I'm intending to use this journal to track my progress as I work on improving my ability to focus for longer, and live out my intentions.
18th December 2025: brb about to lock in. The plan is the same as yesterday: 4x(50/10) sets, then get some food. I use a TODO txt file to have a rough plan for what I'm working on and another one as a brain dump which I spit thoughts out onto instead of acting on them during the work session, instead I can act on them during the breaks if I still want to.
17th December 2025: First day of the journal. I have the intention to be more intentional, but that's very meta. I've invested in a bunch of gadgets, and I think they will be helpful. In fact, I think weaponising my obsession with retro tech and single use devices against my phone/social media addiction is the best strategy I can deploy. However, they're in the post, and even once I've got them, a certain amount of effort must come about in the moment--I must have some internal compass of resolution in order to fuel this project when the going gets tough, and just as importantly, I need a strategy until the gadgets arrive through the clogged up December postal service. I'll set one intention clearly: I intend to not use reddit ever again. I also intend to only use YouTube for educational purposes. I'll come back here and let you know how that goes. Why am I intending to do this? I think I'll have a better perspective to answer that on another entry. It's 5:20 PM and I intend to start a pomodoro session of 4x(50/10), which will take me up until 9:20 PM. Let's go.
Checking in again after first session. I actually took a little while to get going as a thought I should look into a good way to use the pomodoro method, which I haven't really used before. After like 20 minutes in which I installed a timer app, I decided over optimising here is silly and just cracked on with it. A nice hack that's recently become available with an update to duckduckgo is the ability to easily filter out specific sites from the search results. I have filtered out YT and Reddit. You can do this by hitting the three dots next to a search result on the results page.