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Week 89 – One week of using the laptop

 ·  ☕ 11 min read
Featured Image

I had a pretty productive and healthy week with the new laptop, but that clearly did not stop me from delaying the blog 😁

But anyway, I want to talk more about the laptop and the changes it brought in my life over the blog getting delayed.

Laptop Review

So this is the laptop that I went with. Not going to attach any images 😤
You can google and see the images smh.

I don’t have any complaints regarding the speed and performance of the laptop. However, it feels even snappier than my desktop at times, that could be because of the NVMe drive or because it has a lot fewer apps compared to my PC.

But that’s not really the best part. The best part is I can make take it anywhere and work anytime. The form factor makes it easier to do. I am happy that I went with the 14inch model because any bigger or heavier would have only added to the friction.

I haven’t edited any videos on the laptop yet. Even though it is capable, I don’t think I will use it to edit videos because I have a lot of other less intense work that can be done on the laptop and can be done while standing.

This brings me to my next big point, I almost always use the laptop while standing up, and it acts as my standing desktop setup (I don’t have a standing desk). To know how I use my laptop while standing, read my last few blogs maybe 😏

However, there is a con of the laptop, and that is the battery life. It isn’t as great as promised, despite using the laptop in the lowest brightness 😐 Maybe my model is flawed, but the hassle of getting it replaced is a lot more than just connecting to a charger. If there were ever a doomsday scenario where I am stuck without electricity, I would prefer not to use the laptop smh.

Phir bhi dil hai digital minimalist plays in bg

Personal Highlights

Well, the laptop made me more productive. I ended up working a lot more than I usually do but it still did not solve the issue of me not hitting a zero on my to-do list.

Mindfulness

  • Journaling: It went as usual. I am just glad I have been journaling every day without fail since November. This has been my longest journaling streak.

    Fun fact: I started regular journaling back in February 2019, but there were always some pauses here and there, sometimes after a few months, sometimes after a few days.

    But this time, ever since I re-read atomic habits and made journaling the first thing that I do every day, it has sort of become a part of my life.

Fitness

  • Morning Run

    fitw89

    Thoda less compared to last week. Hmmm. I don’t know if I should take the weekly stats seriously and try to increase them. I am still stuck at just going out every day rather than optimizing my run 😩

Learning

  • Reading: Continued reading The Spark on Kindle

  • Listening: I also started listening to “Make Time” audiobook last week but forgot to mention it here.

    maketime

    Anyway, I am about to finish it. I had already read half the book in my kindle last year after Ali Abdaal’s video on Time but this year, I just did not feel like reading another self-help related book, so I thought of listening to it instead because I felt like I would benefit from the information on a passive level more than I would in an active manner which is reading line by line and taking notes.

  • Coding: I did start working on the friend’s website. It is 50% done but I spent a lot of my time on notion planning about the changes that I would need to make on the website rather than actually working on it, which is a bit of a foolish thing to do because noting stuff down in notion made me feel like I was plotting and making progress, but in reality, I could have made more progress had I just started working on the code of the site smh ☹

Optimization and Organization

My hard disks were getting full, so I tried to delete some files and then thought of moving some files to my old external 1TB HDD for backup, but upon connecting, it wasn’t showing up on my PC, which made me a little worried.

But it eventually did start working and I thought of checking the S.M.A.R.T status of all my drives and lo and behold turns out two of my drives including my external drive are not in a good shape, which makes sense because my old internal hard drive is from 2013 and my external HDD is from 2015 and all these led to me ordering a new external HDD 🥶

So yeah, I remember my first podcast episode was on an organization hack which preached the idea of deleting files over getting more storage but sometimes you just can’t help but fall in the trap of capitalism smh 🤥

Job Update

The company where I am working completed six months, and they are planning a meetup in Mumbai. Surprisingly enough, I got invited.

I am not sure if I will be able to go and don’t ask me, “Why wouldn’t I go?” because the answer to that question will reveal that I am a 🐈

I mean, we can’t be a pro max plus in every field and travelling is one of those fields where I lack experience and I feel like building up my experience slowly by travelling to nearby places before I can get the courage of travelling far away places on my own 🥶

Business Updates

Did not make any progress on the business front because I was busy with the website that I am working on. It will take me a week more before I can finally get back or get started with Octalancer again.

Thoughts from the past week

A lot of thoughts on standing up while working because I have been hearing about it for the last 4-5 years. I was finally able to do it this week. I quickly realized that standing up requires way more energy than sitting. So, if you have an intense task at hand, it is best to sit down and do it.

