Category: Blog En

No, this is not a mistake, I think that using distraction can help us be more efficient in some cases. In fact, there is a chance that you already do it in a way or another.

Have you ever done something while watching TV or listening to the radio? Probably, then you already know about it, but let me explain why I think that it can be more of an helping matter than a nuisance, if used appropriately.

Many people listen to music or to the radio while driving a vehicle and doing repetitive tasks. Hearing music or someone talking distracts us a little from the boringness and makes us fall in “automatic” mode. So instead of concentrating directly on what we are doing, and how much it sucks doing it, our mind wanders somewhere else, making the situation a little more bearable.

The “automatic” mode is exactly what we want to achieve here, which is about finding a balance between being able to work efficiently on our tasks, while being distracted enough so that we forget about it.

In my case, when I try to work on some of my projects, especially the ones about visual creation (drawing, 3D design, etc), this kind of distraction is quite useful, because it is really hard for me to stay concentrated on it, which makes my progress slow. So I watch videos while drawing, but not any videos, the kind where I’m not required to constantly look at it. What it does is that until the end of the video, I will be sitting there, so for this duration, I have no other choice but to draw. Using a fun distraction while doing something that is less fun, or hard, helps me do it longer than I would normally.

It also makes me feel good about myself. Because if I take the previous example, I specifically choose videos that I would have watched anyway on their own. So when I manage to do two actions at the same time, that I would have done separately anyway, I feel efficient. I get the impression that I can finally begin to catch up with all the stuff I want to do, instead of just adding more stuff on the pile.

But as I already said earlier, to really benefit from distraction, we have to choose one that is appropriate according to the task we are doing. Some distractions will require too much attention or be incompatible with what we want to accomplish. If I’m writing for this blog, I usually listen to music, because it doesn’t require me to understand what is going on and I can just listen to it passively. On the other hand, watching anime or Youtube videos while writing prevents me from both writing my text and understanding the video, making both activities meaningless. This will probably require some trial and error on your part to find out what distraction fits with which activity, but once you do, it is easy to just continue doing it.

Of course, working on two things at the same time will make our progress slower than concentrating on a single one at a time. But it can likely be canceled-out by being able to work for longer periods of time without stopping.

Obviously, I would only recommend this method for tasks that are not dangerous in nature, watching movies while cutting wood is a bad idea, you would want all your attention to be directed at the main task. We also don’t want the distraction to take too much place, or else we will just end up being distracted and get absolutely no work done.

So as contradictory as it may seem, distraction can indeed be useful, if we manage to calibrate it correctly with our work.

For some people, like myself, completing projects can be hard for many reasons. Sometimes we can simply lose motivation or interest in the project. Other times we lack inspiration to keep going forward, or we find something that captivates us more. And some other times, we don’t even know why we can’t advance further.

An interesting thing that I recently noticed, is that I often block at a precise point in the project. This point is when I have to make an important decision, a choice that will affect everything that follows. It happens when I have already invested many hours in the project, enough so that a potential error or bad decision could make it worthless, and restarting from zero is not desirable or practical.

Basically, more often than not, I get stuck because I’m too scared to make a decision, and suffer the consequences associated with it. So my response to that fear is to stop working on the project altogether. Which ironically, turns out having the same effect than what I was scared of in the first place…

It can’t really be avoided, because there will always be something that doesn’t go as planned in pretty much everything we do, so the answer is not about eliminating choices. In many cases, especially in creative work, there is not necessarily a good or bad solution. Although the choice we make will affect the outcome of the project and it can challenge our habilities or force us to use new methods. This is not a bad thing, because it will make us progress in our craft by forcing us to learn things we didn’t consider.

Furthermore, many of the reasons for abandonning projects that I mentionned at the beginning, such as the lack of motivation, interest and inspiration, could be unconsciously caused by that fear of making a bad decision, making the overall project seem less interesting.

But even knowing that, fighting fear is hard, and I can’t see much solution to overcome it other than just pushing ourselves to make decisions and take risks. But if you too are stuck with this fear, then becoming aware of it is already a step in the good direction, which could potentially lower the actual fear.

