Hello! You’re receiving this because you are subscribed to major updates/new posts on my site, jborichevskiy.com. That will remain the case. I’m also starting a newsletter! I’m sending out the first one here, but subsequent newsletters will be delivered through Substack at jborichevskiy.substack.com and will be free forever. Go subscribe there if you want more of these. I’ll probably move off of Substack eventually but it seems to be simplest solution right now.

A mere three weeks ago I triumphantly published a post on my home-baked productivity system describing how I’d successfully taken control of distractions in my life to get shit done. I was invincible. On top of the world. Roughly around the same time I started paying serious attention to updates about the virus. As the situation has escalated, so too has my obsession with following and thinking about it. A couple things:

Ever since getting onto the internet I’ve had a massive problem remaining productive and focused on the task at hand. This post describes the system I’m developing to help me cope with this sea of distractions, and I hope it might help you as well. Years of fighting myself with various productivity techniques, internet configurations, and browser extensions has led me to finally accept two opposing elements of my psychology:

For me, healthy living consists of sleeping well, a clean diet, frequent exercise, journaling, meditation, and socializing. Once in a while I let stress get the better of me and this causes my life to start spiraling and sliding out of control: deadlines start getting missed, emails pile up, I lose sight of my goals and life just gets overwhelming. It’s not pretty. Like any engineer, after such times in my life I do a post-mortem of what went wrong and time and time again I’ve found one or more of these crucial habits disappeared causing others to disappear in a chain reaction.