I was home schooled,* and occasionally I wish I had gone to public school, because I missed out on a lot of cultural touchstones, but then I'm reminded that kids are fucking horrible to other kids at any sign of differentness, and I was a fat, nerdy, gay bookworm, so, yeah, I'm good with the way things shook out. Haha
*Got a great education, not a religious nutjob, was not raised by right wing zealots.
If you're using excel anyway, you're probably not super worried about using non open source software. In which case, I find Google sheets to perfect. I use it for almost everything, because it's just easier to use Google's office suite for my school than it would be to use libre office, since everything backs up immediately across devices. I've never had any complaints about compatibility or format, and I'm literally being graded on my shit. I'd be preferable to use only open source software, from like a philosophical standpoint, but I also need things to function well in a world that expects automatic saving across devices and flawless compatibility to the arbitrary standard of Microsoft office
That's my favorite Charlemagne quote
Once it's back, I'll definitely do that. It's still not available as of yet.
I honestly don't know how I'd get it until it comes back. I can download through the podcast app, but until then, to my knowledge, it's completely lost anywhere other than archive.org Even the original blog it was posted to back in 2010 doesn't have the audiofiles anymore, just links to the archive.org
I use a podcast app, and apparently it pulls from there. I never knew before it went down. But I tried a bunch of different apps over the course of this, and they all pull from that.
I realize it's like the least important aspect of this, but yay! My podcast is back! I listen to Lawrence Manzo's Mahabharata podcast every night to go to sleep, and I haven't slept well since the attack
Dang, that would have been a cool one to see!
I'd love to see what those looked like back in the day. I love computer history, even if I don't fully understand it. Haha
I don't do anything in depth enough for those things to really impact me. I'm mostly a browser and Google docs person. Honestly, my biggest gripe with fedora isn't even a fedora problem, it's just that anytime I look up how to do something, it gives Debian based instructions and I get a little lost trying to figure out how to do it on fedora.
The small goals part isn't about setting goals you currently need in addition to what you're already doing. It's about setting goals you know you can reach with minimal or no effort. By doing that, you create a pattern of "winning," of achieving. It can help translate into other areas by tricking your brain into wanting to set more and more goals.
And career specifically is a tough one. Hygiene and food and shelter is all natural to us, but going out and working in an office or for a boss isn't the natural state of the human animal. It's something cultural we created for ourselves, and as such it can be a harder area to push yourself into in a lot of ways. It takes a different part of the brain, y'know?
Depression's a helluva drug, and it can make everything seem terribly difficult, but when it finds one area to really fuck you in, it can be so horrible to find any motivation. Especially in those areas that are outside of our evolutionary instincts. Have you considered speaking with a professional about medication? The meditation and the gamifying and such have helped me some, at the advice of a shrink, but medication is what got me through my early 20s. I'd be dead today without it.
Don't sabotage Slef. He's a good dude, who's had a hard life.
In all seriousness, though, I'd love an answer to this as well. It's hard once you find yourself in a cycle of procrastination. You get used to allowing yourself to put things off, and it makes it harder to get back into the habit of doing them right when you should.
A few things that help me:
Do it right now. Remember that you left that important thing in the car? Haul your ass out there and get it now, because it gets trampled under foot and lost. Eat a bowl of cereal? Wash the bowl now, not later. Later doesn't ever get here. There's always more later when you think later is going to be.
Meditation. Try it. If nothing else, you get a nice little break from whatever your normal routine is, which in itself can help you shake things up. 5 minutes of deep breathing and focus can do wonders. I'm not great at meditating, and sometimes I wonder if I'm even actually doing it, but 5 minutes of breathing is better than not doing 5 minutes of breathing.
Set really small goals. Like, ridiculously sillily small goals. Goals you'd set for a small child. It will feel silly, and childish, and you maybe will feel embarrassed about it, but "I will brush my teeth" or "I will clean that dish" or "I will wash my face"
They're things you're going to do anyway, but turning them into a goal gives you a sense of accomplishment, and allows you to get into a habit of completing goals. Gradually increase the goals, and gamify life. It makes you feel accomplished, gives you a sense of progression, and helps to set a pattern you can use going forward.
I hope these things help, or that you find something that does.
That's why I added all the stuff in the footnote. Haha. When I was a kid, we did home schooling because the area we were initially living had a lot of trouble of with knives and guns in the school, and then we started moving around so much it wasn't feasible to really get a decent education at a new school ever several months.
But the books that the state of Virginia told my mom to get ended up being a beka books, creationist nonsense. When my mom realized what they were she started getting me text books from library (we had settled down to only moving within the Hampton roads area by then). That indoctrination and shitty education is so rampant within homeschooling that even the state has given up on recommending decent material.
All that said, my mom (who, just to throw it out there because of comments downstream, did not finish highschool) was an amazing teacher. She instilled a love of learning in her kids, but honestly the most important thing I got from my education was learning how to learn. I feel like other kids learned how to pass tests, I learned how to absorb information and retain it, and how to actually find the information I need.
I also didn't take summers off, so I finished 12th at 14, which was, frankly, really fucking awesome. Lol. I used to get through an entire day's worth of course work before noon, and then I got to what we called free research. Which was basically "you can use the computer until 5pm, but it has to be at least tangentially educational." My God I read so much Wikipedia.
I wish I could be a proponent of homeschooling, because I know how fantastic it can be. But I can't, because the bad parents make it so, so much worse than anything that should be acceptable. We used to go to homeschool clubs, and even group teach (basically a class run by one of the parents with 15 or so kids, mostly as a way to get the other parents a few hours of free time), but had to stop because I would get in trouble with the other parents for saying things like "evolution" or on one occasion how condoms are a great way to prevent STDs. It sometimes felt like we were entirely alone in having a decent education in that system. We weren't, we met many, many other families with decent homeschooling techniques and actual science classes. But the ones who weren't? They were absolutely the loudest.