QHack (Feb 17 to the 26th) was an absolute blast! Lead experts in the field delivered over 24 talks to over 2000 participants  (here's one that talked about QML applied to music creation). Peering into what the great minds of the field are ideating upon is always exciting. 😀 But unfortunately, we couldn't watch many of the talks live because Calum, Aarsh, Tomasz (my team), and I were too busy trying to build our project! In hindsight, that was actually beneficial since we had more time to develop our project.

We were all excited about quantum finance, so we decided to focus our project on that. It explored the area of quantum portfolio optimization with the use of qGANs (quantum analogue of generative adversarial networks). 

Although the final submission results are still to come (I will keep you posted), our team was ecstatic to hear that the judges rewarded our project draft with $4000 in AWS credits and exclusive alpha access to Floq QC simulators; provided by Sandbox@Alphabet! 

Overall, Xanadu put the event together remarkably well. Apart from building a ton of skills in QML, I learned the importance of building a great team. I hear this so often, but I realize now—looking back at my experience—that I wouldn't have pushed myself as hard as I did if not for the culture and ingenuity of the people I worked with.

Listening to this podcast opened my eyes to how I search for and implement all kinds of productivity hacks, hoping that it will alleviate the need to overcome the discomfort of getting straight to work and getting shit done. This is why Nir Eyal refers to time management as pain management. At the end of the day, we need to toughen through the pain and get shit done. 

For instance, I recently started time blocking, and it didn't help as much as I expected. The problem wasn't the technique itself, though. I mistakenly shifted the responsibility of completing the task to the hack, sub-consciously thinking that as long as I time block, my to-do tasks will complete themselves. Although it may sound obvious in hindsight, I realized that I've been using productivity hacks as a mechanism to bypass the discomfort of actually getting work done, which of course, didn't lead to any results.

We can follow daily routines that inspire action and create systems for productivity, but we have to build self-discipline and do what we set out to do when it comes down. Focusing on that has been the biggest help for me this month. I didn't try training self-discipline or wiping out all productivity habits either (sometimes they help); I just let them be and took action.