Category: Life Engineering

Step-by-step guide for waking up earlier

September 6, 2015 / / 0 Comments

8:00 AM: You wake up to a cacophony of harsh sounds emitting from your alarm. Still wishing you were back in the abyss of peaceful sleep, you crack your eyes open and let out a groan. Ten more minutes, and then you swear you’ll get up. You roll over, close your eyes, and then your eyes flicker open. It’s 12:00 PM, and half your day is gone.

Sleeping late and waking up late is a self-perpetuating loop. It’s excruciatingly difficult to break out of this terrible habit. So, to fix such an ingrained problem, you’re going to have tackle it with a multi-pronged approach:

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How to implement “gamification” into your life

August 30, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Gamification means fusing game mechanisms (e.g. lives, points, boss battles, competition rules, etc.) into an activity. Recently, gamification has been garnering more interest, especially in the educational realm. Khan Academy is famous for implementing game-based principles into its adaptive student curriculum, most notably for their point and badge system. During my time at ETS, many of the research divisions were focused on assimilating game mechanisms in their assessment technology. However, here’s another possible area of incorporating gamification: our lives.

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Commit with a log

July 12, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Until recently, I was never been one to stick to a consistent gym schedule. It’s difficult. Very few people have the motivation and willpower to constantly drag themselves to the gym, day after day. I’ve recently found a neat trick that helps me circumvent that: keeping a workout log. So far, this approach has worked: since June 15th, I have gone to the gym every single day (discounting two rest days, as recovery is crucial).

My workout log is a simple spreadsheet with the days of the year in one column, and the exercises that I’ve performed during said day. The benefits of a workout log are twofold: it allows me to keep track of my progress and provides a tremendous psychological boost to continue working out.

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