As soon as I saw an electric bike for the first time, I knew that it was a bad invention.

The electric bike is the best way to exercise without getting in better shape, here’s why:

If we own a standard bicycle and ride it, we will need to pedal when the road is perfectly leveled, and when we have to go up a hill. But the intensity will be greater when climbing a hill, because we have to fight against the gravity that wants us to go back down. On an electric bike, we will also have to pedal on a leveled road and when climbing a hill, but both at the same intensity. This is where the problem comes, we never have to make more efforts to adjust to the difficulty of the road, we just have to keep a steady rhythm and everything will be fine.

What makes us in shape is getting our body out of its comfort zone, so that it has to adapt by making our muscles stronger and more enduring, and by doing the same thing with our heart (cardio-vascular endurance). But if we keep the same rhythm from start to finish because the bike is doing half of the work for us, then we could just be walking and we would be getting the same results, which are nonexistent.

In a way, we are tricking yourself into thinking that we are exercising, without actually doing the work. You know those people who get off their bike to walk beside it as soon as they see a hill, then riding an electric is basically the same thing while still sitting on the bike.

As much as I hate the very concept of it, I can still perceive some utility out of this thing. For example, even though I have never seen it in application where I live, it seems that some people deliver stuff on bike, so for these people who already put in their fair share of effort, such bicycle would be more than welcomed by their joints. Another good use would be for someone who is recovering from an injury, for which a standard bike would put too much stress on the body.

So this kind of bike has its use, although I would personally consider it a marginal/specialized product, for very particular uses and cases where the good old bicycle would be too much. Other then that, sweating and feeling discomfort is part of the experience, if we are not having them while riding our bike, then we are not getting better, we are just stagnating.

Arch Linux is a Linux distribution that is made specifically for x86-64 computers (the standard desktop computer that uses a Intel or AMD CPU). I’ve been using it for many years and even though it is ranked in the top 20 on distrowatch.com, meaning that it is quite popular among Linux users, I still wanted to talk about it.

Arch Linux is not too hard and not too easy, so I would consider it being somewhere in the middle, allowing it to be a really versatile distribution. What I mean by this is that it doesn’t hold us by the hand like the more mainstream distributions would do, but it also doesn’t go too deep into the stuff that is relevant only to the experts (while still letting us the possibility to do it if we really want to).

Why is it easy?

The fact that we don’t have to care about compilation of the packages that we install and all the stuff related to it. Some distributions rely quite heavily on compilation to install software, and unless we are interested in optimization and know a lot about the inner workings of the process, it may seem like a waste of time to recompile the applications on every update. Some applications, like music and video players, web browsers and office suites take many hours to compile. While we can still use the computer at the same time, its performances will be reduced due to the compilation requiring a lot of processing power. But Arch Linux is not one of those, the packages are already pre-compiled and optimized for the system. Also, most if not all of the “standard” Linux conveniences are there by default, so anyone with prior Linux/Unix experience will be able to use it.

Why is it hard?

We have to rely quite a lot on the command line, at least to build the whole system. No installer is included with it, so we have to install the system by strictly using the command line to do so, but don’t worry, there is a guide to help us. Once we are done with the installation, we end up with a basic system without any graphical interface, and it is up to us to decide how to mold that system to our needs. Making it as complex, powerful or simple as we want/need it to. But even if we install a graphical interface, most of the maintenance stuff will, by default, have be done from a console or terminal. This means that we need to know the basic Unix/Linux commands and some more, and also to be at ease working with configuration files. Naturally, all this takes more time than simply clicking on a button that do everything automatically behind the scenes.

An interesting feature of Arch Linux, is that it is a rolling distribution, meaning that if we regularly update the system, we are always up to date with the latest version of the OS. There will be no need to format the disk and reinstall the latest release of the system because there is no “release”. Keep in mind that if you use it as your main desktop computer, it may still become bloated from years of daily use just as any system would.

