Relentlessly Simplify
Long down this road. More tips:<p>Routinizing your diet can bear more useful fruit than anything else. First prioritize ease of preparation, then taste and enjoyment, then health. Doing it in that order makes the subsequent steps a million times easier.<p>At work, I would go out to eat every day. They clean out the fridge every week and any time I&#x27;d start to get into a lunch routine, the fridge cleanout wrecked progress every time and I&#x27;d be back to eating out. Eventually I started bringing canned soups to work as they don&#x27;t need refrigeration. With lunch no longer being subject to the dictates of the fridge schedule, I can start prioritizing taste and enjoyment. I got oil, vinegar, hot sauce, salt and pepper grinders to add to the soups. Canned chicken adds a lot to them as well, and just enough calories so that I don&#x27;t get hungry again an hour later.<p>I have similar routines for dinner, which allows more flexibility due to a fridge I can control and a stove and utensils and all that. It&#x27;s still limited by the fact that I can&#x27;t cook every single night. So I compromise, building on frozen dinners, adding onions, peppers, seasonings, butter, protein, then saving half for the next day. Make things a little better each time while staying within your routine. Eventually it&#x27;s all muscle memory and your mind focuses on what&#x27;s new and it doesn&#x27;t feel like drudgery.<p>Health comes in after you&#x27;ve finished the heavy lifting on the first two. I started noticing little differences in how I feel after meals, and adjusting how much I eat each time. Pounds have been coming off effortlessly, but I don&#x27;t feel hungry very often unless I get off my routine for whatever reason.<p>Your computing life can be simplified the same way. Build on a foundation, in my case Ubuntu. Years ago I maintained a set of instructions, nowadays my scripts are reliable enough to get a brand new Ubuntu system from just installed to usable in some 10 minutes. I use them more often than you&#x27;d think.<p>You learn deeper concepts over time. I kept everything on Dropbox until I found Spacemacs and projectile, now I&#x27;m moving it all back to git. I used to keep complicated sync scripts in .bashrc, now I manually run a sync script as a matter of routine. Workflowy is giving way to orgmode. Ruby may never be dislodged from my life, but I&#x27;ve been adding in Crystal for use in keyboard macros. More power is slowly earned and the number of Sorcerer&#x27;s Apprentice ordeals dwindles.