head around basic ruby loops. My video today showed me working through a problem, one that I have found to be troublesome for me before and STILL is now! I need to figure out some other way to solve it because it’s just not sticking in my head.

A few goals for this month: spend 15 minutes every day learning German, spend 30 hours a week studying, row for 5 days a week, learn to bake a cake and frost it. I have so much more but for brevity I won’t list them all. Organization and time management are two areas that I’m seriously lacking in, so I’m actually surprised that I managed to keep up with for the past couple weeks, for the most part. P.S don’t make fun of my lettering/ drawing, It’s not that good but it’s okay! I deal.

Color Map Legend and Study Hour Graph

Day 36 – Bullet Journal

So creativity bit me in the butt last night, thus I have decided to start journaling. Is that a word? I keep seeing the red squiggle under it, but I swore it was? Anyways, I dug through my things and found an empty book with blank paper!! Turns out, I also had an unused pack of colored pencil, and a new pack of pens. Everything I needed was thrown about in my junk box in my study. To start it off, I wrote a note to myself explaining why I decided to do it, and then on the next page wrote out a list of long term and short term goals (in no particular order). Using Github for the past month and looking at its heat map to let me knows the days that I’ve coded has inspired me to create my own heat map! It basically outlines the activities that I happen to do in a day. More specifically, daily or weekly goals that I would love to meet. A few are: study 4 hours- with red, had fun- green (the first thing that came to mind was playing Dark Souls), and rowed at least 2,000 meters- yellow. It’s cute, and I think for every month I’ll try to come up with a different way to represent the data that I collect. This lets me see what I actually do in a day, without me having to write it all out in boring words in my planner. Also, it’s fun! When I accomplish something, say, writing this post for example, I get to color in the box with the color that corresponds to that activity. In this case, it’s navy blue! It’s like I’m saying to myself, YAY! you did something! What an awesome feeling. I’m really trying to see what I’m most consistent with, and what I should be doing more. Following my heat map, I have the days themselves. These are seperated two a page, and this is basic bullet points of what I have planned for the day. These could be anything from ‘clean the cat litter’, to ‘finish Hard 1 problems’. I draw a little check mark next to the ones that I did do, and see if I can push the things I didn’t do for the next day. That’s as far as I got today, but I plan to create a page for each month- a month overview of sorts, and a page for YouTube video ideas! My creative side has been shelved for a long time now so it’s about time I exercise it. I’ve also noticed that there’s been too much on my mind lately, stress and ideas and whatnot, and it’s disconnecting me from my present state. That bothers me; I want to free my mind of so much noise and just color it all on paper. That’s it for tonight! Oh by the way, I did finish Lesson 3 today, and I’m starting a whole new set of exercises tomorrow. For real this time! Goodnight!