Blog
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MailPoet has taken a lot of time to set up. However, I’m down to the last few steps, so my email subscribers will be getting a request to reconfirm their subscriptions very soon.
I unsubscribed from my text-to-speech service, Play.ht. It’s a good service, but it costs more than the benefit I get from it. I’m not sure which of its features are available for free, but if it ends up being too restricted, I’ll switch to BingeWith and see how that goes.
Productivity
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I failed to create a project map. For the final week of the productivity project month, I tried to start mapping out the relationships among my major projects and missions. My main goals were (1) to give myself a set of predefined projects for easily organizing new tasks that crop up and (2) to move myself toward managing my life like a program of projects. Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far, mostly because I spent too much time on other things. I’ll probably pick it up again after this month’s finance project.
My everyday admin activities are taking too much time. Since I’m switching to another project for this month, I’ll only be able to improve the admin procedure on the side, but it’ll be my top side project.
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Overall, last month’s productivity system project was very beneficial. The routine timers made my mornings and nights more predictable, giving me more time for activities I care about. I turned task management into a daily priority, so I have a basis for getting things done in a timely fashion. I intensified my use of procedures, which should help me continuously improve the way I live. And I reintroduced myself to Notion, which is a potent tool for managing projects and notes.
Finances
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July’s project will be a return to personal finance and investing. I plan to reduce some expenses, finish setting up my rather complicated Quicken budget, look into estate planning, and hopefully do some actual investing.
Business
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Principles of Management by OpenStax gave me a way to think about my life goals. The whole book was interesting and potentially relevant to me, but the main chapters I cared about were on decision making and planning and controlling. Management along these lines is one of the major mental frameworks I discovered in myself this year, the other being economics.
The planning and controlling chapter especially caught my attention with the idea of domain or directional planning, which defines actions that could lead to a range of acceptable goals within a particular domain, as opposed to goal planning, which defines actions leading to a specific goal. Domain planning is an apt description of the way I’ve been planning my life, since my goals are very general and hazy, but they definitely lie in one direction and not in others, and the plans I’m making will push me in that direction. Seeing this directionality more sharply was the main benefit of the little project mapping I did last week. The chapter’s discussion also brings up hybrid planning, where a specific goal emerges as the situation becomes clearer over time, which is what I expect to happen with my life planning.
Space
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To have something spacey to stare at, I made a multistream of space footage streams. It has NASA’s two channels, an ISS stream of Earth, footage from ISS spacewalks, panoramic views from Mars, and a LabPadre cam showing the SpaceX Starship launch site.
