Doing Things the Hard Way

After a long grueling semester, I am finally done with my sophomore year of college. I took several interesting classes and several that were not so interesting. I want to talk about the strategies I have found that help me learn best,, and hopefully this will help someone in a similar situation that I was in.

"Productivity"

Social media is full of "productivity hacks" that encourage distraction-free learning, sprints of deep focus, and other buzz words. I've tried most of these popular methods and none work. Eliminating distractions from my workspace is impossible as I can make anything a distraction. Side note, that is definitely where origami came from. I can make some mean folds. Going into a task with the expectation of working for 90 minutes straight completely discourages me from even starting. I know these work for some people, but they are just not for me.
I have always had trouble staying on task regardless of if I'm doing something important or not. This has led me to some interesting methods. I recently realized that the best way for me to remember to use my "planner" (more on that later) was to make it an inconvenience. Every night, I open it to the current page and sit it on top of my keyboard. That way, the next time I try to use my computer, I have to look at it. I even lay a pen in the middle of it so I cant just close it and put it away. Another good one is when I need to remember to pack something. I write down a list of items (or to-dos) in my notes app, screenshot, and make it my lock screen background. That way, whenever I get on my phone, I am reminded.
In terms of learning, this semester was a good one. I am studying computer science, which is a discipline much bigger than a four-year degree. There are thousands upon thousands of tools, frameworks, and other things you can learn. Two that I had in my to-learn list for years were Latex and Vim.

Vim

My process for learning these has caused me many hours of agony, but it was well worth it. I took a computer systems class this semester. In this class, we learned the C programming language. We were provided with a cute browser-based terminal to do out assignments. Why would I use that when I already have a machine running Linux? On the first day, I cracked open the terminal, blew the dust off my keyboard, and opened a Emacs. As soon as it loaded up, I remembered why I don't use Emacs or do any coding in the terminal. It stinks. I copied all the code from the board into Obsidian and decided to revisit it that evening.
I had tried Neovim before. Last year, I spent a lot of time trying to get it to look good and gave up after about a week. This time was different. I wanted it to work. This led me to "regular" Vim, which is about as barebones as it gets. The great thing about Vim is that you get to decide what features you have. Take Visual Studio Code, for example. Out of the box, it includes a file browser, window manager, and a whole host of useful features. Vim is an empty window. I liked that quite a lot. The first thing I added was a file browser (NerdTree). Then, I had to figure out how to switch back to my editor window. I left it like that for a while, until I got tired of manually tabbing new lines.
Long story short, over the course of the semester I added everything I needed to efficiently write C code. If you know anything about Vim, you know the amount of keyboard shortcuts there are. I had to memorize those too. This process of learning through necessity and by proxy learning through inconvenience really helped me stick with it. Some days I would try and do an assignment and get so irritated I couldn't do something, so I spent a little extra time to find a way to make it easier. This helped me get my work done quicker, get more acquainted with my machine, and caused me to constantly learn new things, even if they were as simple as switching windows.

LaTeX

I had to learn Latex pretty quickly. I think I first used it my junior year of highschool because I thought it would be cool to write some math notes using it, instead of using Microsoft Word's math tools. I gave up on that about 20 minutes after I started. I think I gave up because I didn't have to do it, I just wanted to. In my statistics class this semester, we had to write a project report. My professor briefly mentioned that it would be cool if someone did it in Latex. I took that as a personal challenge.
Rather than using something like OverLeaf, I spent a bit configuring my Vim plugins to support Latex, found a template, and got to work. Many late nights were spent messing with bibliography formatting, changing my header and footer heights to ensure perfect readability, and debugging my compiler. When I think back, all I remember is how much of a pain it was, but once I committed to doing the report that way, I had to follow through. In the end, we had a beautiful hand-typeset report that I could look at and say "wow, I made that happen." That is a great feeling. I am so glad that I found a way to force myself to learn Latex because I don't think I would have otherwise.

Conclusion

In conclusion, if you have trouble committing to things, staying on track, or just want to try something new, give this a shot. Trick your brain by forcing yourself to do something. Put the broom in front of the door so you have to sweep. Leave your laundry in your favorite chair so you have to wash it before you sit down. You may find it makes things easier in a weird way. I hope you enjoyed this long, rambling post. Stay sharp!