There is one more reason why I would recommended Arch Linux, even for beginners (if they are interested in learning Linux). This reason is the Arch Linux Wiki website, if you already use Linux and have searched about Linux stuff on the internet before, you probably already ended up on it, even if it isn’t the distribution that you use at the moment. Because there is so much information about so many things, it is a gold mine of information. If a software or package is available for the system, and that its installation requires anything more than just calling the package manager, there will most likely exist a page explaining the steps necessary to have it working. So even if you are a Linux beginner, just this Wiki site has enough information for you to survive on Arch Linux, provided that you are willing to do some reading and finding answers by yourself.

I restarted playing music a few months ago after many years of not doing much, and I realised something important. It didn’t come directly from playing my instrument though, but from learning more about music theory.

What I realised is that music is not defined by the instruments or tools used to create it, but by its ability to sound musical, no matter if it was made by a guitar, a piano, a computer or a set of spoons.

As EDM and electronic music in general are becoming more and more popular, we hear people say things like “this is not real music because they just sit in front of a computer and don’t play any instrument”, and I think that it doesn’t make any sense to say such things. Because no matter how we make the music, we get access to the same audible frequency range and the same set of basic rules. Which means that we have access to the same old notes, chords and scales that a piano or any ensemble of instruments would.

For people that don’t know much about music theory, this means that some sound frequencies fit well together and some others don’t depending on the “space” that separates them. So a chord that sounds good on a piano will also sound good on a guitar, and it will also sound good on whatever computer with whatever sound effect, because they are based on the same frequency logic.

With that little knowledge, we can now say that making music is not about playing an instrument, but rather about building sequences of sound frequencies (“notes”) in a way that is pleasing to the ear of the listeners (music is generally made to sound good, although there are exceptions). So in the end, as long as the rules are acknowledged by the creator (consciously or not), it doesn’t matter if the sounds were produced from a physical instrument or from an electronic device.

It is very possible that someone may not like electronically produced sounds and prefer the sound of “real” instruments, and this is perfectly fine. But it would be wrong to label electronic music as inferior to traditional music because of the process and tools used. Good electronic music producers, just like good traditional musicians, have to work many hours to find the best ways to make their music sound good. They may or may not know music theory, but it doesn’t stop anyone from making pleasing sounds. Although, it is all in the ears, someone with a well trained ear will be able to make good music, no matter by which means they create it.

If we took a Beatles song, and recreated its melodies and rhythms into a DAW software (Digital Audio Workstation), the song would most likely sound very different, and some people may like it and some others may not. But the overall feel of the song would be the same, because the music stays the same.

What I am trying to say with all this is that good music is not necessarily music that we like. Even though I don’t consider myself a fan of 70’s/80’s/90’s rock music in general, it is hard for me to not sing along when I hear a Bon Jovi’s song on the radio. Do I listen to this music at home when I can listen to anything else I want? No, but these songs have something “catchy” about them, and now that I know a little more about music theory, I’m able to understand that it all comes from a right combination of notes at the right moment. While we could argue about if Bon Jovi is or isn’t “good”, or that we like it or not, there is no denying that the band itself (and possibly the sound engineer(s)) did something right to make songs that were this popular.

So for any type of music, electronic or traditional, the same processes and methods apply, it involves a lot of trial and errors and a lot of time invested to come to the end result of something that sounds good. In that way, I think that all musicians should at least be respected for their efforts, even if we don’t appreciate their creations.

When we think about being in shape, most of the time we think about going to the gym before anything else. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Joining a sports team/group could be a nice way to meet people while doing some exercise, although this article will talk mostly about weight lifting outside of the gym, because I’m not much of a “team player”.

I believe that anyone who wants to be in good shape must do some weightlifting, but it doesn’t have to be done inside a gym.

Generally, what the gym has that we don’t have is equipment. But the thing is that a gym has too much equipment, a lot of machines and other specialized objects that we don’t need. The basic stuff that is really necessary are the dumbbells and barbells, and maybe a pull-up bar and some form of a bench.

What? You don’t have a treadmill or a stairmaster at home? Go fu**ing outside and do some hiking instead, or if you don’t live near any mountain, do some sprints in a park, take your bicycle and ride for an hour or two or at the very least go jogging for half an hour. If you have access to a lake or public pool, go swimming. Jump on things, throw rocks around, anything that make you move and spend some energy. If you’re lucky enough to live near an outside gym, go there.

