A Taoist Approach to Productivity

Byjack

I’ve been meditating on productivity and I was curious as to a more taoist approach. I’ve come up with a couple of ideas:

  • Make things more empty
    • Pursue each task with the goal of emptiness
      • Focus on one thing at a time and do work to make everything feel empty
    • Look to make your to do list more empty
      • Delete things off the to do list
      • Schedule time sensitive things
      • Clear off small tasks immediately
      • Moving it to tomorrow
  • Reduce the size of mountains
    • Create simple steps to kick off each task
  • Seek balance
    • Seek out more risk when things are stale
    • Seek out more structure when things are too risky

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Sova Fanart 2: Class Unit 1 Day 2

Byjack

UNIT ONE: Sova Model Studies | Day 2 – Half Body

Today I was supposed to work on the upper body, but I found a really cool pose and decided to work on that instead. Unfortunately, it took a very long time to sketch out and I was also very exhausted from drawing until 4AM yesterday. I also had a lot of travel and work coming up so I was a bit stressed and overwhelmed.

I feel sometimes that I put too much on my plate for a challenge. I definitely felt overwhelmed coloring a drawing with this much detail.

This was the rough sketch:

And this was my attempt at more refined line art:

And for reference I used this pose:

Rental Car Nightmares

Byjack

A couple of weeks ago, I rented a car at National car rental. My sister returned it for me, and I got a shock in my email a few weeks later.

I immediate assumed this had to be a scam, or some sort of mistake. But the more I read, the more that I could tell this was actually legit. They had the right time, the right place and right company. They were charging me for $1295.81 for damages to the vehicle.

Looking at this deeper I noticed that the line items were VERY extensive, replaces door parts and handles. According to them, the car was HEAVILY damaged.

Looking at the pictures, I could barely see any of the damages they were indicating. It almost felt like they were offloading the cost of wear and tear on me.

Obviously I was LIVID.

  • I knew that there were some small marks on the car when I picked it up, but I never took any pictures.
  • I knew that no damage whatsoever happened when I had the car. I didn’t think any of this damage was on the car when I picked it up, but the damage in the photos are so subtle its hard for me to be sure.
  • I had rental insurance specifically for this car, but didn’t want to file a claim for something I didn’t do.
  • My sister had someone walk around the car and CONFIRM it was ok before she returned it. They parked it, and who knows what happened after that.
  • National has a service for their “Emerald Isle” premium members where you can pick up and drop off a car without ever seeing someone.
    • This now seemed like a LIABILITY not a PERK since now I can’t get them to acknowledge damage on the car.
    • I’m a new member and if they were going to be f*cking sticklers about this whole thing, they should have EXPLAINED it to me. I would have got them to sign off on EVERY F*CKING SCRATCH BEFORE AND AFTER returning the car.

So I went to chase down this problem:

  1. I called National Support, and they told me that I needed to call their damage unit. I asked them to make a note on my case so I wouldn’t have to repeat myself.
  2. After I called their damage unit, they redirected me to someone else.
  3. After getting to another person, they redirected me to someone else.
  4. The last person seemed to know what they were talking about, but I had repeat myself because she could not access any of the notes that National Support wrote down.

The last woman who oversaw the appeals to the damages told me the following information:

  • Generally its better if you take photos beforehand, however, in situations where the “damage” is so small it is easy to miss, you can appeal and they will dismiss it. They consider it human error.
  • She told me that my “damages” were definitely small enough that someone might have missed it before (so it may not be caused by me).
  • She agreed to waive all of the fees.

So my lessons learned from this whole experience:

  1. Always get rental car insurance just in case.
  2. Take a video when you pick up the car to prove the condition of the car beforehand. (It’s gonna be me in the parking lot being like “hey this is me in the parking lot picking up this car at X time” so they have proof I didn’t take the video at some other place or time)
  3. Take a video of the car when you return it.
  4. If they try to charge you for something really small and not visible in your videos, appeal, and they will probably dismiss it.
  5. It’s good to be a mix of legitimately angry (I was furious) but polite at the same time (I apologized in advance telling them I was very upset but I knew it wasn’t their fault personally). As a result, they were helpful and resolved my issue quickly.

