Weeknote for 9/1/2024

Productivity

😌

I finally got back to making a bunch of progress on this project. Despite that, all I finished was adding calculations for lead and cycle times and creating views for evaluating the status of old tasks. But those took a lot of time, most of it spent typing out discussions with myself to work through the many design decisions. It reminded me that while success may be 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, in software perspiration is 10% implementation and 90% deliberation. Notably I had to learn what lead and cycle time were exactly and why they were useful to know, and then I had to decide what part of my workflow should count as the starting point for my lead time, which ended up being the point when I prioritize the task for action within the next month.

Coming up I need to:

1. Add some finishing touches to the Kanban overview boards.
2. Update the Kanban view in the individual project dashboards.
3. Begin updating the statuses of my tasks according to their current workflow positions and my new rules.
4. Update the timeline views to match my new approach, moving from iterations to deadlines.
5. Design some reports.

Food

😌

I was reminded it takes special circumstances to motivate me to cook. Saturday morning I prepared my meals for the next month, which took the form of heating up packaged frozen meals on the stove and in the oven, things like lasagna and garlic chicken pasta. It’s easy but takes a lot of time, which is something I normally feel I don’t have, but if I’ve already spent a lot of time on my projects and I have a large block of time free, I don’t feel too much resistance. The exception that gets me to prep meals at other times is when cooking is itself a project. So now I’m thinking about whether I can use these observations to create a more natural cooking schedule.

Nature

🧐

A big tree at one of my usual parks was knocked down. Some parts of my area had a big storm a couple of days before, so I’m guessing the tree got struck by lightning.

 

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A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

Fiction

🙂

I joined a book group at work that’s reading The Brothers Karamazov. As usual, I joined primarily because it’s the easiest way to get myself to read a classic, and as usual, I’m listening to the audiobook. We got the reading schedule on Thursday, so I found the audio edition and jumped in. The narrator is Luke Thompson, an actor in the show Bridgerton and the movie Dunkirk and terrific as a reader; and despite being a classic, the book is more listenable and entertaining than I expected. Interesting characters are my favorite thing in fiction, and so far that’s exactly what we’re getting.