Update for 7/22/2018

Life maintenance

Just kidding, I guess. I’m moving after all. At the end of July.

A lot happened last week. My top choice of apartments wasn’t going to be ready till after my lease ended, so I was thinking I’d just renew and try again next year. But then I decided I didn’t want to wait a whole other year, so I looked into getting a lease extension. That worked out, so I set up an appointment to sign the lease at the new place. But in the process I found out they were pushing to have the apartment ready by the beginning of August. So I agreed to start the lease then. I’m expecting to pay a late fee to leave the old apartment on short notice, but at this point I kind of want to get this little mess over with ASAP.

So now I have a week of cleaning and packing and planning. My other projects are pretty much on hold till I’m settled into my new home. Fortunately my belongings are half packed already, and the rest are organized enough to make the job fairly easy. What worries me more is cleaning, the bane of my existence. It’s only surpassed by actually moving. I’m debating whether to hire movers.

Coincidentally, my brother is also moving on short notice, and he’ll be within easy visiting distance again. So that’s something to look forward to.

Productivity

I analyzed my notes a bit from Jon Acuff’s Finish, but I didn’t come up with anything I wanted to post as its own article. I’ll probably just absorb those notes into my larger study of project management.

But here’s a thought I came away with as I thought through Acuff’s book. You can look at your progress through a project in terms of the distance formula, t = dr. t is the completion date. d is the requirements for the goal. r is the speed of your methods and your time on non-project activities. To make yourself more likely to finish, reduce the scope, complexity, or quality of the goal’s requirements, your methods, or your outside activities, or make your methods more efficient.

A lot of the book was about how to make these changes. A lot of the rest of the book was about emotions, both dealing with the obstacles they present and using emotions to maintain your progress. It wasn’t the deepest and most rigorous book I’ve read, but it gave me a lot to chew on and explore.

The advice that’s getting me through these blog posts faster is to work on an airplane. Plane rides have a cluster of productivity advantages. The white noise, lack of normal distractions, and short duration help you focus. Well I’m not actually working on a plane, but I gave myself a short time frame for writing. I put on an album, and I have to finish writing by the end. I also cut the goal in half, another recommendation of the book. I write the main points I want to get across first and then elaborate as much as I have time for.

Fiction

The plot twist in The False Prince wasn’t as surprising as I’d hoped, but it was a good book, so I continued with the series, The Ascendance Trilogy. The one thing I don’t like is that the author repeatedly misleads the reader in a way that feels like cheating. Somehow it’s different from normal author misdirection. But that mostly comes up in the first book, so I could forgive it more easily in the others. The second book was really good, and the third is turning out excellent too.

Cognitive science

I’m out of Hoopla checkouts for the month, so I looked on OverDrive and found NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman, a well-received positive look at autism and the idea of neurodiversity. It’s one of those topics I’ve been meaning to look into for years. So that’ll be this week after The Ascendance Trilogy.

Art

A while back I fell in love with this charming pixel art of a train in Japan (based on this one). Last week some idle searching revealed that this is a real train, part of a well-known and historic train system in Tokyo. I’m wondering if this quiet scene is an actual spot somewhere on its route. This was amazing to me, because a while back this picture had inspired me to search for slice-of-life anime with the same feel (for example, Dagashi Kashi and Garden of Words), and I’d always wondered if I could find such a picturesque place in real life. It seems it is real life.