alexcoder04’s personal website

How to stop procrastinating and start being productive

2023-11-19T15:52:44+00:00

Hello everyone,

today, I want to share my method for being productive with you. I only established it this week, so I don’t know how well it works long-term yet but it helped me to study for my exams very well so far.

It consists of three techniques, which can be summarized as “plan”, “execute” and “don’t distract”. This combination should stop you from procrastination and make you sit down and do your work.

Plan: Divide-And-Conquer Strategy

One major reason why we procrastinate is that our tasks are unconcrete and therefore feel big and complicated. That’s why we are postponing them for “later”, when we will “have enough motivation and time”. So, the natural solution for that is to make the tasks feel easily achievable by dividing them into smaller sub-tasks.

Here is an example: you need to write an essay in a week. There are two possible ways in which you can say it to yourself:

I start working on my essay on Monday.

See how inconcrete this is? If you say it this way, you imply that you first will have to sit down and plan what exactly you are going to write on Monday. Furthermore, it is not possible to write the entire essay in one day and, as you didn’t specify what exactly and for how long you want to write, it seems like your entire Monday will be dedicated to writing an essay which feels overwhelming.

I will write the introduction for my essay on Monday.

This feels much more like a task you will be willing to do, doesn’t it? You know exactly what you are going to do and this is a manageable amount of work which you know you will complete in an hour at most. You know that you have to plan in only one hour for the essay and the rest of the day is free to so whatever you like.

Execute: 3R-Principle

However, only planning what you are going to so on a certain day is not enough. A problem I struggled a lot with, is the “just five more minutes mood”. I would have a pretty precise plan for what I want to so on a certain day, however, as I come home from school, I would constantly say to myself, “I’ll watch one more video and then do my homework” (spoiler: I’ll discover a new interesting video I want to watch after that), “I’ll go for a walk to motivate myself for the essay” (spoiler: I’ll take a route way too long and be even more tired after that) and so on.

My plan for the day was set but I could not find the motivation to execute it. This is where the second principle comes in:

Route
Remider
Reward

The first step is to plan a route on how you will drive through your day. You can use paper or your phone’s calendar for that, it’s only important that you fill in every hour of the day (I make a screenshot of the calendar on my iPad and draw into that, don’t judge me).

The second thing is to constantly remind yourself of your route. Hereby, it is both important to limit the time you spend chilling but also the time you work. If you work too much on one thing, you will not have enough time to do the other things. This is why chunking your work into small managable pieces is so important. I personally use a 2:1 cycle, 1 hour of work followed by a 30 minutes pause, but that ratio can be adjusted for personal preference. I didn’t experiment with different cycles yet, but I would assume that you shouldn’t work for more than one hour without a break and that your breaks should be at least 15 minutes long. You can use alarms or reminders for that, but I use timers instead myself: whenever I start working, I set a timer for 1h, and when I start a break, I set a timer for 30min. The time ticking on my screen creates additional awareness and pressure for me.

The final element of this strategy is reward: without it, it feels like you alternate enjoyable and not enjoyable periods of time. You just want your work time to pass so you can enjoy the break. To avoid this and boost your motivation, make your work also enjoyable and comfortable. My personal methods for this are ventillating the room before work so I get fresh air, adjusting my chair and desk into a comfortable position and listening to music. When it comes to music, I listen to the Lo-Fi playlist specifically, not because I believe that it boosts productivity, but because I’m already used to put myself in the working attitude when I hear that music.

Don’t distract: Use Technology

It seems like technology is you biggest enemy when it comes to productivity: all the distracting notifications and addictive social media apps are one big conspiracy that wants to keep you from working. However, if you learn to use technology wisely, it will turn from an enemy into a friend.

I already discussed the role of calendars, reminders and timers in the previous techniques. The last important step to tame technology is to eliminate distractions, which is not as difficult as you might think with the tools we have nowadays.

