I have good days. Everybody has good days but I have days on which I feel twice as intelligent and at least 50% more energetic than normal. These are days when I can fix things and solve problems and learn new things and write well and make music and generally save the world. Sometimes I can do all of that without even needing coffee. They sometimes come far apart and sometimes crowd together. Sometimes I get a long string of consecutive good days.

Everybody has good days but I don’t know if everybody’s good days are as good. I don’t understand people who can do a consistent amount of anything everyday.

I’ve been working on Redwolf for two and a half years now. The thing about being one of three people running a company that’s slowly growing is that I need to manage too many different things. On good days I get an uninterrupted hour to work on something. On bad days its ten to fifteen minutes. What I’ve found is that I’m not good at switching between half a dozen things over the course of a day. I’m good at doing one thing for at least half a day, preferably four days at a stretch, and doing it well.

When doing too many things in a day, on good days I feel like I have got a lot of shit done and on bad days I feel like I’ve wasted a day. What’s missing is that I rarely feel like I’ve done something really well. And I’ve known that feeling. I used to be really good at solving computational puzzles and making algorithms for competitive games, and permutations and combinations, and writing good code. I’ve known that feeling and to not have it anymore is difficult to be happy living with.

I know that having started Redwolf and having got it till here is not mediocre; I meet enough people from time to time who think that what we’ve built is awesome. I know that it takes a lot of something even if I don’t know exactly what it is to continue doing what we do and keep doing more of it, but on most days I’m left feeling like the work I do is average, if not below average.

I’m tired of feeling mediocre. I’m done with it.

I can never write much where when I spend a lot of time with other people, being social. I guess when most things I want to say have been said to people there’s not much left to put up here. I’m growing increasingly bored of talking to real people.

It’s been four months since my birthday and (what seems to be) my last birthday gift arrived yesterday. After being alive for 26 years I can tell you that sometimes birthday gifts don’t arrive on your birthday. Since all my gifts are here I felt obligated to take a picture with all of them in it and update you on the state of my birthday wishlist.

Here are the gifts, in (approximate) order of arrival:-

1. The set of New York City cards from Surabhi: It made absolutely no sense that she gave me these before going to New York but it’s a sweet gift nonetheless.
2. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism: I gifted this to myself just in case the rest of you failed to deliver. I felt like I needed something hardcore. I’ve read about a third of it so far.
3. The electric guitar strings from Anil: No, the guitar itself is not a birthday gift. There’s no way I could include the strings in the picture without the guitar itself. As you can see I’m already putting these to use. The guitar is a loan from Arvind while he’s off studying to be a Business Administrator. I guess it would be a gift if he never took it back.
4. Dan Mangan’s Nice, Nice, Very Nice from Kitu: This really is a beautiful album. I suggest that you listen to it if you haven’t already.
5. The Portal 2 Companion Cube Ice Tray: This is another gift from me to me. I found this when looking for awesome birthday gift suggestions to give you people. When I found out that nobody was planning to buy it for me I decided that I must have it no matter what so I bought it for myself. It makes the friendliest weighted companion ice cubes you’ve ever seen.
6. The beautiful bottle of Mezcal from Apeksha: I have no idea what Mezcal is like but I’ll be finding out soon. It has a worm at the bottom of the bottle. I’m not yet sure how I feel about that.
7. Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down from Ann: I just started reading this yesterday and it seems quite fun. I can’t remember the last time I read a book written by a Brit.
8. 2 Packets of Vietnamese coffee from The Murd: Yummy. This completes the gift collection
9. There was the bottle of Cafe Patron that Lokur got me but there isn’t really anything left of that to take a picture of.
10. I’m terribly sorry if I forgot anything. Four months is too long a time for my ageing memory to accurately track.

I’m bad at multi-tasking. Unless I’ve had an overdose of coffee I would be much better off doing one thing at a time. And that’s only because if I have had an overdose of coffee there’s nothing you can do to constrain me to one activity short of putting me in a straitjacket. I’m bad at multi-tasking, and this is a difficult thing to say with surety because we seem to be a generation of people who think they were built to multitask. We’re surrounded by televisions and laptops and tablets and smartphones that scream out for our attention all the time.

I’m immersed in the internet. Trying to keep the internet out of my thought-space on a normal working day is almost as hard as trying to hold breath in my lungs. The last time I did something uninterrupted for more than an hour was probably years ago. I’m so deeply addicted to multi-tasking that I don’t even want to tell you how I plan to make it better right now. I only plan to conduct an experiment, to see how much of a difference not being distracted all the time can make. I plan to spend 2 hours off the grid everyday. Fine, we all know that’s over ambitious. I plan to spend 90 minutes 3 times a week, not counting Sunday, off the grid.

This can be anytime after 10pm, so I have to make sure that I finish work by 10pm on these days. And if I want more, then I can easily spend 4 to 6 hours off the grid on Sundays. This will be 90 minutes where I turn off the internet and my phone. No TV either, but I can use a computer if I want to, as long as it’s offline. I know I should ideally turn the computer off too, but computers have music and audio recording software and lessons on music theory, or whatever the latest thing I want to learn is.

I worry that I know almost for sure that I’m a less interesting person than I was three years ago. I’ll let you know how this goes.