Journal Entry #5: Out of Time

This is the fifth in a series of ruminations of who/what/where/why I currently am. You can find part one here. In honesty, the fourth one wasn’t that great, so I hid it behind the paywall, but I’m carrying the count onwards.

Lockdown has provided its share of changes, and one blessing their unique combination has accorded me is the ability to perfectly micro-manage my time.

I moved out of my parents house a little over eight months ago, just before the second wave of COVID-19 hit in Toronto. With the rise in cases, working in the office became fully optional once again, as did in-person gatherings with friends. There were no longer any obligations to leave the house, or even my bed, except to pick up groceries. Finally, the faults in my day lay not at the whims of other people, but in myself. And I could cut them all out.

I’ve always been a bit of an efficiency freak, neurotic about always doing something or spending my time with someone. Not that I was never idle, but my leisure time was also meticulously scheduled. That I now had nothing to do didn’t sit well with me, so I started meticulously organizing ways to keep myself busy. As ingenuous as that sounds, I knew that my mental min-max calculation optimizing for low effort and high stimulation would otherwise result in video games for most of my waking hours.

This blog is one of such productivity initiatives. I also organized a few weekly virtual movie viewings with friends to maintain social interaction and lend more value to…