malvasia bianca

It’s time for another update on how I want to be spending my time; the prior list is still pretty good, but it needs some tweaks.

Just in terms of what could go on the list: part of me thinks that I should replace “read more” by “consume art more” (which would include playing games, listening to music, and watching movies/TV), but actually books do deserve a special place there. And clearly games are important to me, too. So probably that’s three separate potential items, with listening to music and watching movies/TV not being important enough to include on the list. (I should also replace “Get back to playing musical instruments” with “make music”, because singing is one possibility to include there.)

Also, even when I created the list, I was spending a noticeable amount of time studying Japanese; not a huge amount of time, but I was doing Duolingo every day and reading Japanese books sometimes. I stopped doing Duolingo Japanese a few months after hitting level 100, but I’m still reading Japanese books sometimes, and I recently started doing Korean Duolingo. So I should probably throw learning languages on the list.

And then there’s the question of my fatigue levels. That affects how much time I have available, but it doesn’t fit on my list. But, to the extent that I’m doing things that try to improve my health, that probably does belong on the list; in particular, for much of the last year, I was seeing a new TCM doctor two or three times a weak, and that certainly ate into my time.

So, if I put that all together, here’s the list of candidate items to at least consider spending time on:

• Nei Gong
• Tai Chi
• Programming
• Make music
• Read more
• Play more games
• Chill out
• Learn languages
• Take care of my health

(Unordered and without a cutoff line; those will come at the end of this post.)

 

Going down the list: I think I’m spending too much time on internal arts (Nei Gong / Tai Chi). I don’t want to stop doing them: I still think they’re interesting, I think I’m getting something out of them, and I think I’m getting better at them. But I’m not getting as much out of them as I’d like or improving as quickly as I’d like, and they’re not exciting me as much as I’d like. So they don’t deserve to take up both of the top two slots.

A little over two years ago, I signed up for a two and a half year “Foundations of Nei Gong” course; so I’ve been going to weekend workshops several times a year. That’s almost over (the last of those weekends is in November), but it’s not over yet, and I want to keep my practice levels high so I can get as much as possible out of that course. So I think, for now, I should keep Nei Gong high on the list but dial down my Tai Chi. Maybe I’ll flip that next year, though; in particular, a local teacher I know and respect might be offering a Push Hands course that I’d want to spend time focusing on.

At any rate, for now: no Tai Chi on Tuesday mornings, just Thursday mornings and weekends. And while I’ll continue to default to doing Tai Chi on Saturdays / Sundays, I won’t worry or feel bad if I feel like doing something else. But I’ll continue to target two hours of Nei Gong every weekday; weekends are more flexible, maybe an hour.

 

Next on the list is programming. I’ve been enjoying spending time working on an app, and I’ve been enjoying playing around with what programming means in an LLM world. And it felt good when I was getting out a new version to testers every week, whereas it’s been more frustrating recently when I’ve had weeks when I’ve made little or no progress on it. (And also, I’d like to get that app actually released and move on to a different programming project!)

So I want to spend more time on programming: not necessarily more time than I had been in my good weeks, just to have more good programming weeks.

 

Now the art-related items on the list. Health-related reasons gave me an excuse to start singing; and honestly it was kind of shocking how bad I’d gotten. (Not that I was ever a good singer, but I’d stopped being able to carry a tune; that’s not good.) So I’ve been singing (with the help of Rock Band 4) a few times a week; that’s been good, I want to keep it up.

And listening to those songs has made me want to play guitar: I imagine what that would feel like on my fingers, and it feels good. Not something I’m going to spend time on right now, though.

I’ve recently been reading books more; in particularly, partly inspired by Kirk Hamilton’s new podcast, I’ve been going through an unusual amount of compulsively readable books this month, and I like that feeling. (I haven’t checked, but I assume it’s been quite a while since I’ve read ten books in a month.)

As to games, I think I’m happy with my current routine: play games on Monday evening, Wednesday evening, and Sunday afternoons, but don’t let them them randomly eat into my life at other times. Though I also go to a board game meetup once a month, and there’s a friend that I’ve started playing games with once every month or so; and recently I’ve been going through Big Walk with another group of friends.

So I guess games are entering into my life more than I’d thought they were? (And that’s one area where dialing down Tai Chi helps.) And I’m entirely happy with that; in particular, the extra game-related stuff that I’m doing has me spending time with other people more often, which is healthy.

