It might not look like it, but I’ve actually been a busy bee around this place. When I actually faced the fact that I now had a wiki waiting to be filled, I felt a bit intimidated and knew I had to get more organized or I’d put off doing anything. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to prioritize my projects because I never can, so I decided to take a clue from Barbara Sher and rotate through them rapidly, picking a project for each area of interest and assigning an area or two to each day of the week: religion and the website on Sunday, philosophy on Monday, social science on Tuesday, arts on Wednesday, STEM on Thursday, people on Friday, and life maintenance on Saturday. I’m holding this schedule loosely, since life will interfere with it often and I’ll also want or need to work on some projects more than one day a week.
The first set of projects was to update the section introductions I carried over from a much older version of the site. So far I’ve done philosophy, social science, the arts, the blog (which has some more details on why I added a wiki), and life maintenance. I’m working on STEM, and I haven’t touched religion, weirdness, or the general site intro yet. Sometime I want to rewrite them all, but for now I just needed to stop them from being so out of date.
For the rest of my projects, to make sure I’m spending my time on things I really care about, I’m partly guiding myself with the question of what I would work on if I only had six months to live and partly with the question of what I need to do to prepare for later projects. So for religion I’m mainly finishing God’s Words in Human Words by Kenton Sparks and reading Paul and the Faithfulness of God by NT Wright for a discussion group; for philosophy I’m reading Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction by Robert Audi; for social science, Solving the Puzzle of Procrastination by Thomas Pychyl; for the arts, I’m doing various drawing exercises, which I will post on DeviantArt; for STEM, reading Math Matters by Suzanne Chapin and Art Johnson. So far I’ve been refreshing myself on my previous work on those projects, reorganizing it for my current work, reading, writing a tiny bit, and being sidetracked by life, but I’m hoping to start posting my notes and reflections on some of these books in the next couple of weeks. My people Fridays are mainly for catching up on emails and other social media, visiting people, generally hanging out, etc.; and my life maintenance Saturdays are for taking care of life maintenance tasks that I can put off till then.
Dividing up my time this way has put me on friendlier terms with time in general. Each day I know I have things to look forward to because I’ve scheduled activities I deeply care about, and that motivates me to impose more structure on my life so I’ll have the time and energy to do them. I’m getting to bed earlier (a major predictor of how well I’ll use my time overall), arriving places on time more often, and using my free time better. I’ll write about this more on the wiki sometime.
Ways to keep up with my site: If you want to see what changed between versions of a wiki article, click the “View history” link at the top of the page, select the radio buttons next to the versions you want to compare, and click the “Compare selected revisions” button. If you want a feed for changes to an article, go to the “View history” page for the article and you’ll see the Atom link in the sidebar; or for changes to the whole wiki, click on the “Recent changes” link in the sidebar and grab the Atom link on that page. If you want a feed for the blog, click the “Subscribe in a reader” link on this page; or to get an email when I post to the blog, put your email address in the form under that link.
Other worthwhile things that’ve been going on: On May 16 I drove down to Champaign to hang out with my family over the weekend and watch my brother graduate with his PhD in educational research methods. The next weekend I helped two different friends move. And last week I attended a worship team meeting and a churchwide barbecue for our music minister, who we’re having to let go after 19 years because we no longer have the money to pay him. It softens the blow to know that he and his family will still be around as long as they can, and I was happy to see them at church today.
How exciting to be making progress on so many projects at once!
Yes, I hope I can keep it up! I may have to schedule in some rest days to play video games or something. I care a lot about my projects, but they’re still work.