Apples with bananas, butter with cheese
#131 - train rides up and down the country
Hi there,
I’ve just got back from my first trip back home. T’was a good chance to spend time with family, get my sister in shape for her December mocks and also to pause and reflect after finishing my first module.
The week gone was full of finance events on campus, as well as rounding off our introduction module and a test on Friday. Now, the real fun begins tomorrow - 5 modules concurrently!
Highlight of the week: going to Kings Cross St Pancras to meet a friend; we’ve been chatting for over a year so it was lovely to meet him in person for the first time. And we were lucky with how gorgeous the sunset was.
Going home after 4 weeks has offered a perfect time to think back on my first month away at university, and think about the WWWs and EBIs. For those who didn’t have the privilege of being introduced to these in Year 7 English, that’s ‘What Went Well’s and ‘Even Better If’s. Our next few posts will be inspired by insights from this reflection.
One principle I have used well and one which I can use even more is batching. I can’t remember where I was first introduced to this, but it is the simple idea of doing similar tasks together. Tim Ferriss, whose book is credited with popularising the term (video here), gives the example of laundry and how you wouldn't put your socks to wash each time a dirty pair collects.
Let me give a few examples of where I’ve utilised the concept, a couple of areas where I can do more and then some limitations.
I. Replying to messages - this has been a godsend since Year 13. I reply to messages in the morning on my commute (slightly less frequently when you’re packed like sardines on the tube 😭) and later when I get home, for most of my messages.
Of course, there are messages which need replying to semi-urgently, but I think it is useful to treat messages as though it’s a letter box, checking them at certain times instead of throughout the day. We should be doing this for emails, as much as possible, if we can - I should be doing this more with my Imperial Outlook.
II. Groceries and meal planning - this is a new addition to my life that I’m loving, with control over my ingredients and cooking. Knowing what I’m going to eat for the week means I have 1 less (big) thing to worry about when I get home in the evenings.
Similarly, it means I get my shopping done in one fell swoop (there’s an English reference for the diehard Macbeth fans), benefitting from the lower cost of buying things in larger quantities.
III. Effective weekends - inspired by answers to “How do you spend your university weekends?” in my first weekend, I’m trialling spending Saturday as a ‘work day’ - catching up on Maths, career stuff, tutoring - and Sunday as a ‘relax day’ - cricket training, cooking, blog posts (although, don’t get me wrong, I’m toiling hard to produce the finest writing you’ve ever seen, for you, my valued reader) and some TV.
lV. Meal prepping - I have found a strong love for cooking. Perhaps it is the innate creator in me, which writes the blog posts and plays the songs, coming out in the form of culinary art. Unfortunately (as I wrote about last time), it takes a long time to properly cook and time is one of our most precious commodities, which I realise I need to be spending better.
Enter batch cooking/meal prepping, and pick the term you like. The large shopping needs to be accompanied by preparing plenty of meals to last me the week, and then sticking them in the fridge and freezer respectively.
V. Staying in touch with people - save the best idea to last. This is an original one, which you are more than welcome to nab. We all have more contacts on our phones than attention to remember who we haven’t contacted in a while.
A strategy I briefly tried in the summer and might make habitual is to randomly pick a letter in the alphabet1 and reach out to all the people I haven’t chatted to in a while from that list, being careful to include LinkedIn and Instagram, as well as WhatsApp of course.
“But Adi, surely that’s a lot of people to get back to?” I like to think of this as scattering seeds: some plants will grow and some won’t. If we were to liken this to plants, this is more like watering some plants which haven’t had nourishment in a while. Some of them might be revived and thrive, but others will inevitably wither.
There’s my list of examples. The main benefits of batching are the benefits of doing things together.
You lose the setup and pack down time/energy costs, reducing the number of courses the activity takes (from last week!). You’re in position, ready to rumble rather than turning off and then getting ready to go again another time.
You reduce the mental cost of task switching, which is purportedly up to 23 minutes.
To finish off, there are a few limitations to batching:
Boredom/fatigue - economists might attribute this to similar effects as specialisation/division of labour. I often find them I am ‘done’ with messages after about 20 minutes (depends on my energy levels - which is a good point, adapt when you batch things to match your energy levels)
Practicality - ideally, I would batch my dishes to do in the evening, but I can’t in a shared kitchen.
It might cause delays in making plans and could lead to missing things hence.
The remedy to this is to experiment to find the right frequency of batching that works for each task. Doing things in blocks makes planning life easier, gives you more time to focus on the job at hand free from disruption and, finally, it makes life a whole lot easier to manage.
I’ve not done a monthly reflection before, but given how useful this was, I might do one from hereon (or perhaps it was a unique case of a first month at uni). Here’s our weekly set of launchpads for your exploration.
Podcast of the week🎙️
Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal: You're Not Lazy: How To Learn Anything Faster - Cliff Weitzman, Founder of Speechify
I re-listened to part of this on the train home, specifically the parts about networking and how Cliff made so many unique connections in his first year at university
What I’m grateful for this week 🙏
My new German teacher for being kind enough to let me miss a German class, so I could go home - I will be back on it!
Quote of the week 💬
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Kurt Vonnegut
The clocks have gone back, signalling the arrival of winter. Brace yourselves for the month ahead before we embrace the jollities of Christmas. Till then, have a great Halloween and Diwali - a double celebration on Thursday!
Adi
You might do this with a random number generator from 1 to 26.