Part I: Quarantine Chronicles: How COVID-19 Helped me look inward

This post is part of the Decoding Rohail series.

1. Part I: Quarantine Chronicles: How COVID-19 Helped me look inward
2. Part II: Unearthing Your True North
3. Part III: Bringing your values into your daily life

I came across this quote from the book “Essentialism” by Greg McKeown earlier this year which very nicely encapsulates some of the learnings and insights I’ve had over the period since COVID. The quote goes something like this:

Space to think, time to look and listen, permission to play, wisdom to sleep and the discipline to apply highly selective criteria to the choices we make

Buying my first drum set

I think the COVID lockdown period forced many of us to reconsider our routines and how we process everyday events. One of the best things that came out of COVID for me was to act on a childhood dream of mine - to learn to drum!

I grew up in a house where we enjoyed listening to different types of Music. I can relate to Music in a way that’s helped me go cope with the challenges life throws at you. Listening to certain songs transports me back in time to a certain moment in my life and therefore, Music clearly holds transcendental qualities for me. While I certainly enjoyed air guitaring to some of my favourite guitar solos like Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb, Drumming is something that always had an inexplicable allure for me. The raw energy and force that drumming is able to convey - the rhythmic elements of Music was something I naturally inclined towards. And on March 30th 2020, my life was forever changed.

Drumming at 5 am in the morning

I’m very glad I have an understanding wife and neighbours that didn’t complain about the thumping sound and vibrations from my bass pedal. With drumming, I suddenly had a whole new world open up to me. Youtube was my friend and I would take advantage of platforms like Drumeo to learn enough of the basics to get started. I had always been an avid music fan but I’d never learnt music theory and now suddenly, I realised that if I really wanted to make the most of online material in my learning journey, I’d need to learn how to read music. Thankfully, reading drum notation is rather straightforward compared to other instruments (or so I thought). Things were all well and good until I realised one day:

How do I make the time to practice and reach the drumming goals I’d set for myself?

I’m quite a goal oriented person and so naturally I had set ambitious goals for myself. However, while in the past these goals were mostly related to studies or work, this time the goals related to a passion. These were goals where I didn’t care as much if I went off track. They were more like a north star and had the ability to steer me back on course if I went too far astray. Lo and behold, I saw that the best way for me to make the time to practice was to start waking up at 5 am in the morning. Yes. 5 am. I had tried practice at more reasonable times but it just wasn’t consistent. I had never thought there’d by anything that would make me jump out of bed this way. And now I’d found it. And I was jumping out of bed. During COVID. The drums helped me stay sane - though likely at the expense of my understanding wife’s sanity 🤣. I was experimenting with different material, playing along to songs I loved and even started learning to play open handed where instead of crossing your hands so your right (for most people, dominant) hand is on the hihat keeping time and you use your left hand on the snare. By playing open handed, as a right handed drummer, I was using my left hand to keep time, which meant I was using it on average 4 times more than my right hand. This was incredibly awkward and frustrating in the beginning. However, I stuck to it and configured my kit to suit this style of playing too:

A typical practice session eventually came to be an hour or more of playing between 2-3 exercises, where I played each exercise for about 15-20 minutes. Sound boring? I found it to be rather meditative actually. This setup was a result of a lot of self-reflection on what makes a good practice session. Benny Greb’s Effective practicing for musicians had a lot of wisdom to share on the topic and much like Essentialism, the message was the same: Choosing is not losing. You need to make choices to go deeper and further with your passions. This is especially true for something like drumming where you don’t need to just analytically understand the physical movements your body needs to execute. You need to literally drill that pattern into your body to the point where your muscle memory can take over and execute the pattern instinctively at will. Coming to this realisation wasn’t easy. While it’s great having all this information on our finger tips with platforms like youtube and social media, these platforms also keep surfacing content that are a constant remind of all the different ways that you’re not enough where you are right now. We are constantly bombarded with what we don’t know, what’s cool and hip right now and 10 ways for you to {{ insert a hyped up skill here }}.

Failing to choose is also a choice

I could easily transfer my learings from playing the drums onto other areas of my life. For example, I saw a number of parallels in my journey as a machine learning practitioner. Scrolling through LinkedIn is just a reminder of all the technology frameworks you still don’t know. That may not be everyone’s experience but I bet a number of us feel that way. Feeling that way is normal unless we become hyper aware of what exactly are the topics that we are super-knowledgeable and passionate about. And those topics have to necessarily form a finite set, rather than one that changes depending which side of the bed you went to sleep. The fear of missing out (FOMO) is what often prevents us from committing to this finite set of topics that we can really dig our heels into. Choosing one thing, necessarily means letting go of something else and who wants that? Can’t we just have it all? Coming back to my 5 am adventures, I was getting some exceptional results in my drumming with the discipline of putting in the time consistently every day. That was, until greed started to set in…

Now I’m quite big on productivity tools and at the time, my productivity system including a number of tools:

• Evernote for taking notes,
• Trello for big picture planning,
• Sunsama for a daily planner,
• Todoist for capturing ideas and doing some tactical prioritization,
• Google calendar and calendly for scheduling appointments,
• Remarkable for hand written digital notes that I can send myself later for further processing.

To the uninitiated, this would seem like a rather long list, but I had been refining this system slowly over time to the point where it felt completely natural to me. Applying Tiago Forte’s PARA method allowed me to pretty much make sure nothing escaped my attention. This itself is a little bit of a mind trap, that I didn’t come to realize until a few years later. Everything doesn’t need to have my attention.

Waking up at 5 meant that I had roughly 4 hours before I started work and that’s A LOT of time to get things done. Soon enough, I started to do more than just drumming when I woke up at 5. I made a system where I tried to make sure I “hit each area” a given number of times. You can think of it like going to the gym and having a push/pull/legs like of setup. I was rotating through different areas in my life to make sure “everything was in balance”.

The result you ask? I was no longer jumping out of bed anymore. I would wake up, and look at the list of things I had planned to do for the time before 9 am. Perhaps it was also the fatigue from the long drawn COVID lockdowns finally setting in, but I had basically taken the magic out of my mornings by overengineering that time I had to myself. Don’t get me wrong, a number of good things came out of this time, such as for example a scraper of immoweb that I wrote around this time (see blog entry here).

Nonetheless, it wasn’t long before I started to wake up, only to hit the snooze button and go back to bed once I saw the long todo list I had left for myself. I knew that I needed to reorient myself and get back to the basics. I had let my greed to get more done, get the best of me. I knew at this time that I needed a value system that would help me decide what’s worth (to me) spending time on and what’s better left on the backlog (or better yet, not even added to the backlog to begin with!).

This was just the beginning

I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy coming up a list of values to give me a foundation. Making such decisions is hard! For example, if you had to choose between knowledge and imagination, which value would you prioritize? What if you had to choose between Integrity and Accountability? Not easy is it? I explore how these insights helped me formulate my values in a following article. Stay posted!

This post is part of the Decoding Rohail series.

1. Part I: Quarantine Chronicles: How COVID-19 Helped me look inward
2. Part II: Unearthing Your True North
3. Part III: Bringing your values into your daily life