Tiredness Level: 0/10

Dear Rubén,

I’m glad that you feel better now. However let’s try to reach at least 6h sleep for health purposes though xD this is a marathon and not a sprint afterall :) But look who’s talking: I went to bed at around 1am and well, and ok, I’ve overslept :D and got up at 6:40, buhu~! Maybe I should take a nap like you, too. It’s actually a good idea. On the bright side I’m not the least tired anymore :D I was sort of expecting something like this to happen eventually, since I still can’t bring myself to sleep early enough. Not always anyways.

Looks like you’re utilizing the time with your dad. That’s nice. When will he go back to spain? Hmm what’s stronger? A stone muffin or a stone baquette?

Your Unity project looks awesome! What else do you want to do with it?

And yea keep learning german if you want! I don’t feel like it’s worth the effort but that’s just me, haha. It’s doubtful that there will be many non english speaking people in germany in the future.

About the one plus, it looks awesome, especially for the price. The only thing that could be annyoing is the the only 3100 mAH battery. Maybe you can swap it for a better one at some point.

Yesterday I started helping Stephan with the critical mass app for berlin. I just wanted to add the twitter readonly hashtag feature. But it took a bit longer than anticipated. Twitter restricted the timestamp of the tweets. Basically you get only the past 7-9 days of tweets of a hashtag. Why twitter, why??? I mean it’s not that hard to freaking send a list of tweets if asked. Like seriously.

Anyways that’s when I realized that my life needs major timeboxing. I happen to sacrefice things I want to do for a bigger chunky thing that I want to finish. But it might be better to do all kinds of stuff instead and return to the bigger chunks on a later time, instead of pushing it through.

And now something completelly unrelated. In the show Inside the Actors Studio Show James Lipton always asks 10 proust questions:

What is your favorite word?
What is your least favorite word?
What turns you on?
What turns you off?
What sound or noise do you love?
What sound or noise do you hate?
What is your favorite curse word?
What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
What profession would you not like to do?
If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?

Would you mind answering them please?

I’ll be ending the letter with another interesting video I’ve found on TED:

As always have an amazing day!

Tiredness Level: 6/10

Dear Rubén,

Yesterday came out a new episode of Doctor Who. So let’s start with the theme song ^_^

What did you learn from ‘El Gran Juego’ so far?

About Cyanogenmod, well the ui nicer imho. However for me it’s more about rooting the device which has a lot of advantages. For instance, you’re able to install Adbblock, use a propper unix terminal, have a propper firewall and being able to delete thumbstones and several cache folders from your internal memory.

The alarm clock idea would be cool imho because I could actually tell stories to myself that I could not think of while being half asleep. For instance “Hey do you remember that guy who gave up? neither does anybody else!”. I could also motivate myself by saying “good morning sunshine, don’t you think a coffee would be a good idea now?” :D i can’t imagine how annoying that would be to hear it more than once though. But you could always record something new every evening.

Oh come to think of it do you know this video?

It got me thinking that the human mind perceives the order of the correlation between feelings and actions backwards. What do I mean by that? People usually believe that they act according to the way they feel when in fact it is the other way around. People feel according to how they act. If you listen to depressive emotional music you might end up feeling depressed. If you play couch potatoe at the weekend you might feel lazy. When however you do some exercises you feel more refreshed.

Do you know the Quote “Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits, Your habits become your values, Your values become your destiny.” by Ghandi?

So my conclusion is, that conciously changing the way think and therefore acting on it will change the way you feel eventually. Especially the way one thinks is highly underestimated.

There is also this TED Talk that tackles this topic.

Oh right totally forgot, I slept from around midnight-ish till 6am. Ah yea and watching TED Talks while exercising works for most of the time. Sometimes there are videos that require you to watch when they show something off. You could always take a small break in between for that.

Have an amazing day!

ps: The rage-one-star-rating against hacking for Diamond Dash made my day! Brilliant. :D

Ruben’s Answer:

Hello Sir!

I’ve to admit it: yesterday I took a nap (30m) in the afternoon. It was going to be either at home or in the streets. I was really tired but you know what? It really worked for me and paid off. Today, even though I slept 5 hours on the couch, I feel much better. It feels odd still, to wake up so early on Sunday. I looked through the window and the only stuff I see in the street are broken bottles of vodka and some people throwing up. I just hope they clean the streets before my father wakes up

Yesterday I went to have breakfast with my father to Westberlin but it happened to be closed until 10AM. That means thirty minutes of waiting. Sorry to say that we were so hungry that we went for the worst muffin I ever tried in my life. Its crunchiness reached the level of a stone. Let’s see if we make it today to Westberlin.

I continued working on my Unity project and refactored the tunnel creating algorithm. Now it uses a much less amount of vertices and it even generates UV coordinates, though there’s a little issue because I can’t set two UV coordinates in the first/last vertex so as to close the loop. I got it running in my nexus 7 (though it looks like shit) and I’m quite happy with the results, especially after adding height variations. Again: thank you for helping me the other day! I’m not sure what to do next; I guess I’ll give the player something to play with.

