26 April 2016

Starting tonight I’ll start a small personal experiment.

I will restart my laptop every night about an hour before I go to bed.

The first reason is to create a trigger for me to stop staring at the screen and close the day properly. Staying at my computer keeps my mind active and doesn’t let it relax.

The second reason is to improve performance by closing apps that aren’t needed. My work laptop is a beast, but it still quite noticeable when only a few programs are running.

The third reason is to be more stateless in my approach to computing and general operating. For example, I don’t want to keep things in my brain’s working memory so I try to write everything down. I assume my memory is going to fail which prompts me to persist my thoughts in my notes. I don’t try to remember it all. I know I won’t so I have an alternative which works.

Similarly, I don’t want to rely on stuff that has loaded in browser tabs. I don’t want to rely on my documents or spreadsheet app not crashing. I can choose to save my work and file it appropriately, or I can choose to discard it. I would know how to find it if I need it.

I wouldn’t need to keep “tabs” open, just in case.

I’ve already tried to be quite proactive in saving notes, assuming that my laptop could crash and restart at any minute, but with the restart habit I’m hoping to take this a step further.

I’ll do this for few weeks and report back.

One short post per week, discussing actionable mental models. Join a community of readers, who receive these posts over email.