When the mood is anxious, one needs to find a few things to do to soothe oneself. Whether or not these have any benefit for accumulating knowledge, in the end they are at least a kind of mental calisthenics. For instance, when it's past nine and you're desperately hoping to get off work, they can ease the anxiety a little.
Things that don't require making any sound:
- Tidy up the files on your computer's hard drive: delete useless files, organize related files, rename files
- Pick a paper, look at the teams of the first author, second author, corresponding author, etc., and which papers they have published before
- Look at a map of China, and get to know the location of each province, the lay of the mountains and rivers
- Look at human anatomy diagrams, learn the types and locations of bones and muscles (Essential Anatomy 5 in English, 3DBody in Chinese)
- Find some images, design an input-method skin and release it for everyone to use
- Learn AI drawing techniques on Bilibili, use Stable Diffusion, LoRA, etc., to draw some interesting pictures
- Read a CTF writeup and summarize some new knowledge you've learned
- Learn about an open-source / commercial piece of software - say, the general functionality and implementation principles of Elasticsearch or Redis, and what its advantages are over similar products
- Design a fictional character, and build out their experiences, personality, appearance, manner of speech, and so on
- Learn and master a color-scheme series, and save it for later
- Pick a pronunciation in a chengyu dictionary, and see what idioms there are - the joy of recognition
- Take an everyday object you often see, and look up what it's called in other languages
- Record the dream you had the last time you slept
- While doing a problem on LeetCode or PTA, learn the basic usage of a programming language
- Pick a paper, find related papers on Connected Papers (or via the paper's references), and get a sense of what this field is working on and what the related teams are
- Read some industry research reports and note the data sources - they often come in handy when writing proposals or PowerPoints
- Learn the rules of a sporting event
- Learn a car logo and the related models and price ranges
- Summarize your own knowledge-and-skill tree: each day, write what you've learned as JSON, and when you have time, save it to a database
Things that require making sound:
- Use apps like Perfect Piano to sing along to ascending and descending scales
- Use apps like Duolingo to learn a language
- Use apps like WeSing to learn to sing (for showing off socially)
- Body-instrument performance (whistling, hand-ocarina, etc.) - learn a tune