The first step is just to turn on the “do not disturb”-mode on your device, it’s as simple as that. I advise against just putting the phone on silent and prefer “do not disturb”, because it doesn’t show your notifications completely. The other important tool to make use of are app timers/limits which remind you to take a break if you get soaked into scrolling through social media. There are also a lot of other little adjustments you can make, like setting your screen into grayscale mode to make using your phone less appealing, especially before going to sleep, but I won’t cover that in detail here.

Conclusion

Staying productive is not difficult if you use some tricks, but it is a very individual thing. I am happy to share my ideas with you and hope that they’ll help. If you found a mistake or want to add or ask me something, feel free to contact me at alex@alexcoder04.de.

Reading recomendations

Although my method is original, it is loosely based on ideas of other’s I read about. In this context, I particularly recommend jamesclear.com and sahilbloom.com.

UI rices - Part 6

2023-10-08T09:52:44+00:00

Hello again,

iPadOS 17 is out and it is what defines my new theme.

Arch Linux GNOME

Still using GNOME with pretty much the same setup; installed some minor extensions which do not affect the look however.

Android 13

Still same ROM, still same apps, just new wallpaper and theme…

iPad (iPadOS 17)

Obviously OS update up to iPadOS 17, use more widgets now and switched to auto light-dark theme (light from 10 a. m. to 4 p. m., so only for a couple of hours).

UI rices - Part 5

2023-08-16T19:43:44+00:00

Hey,

a lot has happened since my last UI rices post. I’ve switches OS on my desktop and phone and there is a lot of new stuff to see.

And - my new theme is called Kobold.

Arch Linux GNOME

I’ve switched from Artix to plain Arch due to usability and simplicity reasons. I don’t hate systemd, so I hadn’t much a reason to stay on Artix. And change is always nice!

I used the switch to also try out a new desktop environment. I used GNOME 3 for a short time on Ubuntu and I hated it. However, I’m really interesed in the DE since the 40 version as they are doing stuff that is very innovative.

A couple of things were a kind of hassle to set up and some very random bugs were here and there which turned out to be just misconfiguration. However, now I genuinely LOVE GNOME on a laptop. The touchpad gestures are very smooth and play well together with the well-thought virtual desktop implementation. And the super key with the global search is just phenomenal. I already always launched programs by hitting the super key and searching in KDE, so the GNOME version matches my workflow exactly.

It is also worth mentioning that I have some extensions enabled, most notably “Blur my Shell”, “Caffeine” and “Date Menu Formatter”.

Android 13

For some time, I used the LeafOS ROM, which is also maintained my SamarV-121.

However, something went a little wrong during an update. so I switched back to (unofficial) LineageOS.

My home screen is still pretty clean, however I added a clock this time.

iPad (iOS 16)

There is actually a rather big update on the iPad side this time. The wallpaper is of course the same one, from the GNOME wallpaper pack, however, I sorted all my apps into categories to keep everything tidy.

New Phone?

2023-04-27T10:37:44+00:00

I am currently using a Galaxy M20 with (now) unofficial LineageOS, which will turn 4 years old this year.

Generally, I am not a kind of person who buys new products every one or two years, and I love tools that last years and years, so I keep using them even if I’m facing slight inconveniences.

However, the smartphone situation is different and here is why:

The situation with security and feature updates on Android phones is terrible. My phone was only supported for a couple of years and I was only receiving updates very unfrequently.
Furthermore, the Samsung variant of Android is a dumpster fire. It is ugly (my opinion), overloaded with bloated Samsung replacements for existing Android apps (40MB calculator, seriously?) and contains uninstallable bloatware like Microsoft products or Netflix.
I’ve had no problem using, I even would prefer flashing LineageOS on the phone (what I’m doing now), but as Samsung doesn’t provide updated kernels and upstreaming the kernel on one’s own is a pain in the *ss, the device isn’t even supported by LineageOS, so I have to rely on third-party unofficial builds as I don’t have the hardware to build a ROM myself. Although Samar-V-121 is doing an amazing job there, I would rather prefer using an officially supported OS.
And here are the reasons why:
- No Push Notifications: it’s a hassle to set up Google Play Services or microg myself, and it’s still a kinda hacky solution
- Camera bad: photo quality is worse than on the official ROM and the wide-angle camera doesn’t work at all
So I end up with a perfectly working smartphone (it runs pretty smoothly because I don’t do any intensive tasks as gaming), but I’m still not able to utilize all of its capabilities and have an enjoyable experience.