 

The next item, chilling out, is important for two different reasons. One is that, no matter how long a list I make, there will always be important stuff that doesn’t fit on it: maybe they’re occasional ongoing maintenance items, maybe they’re surprises that come up that I have to deal with. So I don’t want to overschedule myself, I don’t want to feel resentful or stressed when things like that pop up, and I also don’t want them to fall on the floor.

And the other reason to chill out is that it’s good to spend time doing what you enjoy and are drawn to do; and that can change from day to day or week to week. So sure, maybe normally I program on Monday mornings; but if I feel like finishing the book that I’d been reading in bed the previous night, that’s okay, even good! There’s a risk in following my short-term desires, because sometimes there’s stuff that I want to do when I step back and think about my life but that doesn’t always feel great in the moment; but if I have two things that I both enjoy doing and think are good things for me to do, then listening to whichever one I want to do at any given movement is healthy.

 

I spent a decent amount of time working on my Japanese in 2025 and early 2026, and I’m glad I did; it was interesting, I can point at some concrete things that it helped with, and I suspect it made our trip to Japan in May a little smoother. (Maybe not, our previous trip was fine too.) I haven’t been spending nearly as much time on it recently, though, just occasionally reading a bit of The Twelve Kingdoms over lunch. And that feels right; I should try to be serious about making sure my understanding of the sentence grammar is solid when reading instead of going too quickly to the translation, but the amount of time I’m spending on Japanese feels fine.

More recently, we’ve been watching and quite enjoying some Korean dramas, and it’s been bothering me to not understand the language at all and not even to be able to sound out the writing. So I fired up my Duolingo subscription again and started on the Korean course.

Honestly, that was a mistake? I definitely should not have signed up for the year subscription, but I don’t want sunk costs to keep me going. Having said that, I haven’t quite stopped yet: I want to get a little better at decoding the writing system (and at telling sounds apart when listening to them and improving my accent), and I want to learn more of the basic grammar. So I’ll stick with Duolingo for maybe a couple more months, and at some point I’ll go through a basic textbook, but then I’ll stop.

 

I’ve been trying to reduce my fatigue levels for years; and sometimes the experiments involved in that take time. For seven months or so from the end of last year through the beginning of this year, I was seeing a different (and unusual) acupuncturist multiple times a week; more recently, I’ve been spending time on breathing exercises every morning. (And over the last month I’ve been spending a decent amount of time doing back-related work every day, but that fits into my pre-existing Nei Gong time.)

I won’t say that I regret doing either of those; it’s actually even possible that one or both of them have led to ongoing benefits, though the effects haven’t been clear enough for me to be sure, but even if they haven’t, sometimes experiments will lead to negative results. But also they both ate into my time in noticeable ways; I’m glad that I stopped them when I did. Fortunately, my only current experiment (running a dehumidifier, in an attempt to reduce dust mite levels) only takes up a negligible amount of time, and I don’t have any current plans for other experiments in this area. (Hmm, I guess singing relates to this, but I’m putting that in a different bucket.) So, for now, I can leave this off of the list of things that I want to spend my time on.

 

That’s a long list! And I actually am spending time on most of the things on it. That could be a sign that I’m doing too much; but a lot of it is stuff that I both actively enjoy doing and feel good about doing, so it doesn’t feel like I’m doing too much. (I enjoy my current programming project! I like reading books! I’m glad I’ve started singing recently! And I don’t feel like I’m regularly giving any of those short shrift.)

So I would be okay with the list being long. But actually I think that a long list would end up aiming at the wrong goal. The main point of lists like this is to help make hard tradeoffs: to make sure that I’m spending enough time on stuff that’s most important to me, and to help make hard tradeoffs in service of that.

 

What that all adds up to is that I think that, right now, the correct list for me has three items:

1. Nei Gong
2. Unscheduled time
3. Tai Chi

What that list is saying is that I do want to keep on spending a significant amount of time on Nei Gong, and sometimes I’ll push myself to spend time on Nei Gong even when I’d rather do something else. And also I don’t want to stop doing Tai Chi, but I don’t want it to take up too much of time.

But what I want to have as the heart of my days is the time I’m spending on is all the other stuff that I’m doing that I both enjoy and feel good about. And I just don’t need to list all of the kinds of stuff that fits into that bucket, or to try have the contents of that bucket look the same from week to week or month to month. Right now, I’m actually quite happy with the mix of stuff that my brain is deciding to be excited about; so I want to lean into that excitement instead of imposing extra structure on it.