Weeknote for 9/25/2022

Life maintenance

🤔

Looking into candidates to replace my retired primary doctor has been teaching me some more about research processes that work for me. I’m hoping this week I can settle on a few doctor options and make an appointment.

Productivity

🤔

Taking care of longer life maintenance tasks I’d been putting off has me thinking again about large-scale rhythms my schedule could adopt so I can make sure I keep everything important moving in a timely fashion. I’ll need to experiment to find satisfying patterns, but one likely idea is to take week-long break from my main project every month or two for a side project.

People skills

🤔

The Power of a Positive No by William Ury came across the most earnest book of his negotiation trilogy, since so much of it was about finding and affirming the deeper values that are driving your “no.” As usual I appreciated all the detailed advice, but I was left feeling the series had some gaps when it came to the problem of social engineering, which will be a future topic in this project.

What Great Storytellers Know by Bernadette Jiwa gave me permission to take an organized and careful approach to collecting and crafting stories. It also got me to ponder what inspiration I have to offer my storytelling listeners.

Programming

🤔

Object Design by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock and Alan McKean features extensive and valuable discussions of the design process. But it also reminds me I still haven’t done enough object-oriented design to comfortably understand all the metaphorical language of responsibilities and collaborations, and the complexity of the design decisions only strengthens my interest in Clojure’s perhaps simpler data-oriented paradigm.

Nature

😎

I’ve been neglecting my nature walks lately, so I took a couple more so I wouldn’t regret missing the rest of summer. It reminded me nature is the show that never ends.