Looking for a replacement

So I’m looking for a new phone unless I find some other solution. My current plan is to wait until the end of the year, gather some more information and buy a new phone after Christmas.

These are the requirements I have, from most important to least important:

Longevity and Security. By that I mean software support for at least 4-5 years.
No bloat. A clean and usable OS, no preinstalled bloatware. Never going back to Samsung.
Smooth experience. I love tinkering with Linux on my PC, but my phone has to just work. I want push notifications, easy way to install any apps without jumping over extra hoops.
Privacy. I know that it’s very difficult to achieve on the mobile market nowadays, but I would like to avoid Big Tech companies that harvest my data and have as much Open Source as possible instead.
Price. I’m not going to pay $1000 for a phone.
Battery life. Just want my phone to last longer when I’m travelling and not having to carry a powerbank with me all the time.
Decent camera. Shooting beautiful photos would be a really nice addition.

I already considered some phones but they all fall through some of the categories:

Samsung: No. Doesn’t meet any of the requirements, maybe apart from camera and battery (?).
Any other 9-to-5 Android phone: already first two points aren’t fulfilled.
Shiftphone: suggested by a friend, looks ok, but I don’t know anything about them and cannot be sure that they will be bankrupt next year, so I’ll lose any kind of software support.
Google Pixel: point 1, 2 and 3 are fulfilled. Privacy, price and battery life are not :(
Pinephone: Linux phone, yeah! If it would work properly…
No phone at all: life-time software support guaranteed, very cheap, and the OS is exceptionally clean, private and has unlimited battery life. However, the user experience is kinda lacking :(
The evil: I even looked at the brand I thought I wouldn’t even consider: Apple. The same as with Google Pixel, 1-3 are fulfilled, but the privacy and especially the price… I don’t know whether I can justify it.

That’s why I would ask you for suggestions (if anyone is reading this at all): what phone would you recommend? Looking forward for emails and messages on Mastodon!

UI rices - Part 4

2023-04-27T09:59:44+00:00

Hello everyone,

the winter is over, so it is time to switch to a new, more warm theme.

This time, I decided to use a picture of the North Sea as the background and add the beautiful Gruvbox colorscheme to it; so this new theme receives the name “North Sea”.

Enjoy!

Artix Linux KDE

Still on Artix, still on KDE, still very happy with it!

However, I made my desktop somewhat more minimal by removing the bottom panel. This has two main reasons: firstly, I ended up never using the app icons to switch between apps, as I open everything on different workspaces anyway and use the touchpad gestures to navigate between them. Secondly, as I already had a top panel with some tray icons in it, the only logical step was to move the rest of them in the same place, too. So, only the main menu, which I only access via the super key anyway, and the workspace indicator were left, and it was not a major deal to move them into the top panel as well.

By implementing these changes, I managed to save some screen space without losing any comfort.

The Plasma and Qt theme is warm Gruvbox, which I already used on tiling window managers before and like quite a lot. And btw, Firefox is configured using Gruvbox as well!

Android 13

Nothing really changed here, still on the same ROM by SamarV-121, still not using the phone very often.

Btw, the warm accent color Android suggested me for that wallpaper actually made me use Gruvbox on the PC.

P. S.: I am looking for a new phone, maybe you have some recommendations?

iPad (iOS 16)

Well, as you know, I’m not a huge fan of Apple products and I don’t have very much customization options there.

Nevertheless, I cleaned up my home screen layout to be more simple and less destructive.

UI rices - Part 3

2023-02-16T18:13:44+00:00

This is the third part of the “UI rices” series of posts, where I want to share some of my thoughts on design - by ricing the appearance of my own desktop, phone and more.

As the winter continues, I’m using a winter-inspired theme I called “Blue Frost”.

