Becoming a master of time

First third of 2024: mastering my time, finishing first year of uni, and a hyperloop shift

May 14, 2024

I’m Julia! A first year at the University of Waterloo. I spend most of my time thinking about and building stuff for hyperloops which are basically floating trains that travel 1000+ kph in vacuum tubes. 🤯 (I think so too!)

Welcome to A Nerd’s Shower Thoughts! A personal newsletter about the adventures of a teen green tech researcher, me! Each month I discuss 3 life things I learned in: A quote, what I’m working on now, and a question for you to think about.

This newsletter will cover some of the exciting things I did in the first third of 2024. Some of those are:

Quotes I fell in love with

So, a quote I've been thinking about a lot recently is:

"don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it."

Charles Bukowski

This blurb is from one of his poems, so you want to be a writer?

Bukowski basically spent his entire life chasing and living this feeling. A lot of times it got him sick, jailed, and overall depressed in many ways. He wrote exactly what he thought all the time, and didn’t stick around for anything he didn’t care about which was the main thing that made him so popular and controversial. The blurb is a common theme written in a lot of his work: saying what you want to say, with your real emotions and not just what is generally acceptable by governments, news chains or social media.

Overall a lot of his work is misinterpreted. But based on his experiences while writing it my interpretation is that he is not saying don’t do anything you don’t want to do because then you will be doing nothing worth living for. Instead, he is saying do not spend your life doing the things you hate without leaving time for what you love. If you want something or are passionate about it you will put in the work to do it. If you don’t, there is just a part of you that doesn’t want it. Still, nothing you choose to do will always come out of you like a rocket, some will and some won’t

**I also started reading his official biography so next newsletter I’ll update how it changes my view of myself, him, and the rest of the world.

My second semester uni & finishing my first year of engineering

For the past few months, a lot of university (lectures and constant assignments) killed the sun in my gut. 💀 So, most of my second semester was me trying not to be a dead fish.

By dead fish, I mean from the saying “Only dead fish go with the flow.”

University is filled with way more dead fish than I was expecting it to be, most people don’t even know why they are in university (which is fine, but I don’t think I could live that way). But it makes it much harder than I thought it would be to connect with people, and over time the “dead fish mindset” became so common it got contagious and at a few points throughout the term, I caught it myself.

What I mean is that I started striving and wanting for less, the bare minimum, which isn’t like me at all. Many of my very ambitious friends even warned me of this but my stubborn self thought I could push through. But, no matter how strong you think your sense of self is, it will shift depending on who you surround yourself with. Hence why you are an average of who you surround yourself with.

Overall a combination of being oblivious to my social habits, living in a new place and wanting some friends, and being drained from hours of homework/assignments made me not me anymore. Going forward I will definitely be more cautious of who I hang out with and when.

Everything else I learned in 1st year

A big chunk of the past 4 months was me thinking about how to get the most out of my work. I've read about optimizing flow states and one's attention span, time blocking, eating the frog first (doing the hardest task on your to-do list first), minimizing time between transition states (so working right when you wake up), etc.

One idea I've found is a powerful combination for a person is that one should love the work they are doing, love the outcome more, but fear the consequence of not having the outcome most.

When you hate most of the work you do, it takes too much discipline and willpower for too long, like constantly hitting your head on a brick wall, so people quit. A lot. When you don’t have a clear outcome or know what you want, it feels like you are moving through life mindlessly like a zombie, aka dead fish, and people get tired of that too.

But even with both of these bad situations, if you fear the consequences enough, you will do what you have to no matter what.

Starting on my journey to master time

Day 1 of 2024, I told myself I had no choice but to become the best at time management. I decided I was going to master time. I wanted to be the best I’ve ever been at managing time: my school work and all the projects that weave their way into my life, work and how I treated myself between when I was on the deep grind to build something, just getting started in a new space of research, or resting.

For the following 4 months, I was going to take on…

6 university courses and every single one of them had insane amounts of content and calculations (multivar. calculus, programming, 2 chemistry and 2 physics courses).
Build & ship 2 more iterations of hyperloop motors and get >1 inch of levitation (currently at <6mm) and figure out every problem preventing hyperloop companies from building us a hyperloop already
Secure myself a summer internship
Build a biosensor that could detect kidney disease earlier than anything before just from a person's sweat pH
10x the expansion of my network in public & advanced transportation (generally, the mobility sector)
The second year, activate program, at TKS. This involved several case studies for preparation and group projects that took a massive amount of time, research and calculations
Still take time for myself to read and be creative

I had never attempted this much from myself before for this long, only for relatively short times (maximum 4 weeks, nowhere close to 4 months).

I needed a massive reform if I wanted to do all this.

I used to think being a polymath and doing a bunch of things really well was about learning how to balance your time and your life right. These past 4 months, I shattered that very wrong assumption and threw it down the drain.

You cannot “balance” everything going on in your life. That’s like saying eating everything on your dinner plate all at the same time.

