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Weeknote 19: Halloween, Productivity Stats, and Bubble Sounds for Insomnia

Halloween · This Week's Stats · State Machines · Bubble Sounds for Insomnia

Table of contents

Halloween

Darth Vade-whore

Mirror selfie in a Darth Vader helmet, black outfit, and pink boots.

This Darth Vader helmet is about 30 years old. I found it in my parents’ attic just in time to put together this Sexy Darth Vader costume for a Halloween party. The best pun I could come up with was Darth Vade-whore.

Pumpkin

Shlo, having grown up very Jew-y with the name Shlomo, had never carved a pumpkin or been to a pumpkin patch until this year. Well, I mainly carved this, but he picked the pumpkin at the patch!

Stats I’m tracking

This week I did:

Selfie showing electrodes taped to the forehead for sleep data collection.

Current Productivity Tools

I’m still obsessed with these extrinsic motivation tools.

  • Focusmate — where you schedule meetings to work on a task with an accountability buddy.
  • Beeminder — where your credit card is charged (more and more money) when you don’t complete your goal. I also use the public feature for public accountability.
  • Deepworktimer.io — a competitive leaderboard where you track your time doing deep work.

Coding: State machines

This week I learned about state machines as I refined some data models in my code base.

Bubble sounds: Insomnia Cure?

There are two places I fall asleep easily: the passenger seat of a car and the oxygen room at King Spa.

King Spa’s oxygen room has these bubbling wall sconces that I believe the oxygen is pumped through.

A blue-lit oxygen bubbler mounted on a wall.

These bubblers are mounted all around the room.

A wood-paneled oxygen room with rows of reclining seats and wall-mounted bubblers.

The oxygen room at King Spa makes me sleepy so fast, and I’m not sure why. I couldn’t find any data on oxygen being related to faster sleep onset. So I thought the bubble sounds might be responsible for my sleepiness.

I would love to have several of these bubble sconces surrounding me as I sleep. But in the meantime, I am using this bubbling water white noise.

I listen to it on White Noise Lite.

On Wednesday, I spent 3 hours trying to fall asleep. The next two nights, I used the bubble sounds and I went to sleep in a seemingly normal amount of time. Could be a coincidence, but I’m going to keep trying the bubble sounds.