Artix Linux KDE

I switched back to Artix, although now with a full-fledged desktop. I’m trying KDE for the first time and I’m very happy with it. The customizablity is amazing and even overwhelming and I’m not even using a fraction of what KDE offers.

I run KDE in the Wayland session, with a bottom taskbar, which replicates my previous Cinnamon layout - start menu and desktops on the left, applications in the center and system tray on the right. However, now I’m also using a top bar with a macOS-like global menu, window title and some quick buttons. The window titlebar and the task bar disappear in the maximized view to save space, which works very decently, especially in applications like Libreoffice.

The application theme is just Breeze, combined with Tela icons and Dexy-Dark-Colors-Aurorae window border (looks like macOS again, but with window buttons on the left, where they actually belong). My foot terminal features ann oceanic-next colorscheme, and Firefox is in its default dark theme.

As for the background, I use an iconic 10-year-old winter picture from my personal photos collection.

Android 13

My phone is still on the unofficial version of LineageOS 20 (Android 13) made by SamarV-121.

I’m using the same wallpaper as on the desktop and automatically picked accent colors. The default Trebuchet launcher with a clean home layout serves its purpose.

iPad (iOS 16)

Although there is nothing to customize on an iPad, except of the wallpaper and app grid layout, I will still include it here for completeness.

Twitter is dead, switch to Mastodon now!

2022-12-19T07:49:44+00:00

If you have been following what happens on Twitter in the last couple of days, you may just facepalm yourself.

The drama with Twitter and Elon Musk already goes for a couple of months and it shows very clearly the weakness of centralized media: they are in full control of one person or a small group of people, and this owner can change anytime.

I never had an account on Twitter or any other social media platform, but this week I decided to try out Mastodon, which is a decentralized social media platform; that means that there are a lot of different servers you can join and all of them can communicate to each other. Hell, because of the use of the ActivityPub standard, they can even communicate to any other platform using this standard, like Peertube and Pixelfed.

Only now I realized how much more sense this model makes for social media: due to division into individual servers, small communities with similar interests can form, which are easy to moderate; and due to the uniform standard everyone can still keep connected to everyone.

As for my own experience, I’m really impressed with Mastodon right now. And this is not due to the technical workings or features (here and there I find some corners that are a little inconvenient), but because of the amazingly warm and welcoming community there. It feels like a space where friends come together to chat and share their opinions; no annoying companies which try to sell something and manipulate you. I was also amazed how many of the people and organisations I follow elsewhere on the internet are over on Mastodon.

As a conclusion, I want to refer to the discussions about BeReal earlier this year: a lot of mainstream media seemed to portray it as “the new better social media”, which, in my opinion, however, is absolute b***sh*t: it has the same corporate-controlled and centralized model and even then it is doomed to fail: it brings no revenue (at least, I’m not aware of how they make money), however, if they add more features and ads, it won’t be distinct from other mainstream social media anymore; it will become just another Instagram; if they keep it like it is, people will get bored and quit, as it is just a trend, which will disappear again.

That’s why the future is open-source, free and decentralized: join Mastodon right now and follow me at @alexcoder04@techhub.social!

UI rices - Part 2

2022-12-08T17:34:44+00:00

This is the second part of the “UI rices” series of posts, where I want to share some of my thoughts on design - by ricing the appearance of my own desktop, phone and more.

In this part, I will share the “Red Dark Winter” theme with you.

It’s winter in the northern hemisphere so I need something warm to keep me positive - just like my theme.

Linux Mint 21

A centered fully transparent taskbar, but with the menu on the left (where it belongs), default Linux Mint icons in orange featuring the dark mirrored version of the macOS Ventura wallpaper and the Gnome terminal colorscheme - what more do you need for a nice look?

Android 13

My Phone is running an unofficial version of LineageOS 20 (Android 13) made by SamarV-121.

I’m using the same wallpaper as on the desktop and automatically picked accent colors. Also, I’m currently trying a self-built version of /e/-OS Bliss Launcher, which looks a little like iOS, with all the apps present at the home screen.

iPad (iOS 16)

Now I actually own an Apple device :)

I might write a more detailed review some time in the future, but in short, I’m not really impressed - it’s just like what I expected it to be, very locked-down and unflexible (you can’t even change accent colors -_-).