But the weather is not always good for these activities, or sometimes you just want a quick training because you’re busy with something else but still want to train for a few minutes. If you use social media just a little, you have probably seen many “home workout” videos in your timeline. While I don’t recommend that you buy the fitness plans of those people, who most of the time are just people with a six pack or big booty that improvise themselves as fitness specialists (which also probably train in a regular gym themselves). You can still inspire yourself from them.

It is quite easy to do squats, push-ups, and many other exercices with just your bodyweight. But it still isn’t quite enough, buying a few items would make it better. Having a few dumbbells and/or kettlebells would be nice, there is quite a few compact kits that fit all the weight onto two handles with an adjustable button that lets you pick up the desired weight. While regular dumbbells are definitely the best choice, the compact kits will do the job for home use (you won’t be using them 12 hours every day like the equipment of your local gym is). A step or box could be useful too, and a chin-up bar (please spend a few more bucks on the one that attaches solidly onto the doorframe) and a few rubber bands of different stiffnesses.

If you’re the crafty type, you can probably build up at least half of those items with wood and metal. But for the rest of us, buying them is pretty much the only choice left. It would probably cost a few hundred dollars to get a descent amount of items to create a usable gym, but anyway, how much do you pay for your gym membership every year? Aside from the cheap gyms that cost something around 100-150$ a year, most gyms where I live cost at least 200$ a year. So instead of renewing your gym membership, that you are barely using anyway, just think that the equipment you’re about to buy amounts to 2 or 3 years of gym membership, which you would be paying anyway. With the added benefit that the stuff is yours (which is an advantage up until you have to move them to a new place).

If you didn’t already think about it, most of these things can be found second-hand, because let’s be honest here, a lot of people buy this stuff and almost never use it then after many years of accumulating dust in a corner, they finally decide to sell them. So it is possible to get descent (and almost unused) equipment for a reasonable price.

So it brings me to this: just like not everyone is made to go to the gym, not everyone is made to not go to the gym. Before investing in all the material you need, maybe try working out somewhere else before quitting your gym membership. If you find out that you can’t get any exercice done when you’re not inside the gym (i.e. you get distracted too easily by TV, chores, etc), then maybe you should keep on going to the gym.

But if you can manage to do it, it can very well remove some stress of your back. What I personally like about training at home is that I don’t have to drive to get there and that I don’t have to wait to use the equipment. Gyms generally have a dress code, but at home I can train in pajama if I want. If you’re not going to the gym to talk and meet with people, then you may very well train at home or outside and it will be as effective as the gym, provided that you get the right equipment and use a little bit of creativity.

For many years, I’ve been struggling with the ever present impression of not having enough time to do everything I wanted to do.

I ended up eliminating a lot of things from my life, like social events and work, to be able to concentrate on those things. The problem is that I never managed to gain the upper hand on those projects, even if I seemed to concentrate on them.

What I finally understood is that even though I had the will to do all this stuff that was waiting for me, I didn’t have the determination to actually achieve them for real. Until at some point, I just got tired of just accumulating tasks and decided to complete them for real.

The interesting part of all this is that I didn’t just manage to gain some control over my own self, it also made me a lot more efficient than I thought I would be, if I want it hard enough.

I don’t have any real trick to give here, I just kicked my own a$$ because I was tired of being stressed out about trivial tasks and chores and it just worked.

Like I said in many other articles, for me it all starts with lists, so I took my lists and made a small day schedule in a tabler software in which I ordered my tasks.

After a few days, I already felt a lot less stress. And it isn’t just from having less stuff to do now, it is also because I now get the feeling that I have control over my own life and that I can continue going forward.

In reality, I don’t have that much less stuff to do, because I always get new ideas and projects that come all the time that I don’t even see myself ever coming to a point where I have nothing to do. But just the fact of accomplishing some of them doesn’t make it feel like an unconquerable mountain. I will do some of it today, then I will do some more tomorrow, and so on, instead of just stressing about having so much of it and just sitting doing nothing.

