Since last summer i put a series of repeating activities on my calendar, one for every day of the week. Their main effect is reminding me that my free time could be spent on personal prpjects that do not necessarily need to lead to something public.

It also encourages intentional boredom, as opposed to scrolling. I don't know if it improved my life a lot, i end up ignoring the suggested activities most of the times, but it helps me keeping that frame of mind, and it probably allowed me to put effort in a few things i care for.

i moved one of those 8x2 cube storage shelves from next to my front door (where it didn’t get used) to my bedroom where i use it for “worn but not dirty” clothes

pile of clothes on the floor instantly fixed because now putting clothes “away” is the same effort as dropping them on the floor

I started using a journal to write mini goals daily

Many years ago I learned to improve my electronics "hygiene" by being strict about how power is connected/transferred from household AC to my gadgets. One too many blown PSUs during thunderstorm season while on a deadline, I guess.

Don't use power strips, use high-end surge protectors. Cheap ones can still get absolutely rocked and can't be trusted. Always use high-end OEM charge blocks for phones and for laptop chargers, etc.

No good call to spend thousands on electronics then cheap out at the power-transfer part of the deal. Because that's where most damage is done. Pay for the good stuff now and it will more than pay for itself in the long term. Fewer blown PSUs/inverters/transformers. Longer lasting batteries.

I feel like electricity is less like magic fairies floating down wires and more like ropes tugging and rams crashing. I always liked to think about it that way.

I use a calendar. I know this sounds ridiculous to mention it, but I am continually astonished at how few people use it to remember tasks and events.

Making my phone's home screen functional. Calendar widget on the left, notes widget on the right, 3 rows of frequently-used apps on the bottom.

Went from having no calendar nor a quick place to jot notes, to having a severely overengineered planner with built-in notes that I didn't actually use and didn't fit in my pockets, to now finally having my day organized and my mind clear.

Also centralizing my random notes into a single ~/Documents/quicknotes plain text document for each of my machines with a taskbar shortcut pointing to it.

Cycling to work. I happen to have a nice and scenic route largely within parks and nature, so starting to use it improved my life quite a lot. It's a bit faster and more reliable than public transit, cheaper and a good exersice (30km there and back). And the scenery is way better than looking out of the window of a bus on an arterial highway.

I bought blackout curtains

Learning how to use AutoHotkey has been life-changing. There are many games I can't play due to muscle disease, but AHK expands the amount I can play.

I do things like combine a series of inputs into one, map keyboard inputs to hardware the game doesn't support, and even create mouse controls for games that don't have any. I also made some GUIs to help me write scripts with fewer inputs.

AHK has the concept of hotstrings which are really handy. For example, if I want to expand an abbreviation as I type, it's as simple as

::btw::by the way

It's not limited to text replacement. You could easily use it to launch programs or whatever you want.

Another thing I did was change the "hold space to continuously paint" functionality on wplace to be a toggle controlled with the mouse. Which allows me to participate much longer before my arms give out.

i use two monitors instead of one

learned keyboard shortcuts and made custom keybinds, installed vimfx on firefox and now i can web browse with one hand, never moving from the keyboard

When a workflow is bottlenecked I write it down in a list of things to solve in the future and continue with the rest of the work. And one regular schedule I make appointments with myself to solve bottlenecks and streamline things. Its really powerful. Instead of getting distracted during the day. Stay in flow, sort it later.

I use logseq for my notes.

for my dev work and workflow learning how to effectively use the terminal and use it for just about everything.

Once you figure it out and use a good terminal IDE using your computer just becomes faster. It's faster than using a GUI for everything. Utilizing the terminal and a tiling Window Manager also makes using the mouse obsolete. I don't use a mouse or touchpad for anything other than gaming now. using the mouse slows me down.

I can manage everything on my computer now and multiple programs with 2 terminal windows. or simply manage everything within DOOM Emacs.

that's another program I strongly suggest people check out and learn. DOOM Emacs is my go to IDE, Terminal, Email client, Git Manager, and File Manager. does all that and does it all well.