I have 30 hours worth of things I want to do every day. I have 24 hours. I am not complaining. I am just saying someone did the math wrong.
I have been on a health and fitness journey for almost a year now. Trying to eat healthy, going to the gym every day, walking post dinner, planning out my meals, protein, carbs etc on a daily basis itself seems like a full time job in addition to my day job. With this interest, I’m also trying to consume a lot of content around this - watching krish ashok’s videos, reading everyone’s fitness journeys in r/fitness, brainstorming with chatgpt on how to make the process easier for me etc.
What facewash to use, moisturise regularly, niacinamide and retinol routines, clay mask weekends, anti dandruff shampoos, conditioning it regularly, pre and post helmet wear care - another significant portion of the day goes away taking care of this.
With the same narcissistic obsession, I’m giving therapy a lot of importance lately. Questioning every thought that comes to my mind, constantly evaluating how I’m treating myself and others, rediscovering my relationships with my parents, friends, wife and everyone around me, journaling my thoughts, talking to myself in the mirror, trying to discover who I actually am instead of being what I’m supposed to be. Consciously maintaining friendships across different timezones, not letting my judgemental mind create prejudices about anyone while trying to maintain healthy boundaries is a lot harder than what I thought it would be.
And then there’s the job, which takes up almost 75% of my awake time in any given week. I have to keep myself updated with every AI trend that’s happening around the world, become a better engineer every day, make better managerial and leadership decisions, learn about my category and become a better founder, think about how to scale my company and product - all of this in parallel to all my actual daily deliverables amidst the barrage of meetings.
The amount of content available out there about tech updates happening daily is truly scary. And for me to even read 5% of it, understand 1% of it and try to implement 0.01% of it in my job is becoming incredibly hard. All of this while I try to make sense of the existential dread of how software as an industry is evolving and constantly evaluating every alternative career I can possibly have if I just don’t make the cut.
But on the brighter side of things, one good habit that I picked up last year was reading books. I didn’t really set any milestones for myself apart from reading at least 30 mins before sleep every day. Which has been an on and off habit for me. I haven’t done it the past 2 months but was steady for 6 months before that. The one habit that I regret not picking up early in my life, and also the habit I believe is most important now with how short form content and AI are controlling our brain’s capabilities.
The same AI is also not letting me sleep on multiple nights because code generation is just too addictive. I’ve reshaped my personal site, built my wife’s portfolio, redesigned mokkapadam, moved my blog from wordpress and automated new blog posting via obsidian, vibe coded a meal suggestion app and a read aloud tool. Played around with openclaw, music generation in suno, video generation in remotion, setup my system design learning curriculum in obsidian. Access to learning and creating new stuff is so abundant right now that I’m never satisfied trying out only one or two things.
I need to catch up on every movie and tv show everyone is raving about on twitter every week once after I finish all my watchlist for the past 3 years. I need to be on top of new seasons of the shows I have been watching over a few years. Read every episode discussion thread in reddit. Watch alt shift x explanations after every knight of the seven episode. Get caught up with all the pop culture memes from everywhere and fill my mind with all this critical information much necessary for me to stay sane. I want to restart playing my trumpet. Finish Ghost of Tsushima and start playing Yotei next. Complete my career in cricket 24. Play badminton every weekend. Run at least one 10k a month and clock in below 60 mins before this year ends. Rearrange my kitchen. Restart shooting cooking reels. Plan a hike in the northeast. Visit the Victoria public hall. Go for the sowcarpet food walk. Keep track of my retirement investments. Learn about the market and stay vigilant about wealth. Play helldivers with my EST timezone friends.
With already so much going on in my life, I decided to bring an absolute bundle of joy who is also a complete pain in the ass in the name of Maggi, a 5 month old golden retriever. And boy was I underprepared for the kind of changes she has brought in to my routine.
The most confusing part is, I don’t even feel like complaining because I want to do all of it. None of it is forced upon me. I don’t want to postpone any of it, I am excited to do every single one of these things exactly at this moment in my life. Turns out the version of you that finally has it all figured out is also the version of you that has no time to enjoy having it all figured out.