Week notes - March week 2
Productive procrastination and Calisthenics
First things first - I changed my publication’s name on substack :D
“Divya Shivaram by Divya Shivaram” didn’t have a nice ring to it. After thinking for a while and bouncing off ideas from the internet I settled on "Beta brain”. Think along the lines of Beta features in products, but also Beta waves. If love to hear your thoughts on this.
The short description is “A weekly changelog of my brain in progress“. I’m quite pleased with the new name. It reflects my permanently awake and active brain, and how I love the fact that we’re all works in progress.
My mom is in town. She had this wedding to attend in Kerala, and it made more sense to travel from Bangalore instead of Chennai. But she spent at least 24 hours in a car over the weekend. Phew. Needless to say, she’s tired af and has a bad cold. Nothing a little rasam and a lot of sleep can’t fix hopefully. Mom is usually full of happy and calm energy, seeing her sick made me quite sad.
Abhinay and I worked out of Blue Tokai twice this week. We wanted to take the car to another part of the city for service, but we were rerouted so much from a certain route; We spent a whole hour going round and round just near KR Puram. Indiranagar was on the way, so we just decided to pop by the cafe and work from there, skipped the service. I had a little Tomato danish thing for lunch along with two cups of coffee. It’s sort of become my go-to order these days.
It was Holi festival on Friday, so we had a holi-day hehe. Surprisingly most of my team opted to work and use the comp off. I wasn’t going to miss a long weekend opportunity though. I ended up clearing my gmail inbox unread emails and spent time with mom at home.
Abhinay’s family celebrates holi traditionally with Pua and Dahi vada. I think they also cook mutton? Not too sure. We’ve never visited his family during Holi. I’ve attempted to make Pua once, it was ok. It’s less sweet than malpua, so that’s a win. It tastes like if a banana bread, appam and pancake had a baby. It reminds me of these sweet appams that my grandmother used to make at home. Sadly I’m unable to find this online. It’s just deep fried coconut-y pancake batter with a distinct cardamom flavour. It’s white with crispy brown edges. The ones online all point to the brown Unniyappam they make in Kerala.
The email deletion experience was extremely frustrating, but I did finally bring my unread emails count down from 3000 to 30. I sometimes act like my personal inbox does not exist.. I vibe coded something to help me with this. Still a WIP, but the idea is to get emails from last 24h or 48h and categorise them into ‘needs attention’, ‘to read’, ‘bills’ and other categories. Just trying to scratch an itch. I shall categorise this under productive procrastination. I’m supposed to be building something else, ahem.
I’ve been meaning to check out Superhuman and this other app called Sunsama. Arvind uses them both and he recommends them. I don’t think I have a massive budget for these tools though. I already pay for GPT, Claude and cursor. But since Cursor uses Claude in the background anyway, I might actually unsubscribe from one of them. Will have to evaluate everything.
Last week we ate at Babai Tiffins after a whole month. Dropped mom off on Saturday morning and headed straight to Babai for a piping hot plate of ghee idly dunked in sambar with that glorious peanut chutney. If you’re a fan of idlies (or set dosa, upma, bondas) and haven’t eaten at Babai Tiffins yet, you’re missing out. They also have kickass filter coffee.
The highlight of my week however was the impulsive Calisthenics class I signed up for. On Friday I saw an Ad on instagram for a Calisthenics class near my place, so I signed up for a free trial class on Sunday morning. It was fun hanging from the pull up bars and feel my entire body trying to make sense of the fact that I’m attempting to move it. It was a fitness evaluation type thing, and I’d like to share that there wasn’t much to evaluate. We’re starting from scratch.
I did 3/4th of a full pushup, 5 knee pushups, a dead hang for 7 seconds, 90 degree hang for 15 seconds and chin up hang for another 5 seconds, then ended with 10 squats and a plank. I held the plank for a whole minute which definitely felt like a win. My entire body was shaking towards the end of the hour. My shoulders, wrist and everything else in my upper body is killing me today.
I’m excited though. My only goal with fitness is to be able to do a pull up and make it look effortless. You know, no biggie, just me hanging with one hand and pulling my entire body weight up. So I signed up for 4 months. It wasn’t as impulsive as it sounds though, I’ve been following Calisthenics instagram creators for quite some time now. The algo is working well imo.
Spotted this tree on our way from the Calisthenics studio to a thindi place.
Might be driving back with mom this week though, so I’ll be starting my Calisthenics classes in April.
Oh, and I started posting on LinkedIn. Welcome to the ‘professional divya’ era. I’ll try. Might have some professional updates in next week’s notes.
Leaving you here with my comfort music.
> The email deletion experience was extremely frustrating, but I did finally bring my unread emails count down from 3000 to 30
If there's one thing that Microsoft Outlook excels at and that's in mass deletion. I regularly open Outlook just for this: Group by sender, Ctrl+select - Delete and wham! easy deletion. It's a shame Gmail makes it so painful.
> I did 3/4th of a full pushup, 5 knee pushups, a dead hang for 7 seconds, 90 degree hang for 15 seconds and chin up hang for another 5 seconds, then ended with 10 squats and a plank. I held the plank for a whole minute which definitely felt like a win.
I think you're severely underestimating how hard this is. When I started my gym, I could barely hold plank for 30 seconds. That you're doing all of these is pretty impressive.
> I’m excited though. My only goal with fitness is to be able to do a pull up and make it look effortless. You know, no biggie, just me hanging with one hand and pulling my entire body weight up. So I signed up for 4 months
Best wishes!