Productivity
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My productivity finally climbed back to an almost normal level thanks to getting more sleep. Either that or my brain decided two months was a long enough break. Itās a relief to feel like my new old self again.
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Eliyahu Goldrattās classic management novel The Goal about his Theory of Constraints presented me with lots of food for thought. It gave me another chance to consider how I could apply operations management principles to my life, an approach I didnāt get far with a few years ago. The book especially drew my attention to identifying and managing my bottlenecks and making my whole system of time management more visible to myself.
On visibility, I reworked my daily schedule tracker to give myself a better overall view of my time, merging my work and home schedules, which should improve my awareness of how the two interact.
Since my weeknotes act as a kind of bottleneck, to simplify writing them even more I spent Saturday afternoon creating a weeknote dashboard in Notion, and I set another limitation on the weeknote content using the analogy of sports commentary. The dashboard lets me set the date of the weeknote and automatically display all the Notion tasks and documents that I updated the week before. On the sports commentary for my week, Iām thinking I could devote most of each post to a play-by-play of the projects Iām tracking and then limit myself to one ācolor commentaryā topic.
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To nudge myself to keep my current memory project in mind, I made a phone background with AI to represent it. The mnemonic language I want to try creating will ideally have a logographic writing system, so I had the model generate a bunch of colorful icons.
Learning
Iām going to spend the next week or two setting up my mnemonic language in FieldWorks Language Explorer. According to my original project schedule I should be a few weeks into my math project, but since I want to use that project as a lab for developing my mnemonic system, I want to set up the lab notebook first. The project schedule is always subject to change, so Iāll probably move the end date of the math iteration back so Iām not cutting it too short, but Iāll decide that when the time comes.
AI
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I found a therapeutic use for LLMsāas hot button calmers. A lot of times when an issue comes up that pushes my buttons, all I really want is a discussion of the pros and cons, and then I can put it away for a while, but what ends up happening is that I spend an hour or three reading every random discussion I can find hoping to absorb enough insight to feel settled. LLMs are great at summarizing issues, so Iāve started staging little debates where a chatbot writes the main arguments from one side of the issue, then the other sideās responses, then maybe the first sideās replies to those, and lately thatās been enough to get the issue off my mind.
Movies
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The Wolf Hour was a stark contrast to Tenetāa still tense but much quieter story with loads of characterization. I could feel the oppression and threat in Juneās living situation, and while hers is a much different life from mine, I found it relatable in a troubling yet strangely comforting way. I can already tell scenes from this movie have implanted themselves in my mind.