Here's what I've learned and what I have yet to learn on my journey to master time management and productivity

Prioritization (& as a result productivity) happens in your mind, not on your calendar. How you think about what is truly important in your life is how you spend your day, which compounds into how you spend your life.
You can have the fanciest life-management system in the world, but if you can't say your top 2-3 priorities at the moment without looking at your to-dos, you are not focused on your goals + wasting your time.
Time management is lonely, like any new part of growth. You won’t always get to do what you want, but if you want to improve yourself and excel in your potential you must do some things you don’t like of parts you do, like you love them to get to parts you love.

Things I'm practicing:

Discipline for things I really don’t want to do → I don’t have time for not wanting to do something anymore, which is the perfect time to practice it.
Expanding my attention span → The easiest way to create an unfulfilling life is to destroy your attention span - Afraj Gill
Practicing mindfulness & focus in the morning to centre my mind & ideas for the rest of the day. And avoid becoming a zombie who just does the things she has to, without questioning why → a horrible uni habit I built

Making the switch from building fast motors to making sure they don’t blow up

As a student activating at TKS I've spent most of the year trying to teach myself about how public, personal and micro transportation work from a background of biological, sustainable energy production. Complete opposite sides of the science spectrum.

Around February I finally started getting into contact with hyperloop motor engineers who basically told me that my circle motors would do more harm than good.

So I scrapped that idea and started looking at other gaps hindering the development of hyperloop tech. The majority were very technical research problems that would take me years of research and testing to figure out. In April, I decided I didn’t want to tie myself to one thing now that would likely take me 10+ years to figure out. So I went a full 180 deg and dove into every other aspect of hyperloops.

Two interesting problems I found were:

How do we control/maintain hundreds of kilometres of tubes at constant low-vacuum air pressure and make sure they don’t explode/depressurize if broken?
What do we do to make sure people and cargo riding survive when something goes wrong like the tube exploding?

I chose the latter so now I’m trying to understand the safety/certification gaps preventing hyperloop’s full development and commercialization.

You can have great tech but if there are no safety guidelines in place there is no way it will scale and this has been a huge hurdle repeated through tech history with the advent of drones, planes, and most recently + still being held back is commercial space flight.

But for hyperloops, there is no single existing category to focus efforts:

It’s a type of train so existing rail safety guidelines are a must
It moves like a plane & spacecraft at crazy high speeds and in a low vacuum so space and plane guidelines should be involved too which are partly still in the making.
Then there are the new parts that no one knows what to do with: autonomous driving, vacuum tubes, and high speed on land.

Other fun things that happened

Winter term engineering dance
TKS Problems Incentivized Economically (PIE) Challenge → with
Keerthana
,
Mia Aiyana
, and Shrila Esturi we made a drone seeding and carbon credit tracking system for improving reforestry efforts, here’s our deck
Memo on the project
Socratica & Velocity! After a whole year of not knowing they existed, I finally weaved myself into both communities in the last few weeks before exams
My temporary website is finally up! I coded it entirely in July of last year and have been searching for domains and then the chaos of first-year engineering happened, but it’s finally up and now I am coding it on GitHub.

Something to think about 🧠

Are hunting antelope or mice?

It’s from a recent Tim Ferris post about the American politician, Newt Gingrich. Who told a story of a lion which is perfectly capable of capturing and eating field mice. But it’s so small that the energy to catch it is more than eating the mouse itself. So, if the lion spends its day to weeks hunting mice would starve. A lion needs something bigger. Antelope takes more energy to catch but when captured, is big enough for a feast. So, the lion can live a longer life eating antelope.

For you, are you spending your time exhausting energy catching mice which gives you a rewarding feeling short term, but to die quicker? Or antelope that will sustain you later on? The point is to reflect on what you wanted from your day and the past few weeks asking: “Did I spend today chasing mice or hunting antelope?”

What’s going on in the future?

In May & for the next few months I’ve got to get through my first co-op job for university, build a hyperloop safety guideline, design a sweat pH biosensor with Ivan Osaretin, and continue my journey on mastering my time.

Interning at one of the world's rubber leaders

I’m interning at AirBoss this summer + finally getting paid for lab work instead of school credits! It wasn’t initially my top choice (don’t think I will ever get used to the smell of burning rubber) but it’s still really fun to work here. Plus, everyone here is a rubber nerd so it’s always entertaining hearing people talk about random rubber facts and seeing all the weird stuff it does.

Intern at a hyperloop company

I spent a huge amount of time researching everything about every hyperloop company to learn their mistakes and crafting great emails to get the internship of my dreams, one I’d spend hours thinking about sitting on the 3rd floor of the University of Waterloo DC building (didn’t get it YET).
I wanted to work at a hyperloop startup. Even though I definitely was naive about the timing that would take and how complex it is to learn enough about an infant industry, I’m still on my mission to do that.

Bring pH sweat sensors into the physical world

The hardest part of a project like this is uncovering the validated science for how our sensor will work. A big setback right now is figuring out how we can get enough sweat from the arms or fingers so we can accurately test and create some proof of the correlation between pH imbalance, diabetes, high blood pressure, and chronic kidney disease (CKD).

Last 2 months as a student at TKS

Pushing all in on building something great and useful for hyperloop safety

A Nerd’s Shower Thoughts