Weeknote for 9/22/2024

Productivity

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For my Kanban setup in Notion, I created a couple of task management features and reorganized some of the status info I’m tracking. More specifically:

1. I finished implementing a status advisor formula for parent tasks. When I collapse a branch in the task tree, I can’t see the statuses of the descendant tasks, so I’m using the status of the branch’s root task to tell me if there’s any hidden task worth paying attention to. It’d be a lot of work to update those parent task statuses manually, so I’m having a formula tell me what they should be.
2. I created a timeline view that would show my upcoming deadlines. Here’s an article that demos timelines in Notion. It’s a replacement for my project schedule, because I’m dropping the idea of iterations, where I plan for specific tasks within a certain period and then try to deliver all of them by the end. Instead my work will be more fluid, managed by the handles a Kanban setup gives me.
3. I separated out the blocking and prioritizing statuses from the list of task progression stages. This change comes from David Anderson’s insight that it’s better to keep your work items flowing in one direction through the stages rather than having them bounce back and forth, since regressing through the flow muddies its purpose, which is largely to track the stages of accumulated knowledge about the item. So I’m tracking those less linear attributes as layers on top of the work stages via separate Notion properties.

Coming up:

1. To see what I worked on when, I want to add a timeline view for recent tasks.
2. To make my tasks easier to manage on a daily basis, I want to update the Kanban boards I use in my admin sessions.
3. To reduce my task list to a manageable size, I want to start updating the details of all my current tasks to correspond to my new setup.
4. To keep my notes more centralized, I want to start separating them from my tasks, which tend to fragment the information about their related topics.

Fiction

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Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata reminded me that normal people are weird. It was very funny in places as main character Keiko Furukura tried to navigate normal society and understand how it worked and how she could fit in or at least keep it off her back. As cliche as it sounds, the book empowered me to be true to myself. If some aspect of the world finds me to be a natural voice it can speak through, then regardless of other people’s preferences or agendas, maybe it should. The audio was narrated by Nancy Wu, who also read another book I enjoyed with a neurodivergent main character, Ada Hoffmann’s The Outside.

We had our first Brothers Karamazov book group meeting. I’m starting to see why the book has risen to the level of a classic. A lot of interesting thoughts were shared, and the discussion highlighted how much there was to unpack in the novel and how much may be going on under the surface.

Music

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I spent the week making a covers playlist for the worship song “Yet Not I but Through Christ in Me.” This song was in the lineup for our worship team at the start of the week, and it got stuck on repeat in my head as I was preparing for it. Whenever that happens with a song, I make a background project of assembling a playlist of its renditions ranked roughly in the order in which I like them. “Is He Worthy?” is an earlier example. Here’s my Spotify playlist for this one. I’m still shifting songs around a bit, but it’s mostly in the right order now. Here’s the YouTube video for the original band’s live recording. And here’s the video for my favorite recording.

Although I primarily do it out of obsession, there are a few benefits to this kind of exercise: (1) It lets me listen to the song a lot without getting tired of it so quickly. I even find different recordings playing in my head at different times. (2) It makes me aware of a bunch of different artists who’ve recorded the song, so sometimes I look up their other music. And (3) It gets me to pay more attention to the lyrics and musical features of the song, like a prolonged meditation on it.