Here’s an amateur capture I uploaded:

I’ll start in some minutes studying some German. I feel like I need to improve my productivity in the morning, I guess I’ll cut some corners and leave Facebook closed (though it’s supposed to be my free time).

What about your progress? I found it pretty cool that you called me the other day to go shopping. Let’s see if the next week works out of both. How many anime episodes did you watch this week?

Did you have a chance to have a look at this Android device? What do you think about it?

It already comes with cyagenmod and wow, I’m quite impressed with its features for the price. I was thinking about getting either that one or the nexus 6 since my iPhone got its lock button broken and it really sucks that way.

Have a good Sunday.

Things I could do due earlier waking up:

• exercise
• read
• watch interesting videos
• write blog entry

Tiredness Level: 4/10

Dear Rubén,

Good morning :) Black Bullet finally released its osts. Only 3 months late, but hey rather late than never. So here it goes:

This is the most epic scene in the anime:

I’m glad that you’re having a good time with your visitor even though your sleeping environment has slightly changed. For these purposes I own a self-inflating bed.

And yea I’ve added a tiredness level and a list of things that I could do in those 2-3 additional hours in the morning. Although I feel like it’s a bit unprecise at this point. (Work in progress.)

As for the progress itself I went to bed at 23ish and woke up at 4:31 because I’ve tried the ‘smart rise’ feature of an android app that is based on ‘advanced sleep cycle theory’ which basically wakes you up 30 minutes before the actual time in a slowly fading kind of way. However my sleep usually isn’t that deep to the begin with and I woke up instantaneously. Oh well now I know for sure. Did you try such a thing before? Some people wake themself up multiple times each morning which is a terrible idea imho.

Which reminds me. Do you know an alarm app where you could wake yourself up with your own recording? :D I see a serious app idea here haha.

For the sbs team event we went to The Fichtebunker time capsule. It was a brick-covered gasholder to supply street lanterns between 1884 and 1937. And later it was transformed into a bunker to hold 6500 mothers and children to survive the bombings in berlin in the 2nd word war. Another interesting part is that people are actually living on top of that bunker now o.O

Other than that I feel like I need to change the order on what I do in the morning. For instance taking a shower first helps waking up. And then do some exercises before I check my e-mails and facebook. What is your current order?

Also for me it feels stretchings to be most effective to feel fresh more than doing exercises right away. What do you think?

Have an amazing day!

Ruben’s Answer:

Hey Jan,

So this time I’m definitely even more tired. Sleeping on the couch didn’t really help my back, but I’m still rocking here. I’ve managed to have a good breakfast (which always includes a warm coffee), read some pages of a spanish book that has some really good learnings about life (El Gran Juego de Carlos Martín Pérez).

It’s been written by a person who’s been in the army for more than 35 years and offers a great dose of sarcasm to explain common scenarios and solutions. It’s a shame you don’t speak Spanish!

When reading your previous blog entries a question came to my mind. How useful is to install cyanogenmod? In Apple products I do see a great advantage, as everything is pretty clearly restricted, but for Android? Can you also revert it so it looks like you never rooted it? The only scenario where I really found it useful was when trying to hack DiamondDash in order to implement safety mechanisms which, by the way, worked like a charm as some people rated us with one star complaining that they couldn’t hack it anymore. Pretty funny stuff!

I’m glad to see you enjoying anime! I’ll take your advice and start watching no game no life and tell you about it.

About the alarm clock app you mentioned, I guess you can find a niche market if you manage to avoid the issues of Android limiting your app while the phone is locked. It’d be fun to play a video of my mother shouting at me “Rubén wake up you lazy bastard, go to school”. I don’t forecast a good start of the day, though.

My current order is: chaotic. Normally I grab myself a coffee and start doing stuff in my computer right away with some music, since I take showers at night. Should I try doing exercise? Okay, I’ll try it soon and tell you how it went. Do you think it’s a great thing to do some exercise while watching some ted talks?

Have a good day!

Things I could do due earlier waking up:

• exercise
• read
• breakfast
• watch interesting videos
• write blog entry
• browse around animes I want to watch in the future; current watch list:
  • Mahouka Koukou No Rettousei
  • Naruto Shippuden
  • Fairy Tail
  • Sword Art Online 2
  • Aldnoha Zero
  • Akame Ga Kill
  • Tokyo Ghoul

Tiredness Level: 5/10

Dear Rubén,

Here an awesome song for the day:

Yesterday I’ve had a team event at the bunker.
I have been home at 23pm and managed to sleep at around midnight. Which means 5h sleep. I feel more tired than yesterday q.q. To make this work I definetelly need to sleep earlier. However I already feel the difference. Days appear to be longer. Ok that might be because the day was actually quite long. Anyways how was it for you today especially with your visiter?

Congrats to beeing featured by your university, nice nice! Then again, maybe they want to show students how to successfully leave the country. (and that they’re especially happy about you leaving xD j.k.)

