Wydbot / Promotion - Tiktok - KFH - Gopchang - Irish Moss

I’ve spent too many days emerging fuzzy-brained from hours long binges at 4AM asking myself with deep regret:

What did I do with all my time?

Wydbot is a tool I built to help me answer that question.

The data for this past week. Note that I deployed the project on Friday (2/19) so we have just a few days of data in this graph. For subsequent weeks we should have full weeks of data.

How it works

Wydbot texts me through all of my waking hours (9AM - 3AM EST for a bit of leeway). Upon receiving that text I respond with what I’ve been doing for the past hour. This message is logged to a table and at the end of each week I take that data, run it through a data analysis tool and get a graph of how I spent all my hours the past week.

How I built it (skip if you don’t care about coding stuff)

I use AWS Lambda as the brains of the tool. I use a cron job via AWS Cloudwatch that calls this lambda function every waking hour. Upon being called the lambda function calls Twilio to text me asking what I’m doing. Once I respond to that message Twilio calls the lambda function via webhook integration which then logs my status to Airtable.

At the end of each week I import the CSV generated from Airtable into Jupyter notebook where I use Pandas to process and visualize the data. Note that for status entries that have multiple statuses I split the weight of the status by the number of statuses. E.g. “tiktok, eat” —> 0.5 hours tiktok and 0.5 hours eat

Hope this makes sense. If it still seems like gibberish to you and you’re interested in learning more details lmk.

Thoughts

I’m pretty happy with the way this turned out. I think it’s a big push towards the right direction. I know I generally waste a lot of time but now I know exactly how much time I waste and where I waste it.
The time tracking wasn’t too difficult after all. I thought it might be tedious to log an entry every hour but it ended up pretty easy. I like the text aspect of it. Makes me think about it less and it’s almost like I’m responding to a real friend actually asking me what I’m doing
It was interesting to segment out my hours like this again. Real throwback to my high school days where we’d have 1st period, 2nd period, etc.
- I wonder what this segmentation of time actually does. For the past few days, at least, I was definitely more cognizant of how each hour was going by knowing that I’d have to log my status for that hour.
- I’m generally a fan of segmenting time into meaningful intervals. Up until the end of college I’d lived my life this way. Four years each from middle school, high school, to college. Now that I’m post college I think the lack of segmentation has led to a sense of formlessness?
- To that end I wonder how effective it’d be to segment the rest of my life into meaningful intervals. E.g. for these four years I accomplish X, for these next five years I accomplish Y, etc.
We’ll see how I end up using the data to make changes to my life. Is it just a pretty graph or will I end up actually changing my habits? Will be interesting to see the graph after a month of data or so too

Besides all that stuff, here are this weeks highlights.

Promotion
I got promoted at work! I was out with Chynna at 5ive Spice (great pho) when my boss’s boss messaged me saying I got promoted. Feels great in the sense that I get more money. Feels weird in the sense of what’s next? Try to get promoted to the next level? Enjoy myself at my new level? Also feels kinda weird to get promoted when we’re all WFH. Would have been nice to go out for drinks or something.

Tiktok
I got really into tiktok this week. It all started when Sherry told me she’d been using tiktok and tried to catch me up on all these random tiktok trends. After that I downloaded the app and started as a lurker but—to my surprise—I also ended up making a few tiktoks myself (1, 2). Pretty fun for a while but I think I’ll tone it down a bit this upcoming week. There’s just way too much information out there and using tiktok is like being blasted in the face with information from a fire hose.

I feel old when I use tiktok. My first tiktok took almost an hour to make. Technology is making the generations go faster. Before a generation was maybe ~30 years apart. Now even people 10 years younger than me (I’m 26 now) seem almost un-relatable.

KFH
Met up with KFH, an old high school friend. We hadn’t been that close back in high school so I was a bit surprised to hear from him but it was great seeing him again. To think I hadn’t seen this dude for roughly 8 years is a little mind boggling. I’m sure some people drastically change but KFH was pretty much the same. A deeper voice and a new beard, sure, but personality wise he seemed pretty similar. We caught up over ramen at Ramen Danbo and talked about the people we used to know. I was astounded to hear that KFH is currently managing an artist and finalizing details to sign the artist with a label. He’s promised to give me tips on releasing my music in the future so I’m grateful for that :)

Gopchang Story
Went to Gopchang story with ToAnnie. The food was great. Super heavy but delicious.

Pretty much a platter of any kind of offal (large intestine, small intestine, tripe, etc.). Kinda disgusting to think about but hands down delicious to eat.

Does the idea of eating this disgust you?

If so, then grow up and join the rest of us in the new world. THIS IS WHAT WE EAT NOW.

Irish Moss
This was the first time in months(? years?) that I tried a drink I had absolutely zero context on. Picked up this Irish Moss drink from a Caribbean restaurant. Delicious flavor. Interesting texture. The flavor was peanut butter and condensed milk (I think). The texture was significantly goopier than I expected. The can instructed me to shake which I did but even then there were pockets of goop that hadn’t been well distributed. Overall fascinating drink that I’d try again.

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