A day later I got an email.

Focus & Slowing Down

Byjack

Most people think that focus is a heavy thing, it is an effort of concentration. But really focus is a light thing. It is something subtractive. The more things you remove, the more focused you are.

Removing distractions, removing goals, removing worries, removing clutter. All those things contribute to the feeling of focus.

The first step of any focus exercises is simply focusing on yourself. Forget your goals and tasks. Let go of everything. Forget figuring out what to let go of and what to focus on. Simply direct your attention to your feelings. Breathe. Nothing else matters. Slow down.

Slowing down is one of the quickest ways to access focus because speeding up is the mindset of the unfocused. It is the mindset of trying to juggle many things, to switch between many things at the same time.

Valorant 18: Strafe Clearing

Byjack

I’ve been killing it on the aim front. In deathmatch, I absolutely own.

I have been working on a new aiming mechanic, what I like to call the strafing clear. First, I went from silver all the way to gold simply off of working on my site clears. A few things I noted:

  • Practicing in custom matches is extreemly helpful
  • Way more helpful than DM flicks
  • Close angles call for very small clears, big angles are for big wide swings

I’ve been trying to pair this with the counter strafing mechanic and I think I figured out something.

Simply by paying attention to which side of the head you expect your crosshair to be on, you can get a much better strafing shot when you peek/clear an angle.

When you clear, you shoot like normal, if your shot is off, you adjust in the direction you need to.

I'm clearing CT, getting ready to clear the other side of container.
I see the Omen when I clear, I know my crosshair is on his left. So I need to adjust right.
I strafe right onto his head.
Instant headshot.

Let’s say you are clearing one angle, and an enemy pops up on your right. Your crosshair is far to the left of your target, so you quickly adjust, while strafing to the right to line up the perfect flick.

This is extremely useful because not only does this mean that your shots can be super accurate, it means you are moving a lot and making it extreemly hard to hit you (or atleast headshot you).

I think the coolest part, is when you strafe out in one direction, realize the enemy is to the other side of your crosshair so you strafe in the other direction to get the shot.

I also abuse the hit slow (how you freeze if you are hit) to get better accuracy and try to tap the enemy down if I am stopped midstrafe.

That being said, I think that there are a couple of different types of aiming mechanics in Valorant.

  1. Spray control – used for wall spams and smoke spams and long gun fights
  2. Strafing – used for clearing and gun fights out in the open
  3. Distance shooting – used for really far fights
  4. Holding – used to hold again specific peaks

Spray control

  • Got no real strat. Just try to watch the bullet tracers

Strafing

  • Watch the relationship between the crosshair and the head (whether left or right). Details are above

Distance Shooting

  • Use a lot of movement-based aiming for really accurate shots. Tap fire.

Holding

  • Prepare to duck behind cover, spray a few shots and duck back.

Goal Setting

Byjack

Today in the King’s council, part men’s group, part coaching session, we talked about setting goals.

I didn’t have an idea of what my goals are but a couple of visions came to mind:

  1. Coaching is a large part of my life. I saw about 3 coaching conversations with clients or potential clients every week.
  2. Youtube challenges being a large source of energy in life. I saw myself dedicating a little time every day to focus on an active challenge. This could be writing about the challenge, doing the challenge or shooting videos and thinking about the final video.
  3. I imagined feeling a lot more confident and in control of my challenges. I saw this as having successfully editing and posted a single challenge to youtube.
  4. I saw myself being outside and having a lot more energy. I would spend different parts of my day in different places.
  5. I saw my work-life come alive again. This meant posting posts on Linkedin every week, and engaging with people at work about my life outside of work.

I need to choose three main ones for the intention of the Kings Council.

I will choose the following goals:

  1. To have a powerful coaching conversation with three more people.
  2. To have one paying client.
  3. To have produced three challenge videos and posted them to youtube.