So in short, what this all means is that it isn’t how much we do that is important, but that we steadily do it, so we don’t get overwhelmed.

An iso-hold, in muscular training, is about maintaining muscle contraction under pressure. In other words, it is about holding the position at the peak of the contraction against the force (whichever it is between the good old gravity, a band, a pulley or anything else) that wants to return the weight to its starting point. That “peak” of contraction will normally be in the middle of the movement, between the end of the contraction and the beginning of the controlled release.

As an example, the iso-hold of a pull-up would be to hold yourself at the “top” position, where you are closer to the bar (or farther from the ground).

So if you’ve been following, an iso-hold rep would be to do an iso-hold at the peak of each rep. Taking back our pull-up example, you would lift yourself to the bar, hold for a few seconds, drop back down, and restart those steps until you’re too tired to continue.

I know, there is nothing revolutionary about this, in fact, you probably already knew all that, the longer you hold, the harder it gets.

But I thought that the subject deserved to be talked about, because it can be interesting for a few things like raising mind-muscle connection, increasing difficulty and just exhausting the targeted muscles even more.

I use this technique for movements that I feel weak at. If I take the pull-up again, I can only do 5 or 6 of them, so adding an iso-hold to each rep make me work a little more. The logic behind this is that it increases the time that the involved muscles are under tension, and more tension means more damage to the muscles. Consequently, this damage will be turned into gains, whether it be more endurance, more strength or more muscle fibers. So in the case of my pull-ups, because I’m not able to do as many reps as I should, adding iso-holds with each rep lets me work the muscles a little more without the need for more reps.

The other time I use it is for muscles that need special attention. For example, I tend to have knee pain when walking/running for long distances (by “long distances” I mean more than a few kilometers without breaks, which is generally exceptional circumstances for most people). So I try to strenghten the VMO muscle (Vastus Medialis Oblique, a part of the quadriceps which is sometimes called the “water drop”) which often grows slower than its counterpart and disrupts the knee mechanics. The exercises I choose for this part are the split-squat and other similar movements such as the reverse lunge.

So when a muscle is lagging behind, like my VMO in this example, it will also be harder to “feel”. But then, using a movement that is known to solicite the said muscle and holding it at the toughest point (the peak) will make it come forward because it will start to “burn”. That burn will confirm that you are indeed using the appropriate movement for what you are looking to achieve. Repeat the process for long enough will slowly resensibilize the muscle and someday it will probably act like it should.

In some cases, an iso-hold may be useless, like in the case of biceps curls, where the peak contraction is also at the easiest point. To obtain the same effect, we just have to use an elastic band.

Iso-holds are a nice way to crank up the difficulty of a training without the need for any specialized equipment. It can be incorporated into any workout program as it won’t necessitate any change to it other than just holding reps for longer when doing them. However, don’t go crazy about it by adding holds to every exercise in your program because it will probably become more of an annoyance than anything. Like I said ealier, choosing movements that you feel the need for a little more work would probably be the right choice. Try it and see if it helps.

Solving small problems is not about discarding bigger ones, it is about dismantling them into smaller and more manageable tasks.

If we take an example that most (responsible) adults have to face at some point: Cleaning the house/appartment.

So if we take it as is, “Cleaning the house”, it seems rather vague and possibly quite time consuming. We have to decide what it means concretely, does it mean that I have to clean the whole house, inside and outside, or just parts of it? Most likely, we are talking about a general cleaning of the interior, but is it a spring cleaning or just a “standard” cleaning that we have to do every (few) week(s)? This is the weekly cleaning of the stuff that gets dirty fast, the floor, the toilet, sinks and bath, maybe wash some clothes and dishes too.

I made the list from what I said in the previous paragraph:

• Wash floor
• Clean toilet
• Clean sinks
• Clean bath
• Wash clothes
• Wash dishes

It already feels a lot more manageable than “cleaning the house”. We could go a step further, like precising which sinks we want to clean and which type of clothes. So the list becomes:

• Wash floor
• Clean toilet
• Clean bathroom sink
• Clean kitchen sink
• Clean bath
• Wash work clothes
• Wash other clothes
• Wash dishes

It feels even more manageable now, because some tasks have gotten smaller than they were before, but the list gets a little longer.