LineageOS on Samsung M20

2022-10-24T19:31:44+00:00

I am a free software enthusiast and a proponent of minimalism, and this is also true for the mobile space. I switched to LineageOS almost one year ago, as Samsung stopped shipping updates for my phone, and I got tired of the bloated stock Android, so in this post I want to share my experiences.

Installation Process

The installation was extremly easy on my phone: I just followed the instructions on the LineageOS website and everything worked without problems. I had to turn some kind of switch in the developer settings (unlock bootloader or enter some kind of special download mode I guess), then start the phone with a specific button combination pressed, flash the recovery and install install LineageOS from it.

That’s it.

Performance and Battery Life

Although my phone (Samsung Galaxy M20, released 2019, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage, 5000mAh battery) is already three years old, it still runs very smoothly. I mean perfectly fine. I never had any performance problems, even running in battery saver all the time, and the battery holds for two or three days with my usage (at the very beginning it lasted even up to five days).

Hardware Problems on LineageOS

After installing LineageOS, several things are not working as expected, however it is not really a big deal for me:

Low speaker volume: all sounds are not such intense; and in noisy atmospheres, it is difficult to hear the media playing.
Wide angle camera not working at all.
Camera quality dropped drastically compared to the stock ROM.

Absense of Google Play Services

LineageOS ships without the Google Play Services and Google Apps, but this is rather an advantage for me as I try to avoid using proprietary apps; the only Google app I’m using is Google Maps, and even that not on a regular basis.

I’m using the microg variant of LineageOS, so I can receive push notifications on messenger apps through Google Cloud Messaging, which works very well.

Default Apps

LineageOS comes with a set of default apps like calendar, camera, gallery etc., which are mostly based on AOSP. These are pretty barebones, however I ended up replacing only two of them: file manager and gallery with both SimpleMobileTools counterparts; also I switched to Brave instead of their browser app. The rest, however, is working perfectly and I find it even better than the Samsung versions, which are very bloated (compare LineageOS Calculator (57kB) vs Samsung Calculator (around 20-50MB) with almost the same functionality). I even don’t need to mention, that all the un-installable bloatware like Facebook, Netflix, Microsoft Office (who uses these on a phone?) from the stock ROM, don’t bother me anymore.

The OS itself is also much more customizable than Samsung’s and allows creating own themes by combining accent colors, icon shapes and fonts.

Updates

Samsung supplied my phone for only about two years with updates, delivering two updates a year (if I remember correctly), which even then were several months behind. On Lineage, on the other hand, I’m getting security updates at least every month and can use Android 11, which was not provided by Samsung. However, Android 12 and 13 are already out there and they probably won’t be ported to my device, as this is too much work for the maintainer and the userbase is not very big.

Outlook

So, from my feeling, I will get updates for another couple of months, maybe a year, as long as Android 11 is still maintained; after that I will have to look for a new solution. I thought about different options - Google Pixel, Fairphone, Motorola - but I’m still unsure.

What I’m pretty sure about: the M20 in combination with LineageOS did, is doing and will do a great job until then and my next device will certainly run LineageOS as well.

UI rices - Part 1

2022-10-24T17:53:44+00:00

In a “UI rices” series of posts, I want to share some of my thoughts on design - by ricing the appearance of my own desktop, phone and more.

Currently, I have an Apple-inspired theme on both my desktop and phone.

Linux Mint 21 - “Mice”

"mac" + "nice" = "mice"

This my Linux Mint Cinnamon desktop - macOS Monterey wallpaper featuring the default Linux Mint theme with fitting purple accent color and CPU/RAM/disk monitoring applet in light colors plus “transparent bar” extension. Not much more.

Android 11 - “iOS 16”

My phone running LineageOS 18.1 (Android 11) offers some customization options, though much more limited as a Linux desktop.

I use the iOS 16 wallpaper with a blue accent color and “squircle” icons - and of course a dark theme ;) I love a clean home screen, so only a search bar and a couple of most used apps are present there.