Productivity

I am up at the good, fair hour of 2 PM. This has been my schedule for weeks, it seems: I fall asleep between 4 and 6 AM, usually towards the later side, and get up right around 2 PM. I often wake up around 11 because I set my alarm for thereabouts but I am so exhausted still I feel like I could sleep eternally. By the time it gets close to two I force myself to get up in one way or another and I take a shower, after which I tend to be awake through the day.

Yesterday was really frustrating in a lot of ways. I have a laptop where unnecessary stuff pops up and annoys me and I haven’t tried to deal with it. I also seem to need a new battery so I have to keeo it plugged in. My host does not know his wifi password and I haven’t bothered to research exactly how to retrieve it so I spend at least an hour of my time it seems just eaiting for things to load and it is so inefficient. Last night I was especially frustrated. Today I woke up with the goal of being more efficient in what I’m doing and especially in my learning process.

Yesterday I read some of a really interesting book called The Amazing Fact of Quaker Worship. I feel more and more at home every week not just in my own contemplative practice but communally with others. The shared practice of sitting in silence is strangely so powerful and it is a necessary clearing out for me. The suthor calls it therapy and in so many ways it really is. People who never expected a Quaker meeting in silence to move them finds that it does and I can’t explain the effect it has on me but it has definitely been a necessary practice the last few months. If I didn’t have that I have no idea where I would be and I can’t quantify the effect that just sitting has had on my life. It is such a good thing though. I feel like I have found the closest thing I am going to find to a spiritual home in the Society of Friends.

I was so frustrated with all the inefficiency and everything that went wrong yesterday. I started writing an entry but didn’t like how I was writing and didn’t post it. I was going back and forth every few minutes between different activities because I was restless and anxious and felt like I had so much to kearn and do and not enough time to do it. In the end I accomplished a lot, I guess, despite my inefficiency. Learning about trading is like learning a language. There are times when nothing makes sense to me and it all glazes over me but then if I keep exposing myself to learning bit by but things get easier. There is a lot to learn with this Think or Swim software, how to trade options in general, technical indicators. I look at charts and realize I have a lit of questions and despite learning so much everything is suddenly fuzzy. What time period do I look at, how do I measure price resistance levels more thoroughly, how do I set up stacked EMAs on my charts? Question after question and when I have them I just research and tackle them. I typed out Think or Swim code that would indicate exactly when EMAs become stacked in bullish or bearish ways. I was surprised that wasn’t built into the software but it was fun to code! l keep in mind (should probably write down) the questions I have and the things I could learn about that would let me learn the most, the fastest, and then I research them. I felt a bit more fluent when I was finally ready to go to sleep and I didn’t want to go to sleep until I did. It’s a lit like learning a language. Everything I am wanting to do lately is like learning a language, it seems, and I am getting mote and more efficient at doing that.

I came across an article on medium on modeling quantum phenomena with Python and I just scanned it hardly reading a word but it was so exciting and I realized suddenly, ah, that is the programming language I will learn first! It was so hard to decide! That would let me combine multiple interests into ine, too: I can learn about math and science and programming at the same time. It is going to be fun, but I am doing sooo much, and I question how I am going to learn everything I want to learn: languages, trading and trading software, programming languages, my best practices for passive income generation, music and guitar. I feel like a beginner in everything I am learning, which is frustrating, but some of these things, especially trading, will probably take up less of my time once I get a handle on it. I *am* learning pretty quickly, it’s just a matter of keeping at it. And not getting too anxious and tense about how much I have to learn about all sorts of things at the same time… I wonder if I’m committing to too much at once, but these all feel like things that I really want to do!

Now it is almost quarter past three. I just went upstairs to make some cream of wheat and my physicist host just showed me a light box he just bought, measuring with a little solar panel and a voltage meter and an oscillator. Now I am using it.

I think I might try logging the hours I spend doing various activities, after I finish this entry, so I have a better idea where my time is going. Today my goal is to watch more cideos on trading and go over the notes I’ce taken. Maybe I will make my first virtual options trade or at least find a stock that looks like it’s at a good entry level. Once I start doing this I will find a good way to track my success rate (maybe that stuff is built into the app?) When I feel confident with that and see that my virtual account is making money I will make my first real trade. Then we will see what else I end up doing.

I am really down on myself today. I know I can be a fast learner and accomplish a whole lot of things in a short time but I don’t want to get anxious and push myself and it’s hard to find a balance. I feel like I am making up time in so many ways. If only I knew what I knew now as far as how to learn and accomplish things when I graduated from high school…