Also, another observation was that walking is easier than standing. Remember, the human body wasn’t meant to sit all day at a desk, but it wasn’t meant to stand up either. Rather, it was meant to move around a lot, and I realized the ills of a sedentary lifestyle could not be fixed by a quick hack like getting a standing desk. We have to walk around a lot more and there isn’t a substitute for that. Well, attaching a treadmill can be one, but then again, it’s too costly and I personally don’t like treadmills because of how easy they are.

I also did some research on it. Watched videos[Linked below] and came across tweets

But let’s not get distracted from the advantages of standing up, which I experienced,

The first is I can not only continue my work every time I feel like I have been sitting for too long I can also work more

Now the downside of this is that my eyes aren’t getting enough rest and if I overwork, I will for sure burnout and there is no counterargument to these but I have to say it feels quite nice to continue working when on other days I would have picked up my phone while taking a standing break and browsed insta.

So yeah, all in all, I am very satisfied with getting the laptop. It is serving the purpose that I intended it to. Even if it hasn’t been able to solve the problem of getting more done, it surely has eliminated my back pain. I did not even once feel any back pain this week compared to last week when I felt it 2-3 times throughout the week, especially at night because of sitting all day.

And yes, the laptop purchased made me feel very content and it was one of those big lifestyle upgrades that I had been looking for a long time. I don’t think anything else would impact my life as much as it did. Sure, I could get a lot more fancy gadgets and stuff, but the productivity bounce of all wouldn’t be as prominent as this laptop.

Opinions

My Favourites from the Week ⭐

Blogs/Articles 📑

The Nine Habits to Increase Your Energy - Scott H Young

Twitter Threads 🧵

This thread made me want to/reminded me to opt-in for health insurance which I will probably do this week.

Book Highlights📚

anxiety

theory_exposure

painful

how_we_respond

From Spark

VIDEOS 📼

Movies 🎥

Spider-man : Into the spider-verse [Alternate directors-cut] 2018

spiderverse19

I had originally watched the movie back when it came out online and quite liked it if not loved it. This film is the favourite Spiderman movie of most comic book fans’, but I failed to see how because I haven’t read the comics 😭 XDDD

But anyway, the version of the movie I watched this time was different from the one that I had originally watched. This included a lot of unfinished scenes and even some scenes which were just rough sketches and despite all those it did not break the flow of the movie

powerofmultiverse

Series 📺

The Boys Presents: Diabolical

boysdiabolical

Finally a good series but alas this is only a miniseries[10mins * 8 episodes] and I finished it in 2 days.

Also, since it has 8 different stories, I have to admit some were not pleasant to watch at all. Plus, it was quite gory. Refer to Comicverse’s video because it seems like I am repeating most of his stuff.

App(s) 📱

Ninite

I have been using this since 2017 and was able to use it again this week after getting my laptop because this is basically a “multiple apps installing” tool for windows. You should use it while setting up a Windows PC for the first time.

Tech Tip 🧙‍♂️

Set up network file sharing in your home and transfer files between PC and laptop at ease.

Songs 🎶

Podcast 🎙

Optimizing Workspace for Productivity, Focus, & Creativity - Huberman Lab

I started following Huberman’s advice of altering between sitting and standing throughout the day and can confirm it sure is better than just sitting or standing.

Memes/Edits from the last week 🐒

👉 Here 👈

How was your week?🧐

Coming up next week🥅

  • Next will be the start of a new chapter for the blogs.
  • The last few weeks have revolved around getting a new laptop, and now with me getting the laptop and using it for a week, the story arch is officially over and we move on to a different story (which I don’t have XD)
  • I guess I will talk about spring in the next week’s blog and how it’s a special time of the year or was that is. 😷

Quote from the week📃

One of the great benefits of reading books isn’t simply to give you ideas and information. Rather it’s to reinforce a mentality that often occurs at a subconscious level. The best books aren’t those that teach you facts, but those that subtly change your entire thinking patterns.

  • From the blog that I shared above.

I hope you liked my Laptop saga and how it actually made an impact on my life. This blog is slightly delayed, but I tried to write a lot more in this blog compared to my other blogs 😁🙏

See you again next week 🤸‍♂️

Thanks for reading this week’s blog.
I hope you found something of value from it.

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TEEAARBEE
WRITTEN BY
TEEAARBEE
CEO @ Octalancer 😎

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