when i decided to wipe my drives clean and dual boot windows and linux, i only kept windows (technically atlasos) as an option because i had programs i needed to use that did not work on linux. i made the deliberate choice to not install zen browser, instead using librewolf as my default browser which i set to delete all my browsing data & cookies upon closing. i also didn't install any video games on my windows drive, only having steam to use wallpaper engine (which doesn't work on linux).
i thought that would disincentivize me from using windows because i'd make the connection in my head that linux is where all the fun is... but recently i've been finding myself booting to windows more often and staying on it for longer.
i should've seen that coming, honestly. i'm not the kind of person who cares that much about video games these days, so the fact that my osu installation is on linux barely affects me. i'm also trying to fix my sleep schedule & make better use of my time, so when i spend hours on linux just binging youtube videos or saving recommended videos to "watch later" i almost feel guilty. maybe it's the "hustle grindset" culture that i internalized from years of watching self-improvement videos while doing next to none of that, but i like to think that i'm taking what i've learned over the years and applying it in ways that work best for me.
but what have i been up to recently that would motivate me to stick to windows? aside from fixing my sleep schedule by going to bed at 9:30 and waking up at 7 am (usually i'd randomly wake up at 3-4 am then try to go to back to sleep), i finally started using a task management app again.
i used to arrogantly believe that i didn't need one because i can keep track of everything in my head, or that it wouldn't work out anyway cuz i have autism/adhd (the latter of which i have yet to get diagnosed for), but late last year i began to make a real effort to use one – lunatask. i made an account at some point in early/mid 2025 when i saw a video about it, abandoned it after spending approximately 0 minutes with it, then picked it back up sometime in november to try to make a study schedule.
it worked for a couple weeks. unfortunately, the way i lived my life at the time did not make it easy to time block or accomplish anything during the day. if anything, it worked in spite of everything else i was doing to myself.
the first problem was owc. i was committed to watching all the important matches live, but the 2 teams playing in finals & grand finals just so happened to be poland and the united states, which "forced" me to stay up late at night to watch the matches. this was the beginning of the end because i wouldn't return to a normal sleep schedule for months afterwards.
i realized just how much "things" i could get done if i just stayed awake instead of sleeping. i wanted to believe that this is a worthy sacrifice & it would benefit me in the long run. so even after owc 2025 ended, i spent the next week or 2 refusing to sleep or eat or do anything else just so i could complete a paint-by-numbers project as quickly as possible (for highly specific and personal reasons). and even after i was done with that i still found new ways to convince myself to stay up late instead of sleeping.
i even had a "study" habit that i pretty much quit after mid-january or so, because for some reason i decided to go from barely glancing at a textbook to forcing myself to do practice problems for 90 minutes straight without spending any time at all slowly building up a studying habit. admittedly it was effective in what i wanted to achieve (i think), and wearing a femboy outfit did make grinding linear algebra problems at 3 am slightly less painful, but it was still insanely taxing mentally and physically. just typing it out here is making me relive the experience.
i had a brief moment where my family and i went on vacation and i "fixed" my sleep schedule for a week or so right after i started using pokemon sleep, but not long after we got back home i found out that its sleep tracker is way easier to cheat than sleep cycle's tracker, and so back to the gutter my sleep schedule went.
at some point in january i soft quit lunatask and went back to writing down half of my tasks in my daily notes & keeping the other half in my head, which was about as effective as you'd expect. but after i pretty much gave up on school, i went back to using lunatask, but only to track the 2 habits i was still willing to do – reading and drawing. after setting minimum time requirements didn't work i lowered the bar until doing any amount of reading or drawing counts towards the habit, and even then i still saw long stretches of days where i didn't do either.
meanwhile all the other tasks i wrote down kept haunting me every time i booted up my computer. i'd see the number to the left of the checkbox tick up by one as it sinks in that i haven't had a proper workout in weeks. i'd contemplate whether to finally do it only to tell myself that it's been so long since i last did that it would be weird to restart now, so i'm gonna start tomorrow. then comes tomorrow and the same thing would happen, again and again until i found a new pet hobby to do so i didn't have to think about it anymore.
i finally "quit" lunatask when i made the decision to daily drive linux, because my first mission when setting up my new workspace was to find alternatives for electron-based apps. the months i went without getting proper sleep was making me internalize tech nerds' highly specific complaints about bloat, so off i went to install super productivity. coincidentally, they just released the app on ios a week before that. i've tried to use it a couple times before but also had to drop it because it didn't have an ios release.
so this is it, right? i've found the ideal linux distro, i've found the perfect task management app, and anything else i need can be done with the help of an emulator. surely things can only go up from here-
except no i ran into a whole bunch of issues, some of which i've documented on my past blog entries. what i didn't mention was that super productivity was a weird, buggy piece of shit that could only do the absolute bare minimum. sometimes subtasks would duplicate for no reason. other times deadlines would reset no matter how many times i change them. set a slightly complicated repeating schedule and the program would shit itself. it was the only half-decent open source task management app, and it still sucked ass.
1 drive-wipe-into-dual-boot-setup-into-daily-driving-linux-on-my-laptop later, and while i was installing hyprland and caelestia on my laptop, i did some extra research on the shell's special workspaces, and found out that it had a special workspace for task management apps with one as the recognized default – todoist. i've heard of it before but never used it cuz i just assumed that anything mainstream is also a data harvester. the lack of sleep kicked into gear again, and this time i decided to bite the bullet and install it. and i actually kinda liked it.
admittedly there's nothing about it that makes it stand out from any of the dozen other task management apps i've tried in the past. if anything this one lacked a habit tracker, but instead of dropping it immediately i made 2 tasks that repeated daily and tagged them "habits". and at the same time mom was begging me to start going to sleep properly again, so i also went to sleep at 9:30 pm instead of sleeping during the day and waking up late at night.
i've only been using todoist for a few days, but something weird about my pc linux setup is that installing todoist doesn't automatically create a desktop file for me to access with the launcher, which is really annoying cuz my laptop managed to install it just fine. i think it had something to do with the snap error i got, but the forums didn't help at all. installing on windows went perfectly though, so that's also part of the reason why i prefer to stay on windows.
this blog entry kinda went off the rails, didn't it? it's past my bedtime as of writing this (10:20 pm) and i think my brain is slowly giving out. i still have more i want to write about but i'd have to leave it for tomorrow.