We are now at the part where it becomes more personal, we have to decide how specific we need to go the get the right balance between the amount of tasks and how precise they are. For the sake of this article, I will stop here, because for this particular example, I don’t think it would be logical to decompose further than it already is. But for other types of tasks, we could probably go over the list and decompose it a few more times, if necessary.

The reason why balance is important is because too few big tasks and too many small tasks will amount to the same thing in the end, more anxiety towards what has to be done. As with pretty much anything in life, aim for the middle ground.

As I already said multiple times, using lists will make us more efficient, but they can also discourage us by making us realize how much work we have to do. So this is why it is important to build the list in a way that will help you be as efficient as possible.

If you have already been training for a while, you probably already know about “super-sets”, if not, let me explain shortly: The standard or common way would be to “do a set”, “take a 1-2 minutes break”, “do another set”, “take a 1-2 minutes break”, and so on… While super-sets being “do a set”, “take a 10-15 seconds break” (which is approximately the time it takes to set yourself up for the next exercise), “do a set of another exercise”, “take a 10-15 seconds break”, “do a set of the first exercise”, and so on…

So super-sets can either make your overall workout shorter, or allow you to train more in the same amount of time, while also building a little more cardio because the shorter breaks don’t let enough time for your heart to go back to its resting rate.

Now that we know what super-sets are, we can introduce “double-sets”, which is just a name I came up with, so it could already have an official name that I’m not aware of… I guess it could be similar to what some people call “combo-sets” or “complexes”.

In a super-set, you replace the break by another set. In a double-set, each rep of a particular set is composed of two different movements. So depending of how intense you want to train, you can either use double-sets with regular 1-2 minute breaks or even super-set them with other double-sets.

But how do we combine two exercises into one? Exactly as you would expect, by doing one after the other, than count one rep.

Here’s an example: If we want to train legs, than we could double-set some reverse lunges and single-leg RDLs (RDL = Romanian DeadLift). So we start by doing a full reverse lunge with the left leg (meaning that the right leg moves to the back while the left leg lunges), then, instead of continuing with another lunge, we keep our right foot in the air and then do a RDL with our left leg, and we got our first rep. Then we start again until we’ve reached the amount of reps we were aiming for. When we’re done with the left leg, we do the exact same thing with the right one.

As you can see, I picked two complementary movements that can be easily chained together. Of course, some combinations won’t work that well, like if we tried to double-set calf-raises and push-ups. So there has to be some experimentation on your part to find what works well with your workout plan, or adjust your plan to fit some movements that allow for double-sets. The key would be to combine exercises that you can either lift the same weight (changing dumbbells each time wouldn’t make much sense) and/or which the transition between the two is easily done, like in the previous example.

The advantage of double-sets, like for super-sets, is that you can also fit more work inside the same time frame, or just reduce your overall workout time. But there is also another benefit that I found while doing it, depending on which exercises are put together. It can help you work harder on a single muscle, for example, if I do triceps extensions on a pulley, I can alternate between an over-hand and under-hand grip each rep to work the muscle in two different ways at the same time. This one is particularly interesting because I can really feel which “section” is working harder than the other on each alternating rep.

At the end of my workout, I often add a few exercises aimed towards “forgotten” or “lagging” muscles, like the rotator cuff and the low and medium trapezius for example. I usually do face-pulls for the traps and a variation of that move that targets the rotator cuff. They fit really well with double-sets, because they are both done in the standing position with a band/pulley in front of me at face height. The only thing that changes is the path of my arms when I pull them towards my back, which is really easy to do.

Also, just like you could super-set three different exercises, you can also do triple-sets, which is the same thing as double-sets, but with three different moves needed to amount to one rep. The one I use the most is an explosive deadlift (there is a name for it that I can’t seem to find, the one that makes the bar/dumbbells fly up to your shoulders), followed by a shoulder press then a front squat.

So as with any other technique, this is just another tool in your toolbox, I wouldn’t recommend using it all the time for every movement, but to fit it where it makes sense.