This book is the reason why I start running and get addicted since then. It helps me quit smoking, be more disciplined, create some good habits in my life, and focus more on process rather than goal.
I work from home now and I solve rubik cube, randomly strum my guitar, and juggle balls while waiting for something to run.
I used to check random stuff on the internet ( social media , HN, reddit or youtube) but I found them very distractive. So, I ended up picking something that are not related to internet.
1.Healthy lifestyle: eat less junkie-food, exercise, and have a good night sleep (sleeping is the most important for me). Avoid stress as much as you can and try to live happy life instead.
2.Less news: stop watching tv and read less news. These make your brain process less information and reduce the cognitive overloads.
3.Single goal: decide what you want to do or what skill you want to achieve. Do not try to have multi-goal or multi-tasking while you are focusing. In general, you want to have zero distraction so no phone, youtube, music, email.
If you feel tired after 3-4 hours, do something else to relax your brain til you feel ready for the next session. Do not take it too serious and enjoy the process instead. It's getting better everytime so let it be and just have a good day!.
If you are interested in big data/data engineering, I would recommend you to learn python and scala. These 2 languages have been used in everywhere for data engineer world. For instance, Kafka was written in scala/java. Spark was also developed in scala language.
For python, it will increase your productivity in a lot of things such as etl/some scripts and also be very helpful to access various libraries for dealing with data such as numpy/pandas.
In my opinion, the best way to learn these languages is to tackle some problems. You can just start by scraping some data, inject them into distributed messages/logs system like kafka/rabbitmq ,transform them by using some tools like spark,and process them and store into some places that you want such as hdfs/postgresql/cassandra/s3.