On meditation...

If someone thinks meditation is a sacred activity that shouldn’t be perverted for productivity, they probably have the wrong definition of productivity. Somehow over recent years productivity has gotten a bad rap – it’s equivocated with optimizing your calendar and getting to inbox zero so you can chase a hollow definition of achievement and accumulate material things.

I think that making something through true alignment with your curiosities and creative energy is a beautiful thing. My curiosity has been my north star since day one on my own eighteen years ago, and meditation helps clear the clouds and light pollution from the night sky.

Why I’m meditating 300 hours

The power of meditation, I've heard, is multi-fold:

• Give your mind, "idle time" to let it do the processing that it's wired to do. We don't do rote labor enough, for example, where our minds used to have the time to process. In my own case, I used to have time driving, commuting etc which were often not filled with information feed like podcasts. Heck, these days, sometimes I sleep with podcasts on. No wonder, I am waking up tired.
• Another value is the ability to let your mind become more comfortable with "drone time." When you are not filling the time in your mind with dopaminergic activities, it trains it to be okay with the dullness and lets it focus inward.
• The inward focus also lets your mind channel the various lingering thoughts that you've not had a chance to process and hence allows you to also work out things that would otherwise be in the background but never get resolved.

I have restarted journaling in the morning. For the first half hour to an hour after waking up, I make my coffee and I write. I write thoughts that appear without any clear output that I am trying to do. To achieve this, I also decided to stop journaling into a computer.

I've gone back to good ol' paper and pen and I am realizing that with every passing day, there's more that I want to write and my muscle memory of writing is also coming back. I can write for longer and while the initial few mins, my mind is usually blank, the thoughts come gushing out - every. single. time.