I’ve told you before but I’m genuinely glad that your blog turned out to be so sophisticated in terms of communicated humor and knowledge. Also that other people think so, too. ^^ For me personally doing a blog was always a worthwhile activity. Although I erased like 5 blogs in my life with tons of entries already so who knows what will happen to your blog once you have the glorious idea to ‘overhaul’ it. xD

About your rabbits – how long do they usually sleep and wake up?

And nice to hear that you find this idea interesting as well. It’s certainly a good entry point to do procrastinated tasks, like your language learning progress haha.

Here is another nice missconception video of veritasium:

As always have a nice day. :)

Ruben’s answer:

Good morning Jan,

What was that bunker event about? I hope it wasn’t about shooting lessons.

Definitely days are longer, so as the increasement of the tiredness levels. I really have to get earlier in bed, as I’m getting to sleep at about midnight or 1AM and when alarm clock sounds it seems like I just set it up, a horrible experience. Though the benefits are clear! I’ve managed to work on my e-mails and improve my interview texts, which took really a lot of time. Hearing music at this time helps building up my motivation.

Things are going well with my visitor. We’ll definitely walk (and eat) a lot, though I suspect I’ll be sleeping on my own sofa so as to avoid waking him up at 6. I don’t think he’d happy about it.

I detected that you modified a few blog entries to include some sort of feedback of what you could improve. That’s great, I might copy (again) your idea in further blog entries.

What are you planning to read, though?

Thanks for your words!

Things I could do due earlier waking up:

• exercise
• read
• breakfast
• watch interesting videos
• write blog entry

Tiredness Level: 6/10

Good morning everyone!

When I told Rubén about this little self-imposed challange he was intrigued and told me he wanted to join for higher success rates. So I thought it would be cool to report my progress in a form of an open letter to him. Here it goes:

Dear Rubén,

All right, waking up early wasn’t so hard after all. Getting up is a completely different story if you’ve decided it for yourself instead of getting forced to do it. How did it go for you so far? How did you use your additional time?

I managed to sleep at around 23:30ish and got up at 5am. At the first 15 minutes I thought a truck hit me. But I’m better now. I took a shower, did a few push-ups, some crunches and lifted some weights. So here’s where it gets interesting. If you had 2-3 free hours before work. What would you do?

For this morning I read a few more pages on “Ich bin Merkur” by Ava Sergeeva. A quite interesting book that hasn’t been released yet. So I truely feel honored to be part of the group who got their hands on it first. Thanks Ava! :D Also I managed to create an actual landing page on my domain, which I own for exactly 3252 days. That’s something I procrastinated for a very long time by now, haha.

I also watched a few more science videos of Veritasium, which is a youtube channel I found the other day and enjoy a lot. For instance did you know that if you bungee jump you would accalerate faster than mere free fall?

Have an awesome day!
Jan

Things I could do due earlier waking up:

• exercise
• read
• breakfast
• watch interesting videos
• write blog entry
• sort out e-mails

Rubén answered:

In my case I slept at nearly 1 o’clock and got up at 6. It’s been a great day so far! basically I answered all my pending e-mails, especially one that my university sent me. They did me an interview via e-mail as they want me to appear in their webpage as an “honorable student”, whatever that is supposed to mean.

I was also surprised to discover that some entries of my blog were posted in reddit, dzone and some other portals.

I also had some time to play with my rabbits and they were kind of surprised to be able to freely run so early.

In the next days I’ll be doing a more detailed plan that will also involve some physical exercise and language learning.

All looks so promising! Thank you for sharing your idea; it will work well for both of us.

Have a good day as well.

Last month I’ve read an article from Jeff Finley on how he woke up early for a year and how it changed his life.  It got me inspired. At first I was wondering what would possibly be the point in that? I mean I’m quite happy by sleeping a bit longer thank you very much.

However the last couple of days I began to wonder if there might not be more to it than it meets the eye. Why didn’t I want to wake up early? Was it because I felt lazy or did I have a particular reason to stay up late? Truth is a bit of both. When did I choose to stay up late on average, when did I decide what food want to eat or how often I work out?

At the TED Talk How to make choosing easier Sheena Iyengar states that a normal person decides about 17 decisions and a CEO 139 decisions on a typical day, the CEO handles 50% of them in even under 9 minutes or less.

Basically we all do all kinds of choices on a daily basis. The weird thing that always gets me is that we rarely recognize them as choices. Many choices just ‘happen’ and stick that way for convinience reasons without giving another thought to it. (Sidenote: one reason is the choice overload problem.)

But is that really good enough? Wouldn’t it be better to do more choices conciously?

The more I think about it the more I realize that I lack a time think about these things conciously. On how I want to live in general. Therefore I’ve decided that I’ll be doing a little experiment. Not for a whole year as Jeff did. But for 66 Days, which happens to be the average time for a person to get used to or get rid of a habit.

Starting tomorrow I’ll be going to get up every morning at 5 o’clock for the next 66 days. In this period of time I’ll be doing some workout, having breakfast, getting ready for work, doing some non-work related personal development and most importantly I’ll be keeping track on a blog post every day.

No clue how successful I’m gonna be in getting up, what is gonna stick after that time or what I’ll be doing exactly – so let’s find out.