Politics
😌
I finished my election research and made my ballot decisions. Thanks to newspaper interviews and endorsements, the local races were much easier to evaluate. Some of the propositions were tougher, and in those cases I usually end up voting with the status quo, since I don’t understand the situation well enough to recommend changes. This election’s research (for example, this discussion on the property tax amendment) reminded me that just because politicians have identified a problem and proposed a solution doesn’t mean it’s the right one.
Holidays
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This week I’ll start working on my Christmas labels. This is an annual art project where I create gift tags based on something in my life over the past year. Here’s last year’s. They’re a secret till Christmas morning, so I’ll only give general updates while it’s in progress. For many years I’d either wait till the last minute or let the project drag on for ages, and it was rather stressful, but in recent years I’ve gotten myself more organized and I’ve streamlined the designs, so I’m aiming to get through this one in the next couple of weeks.
Productivity
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I started experimenting with Notion’s dependency timeline feature. I’m using it more for prioritizing than for scheduling, since I can’t really predict how long things will take. Even though I don’t know exactly when tasks should happen, the dependencies can tell me in what order they should happen. This week I’ll continue that setup, which will take some fancy formulas to keep the timeline sorted in a readable order.
I got a much better understanding of Kanban from Jeffrey Liker’s The Toyota Way. It seems to cover the ideas of Lean and Kanban in more breadth, depth, and clarity than the other books I’ve encountered. I think a large part of the clarity is that its subject matter is a physical assembly line, which gives me an easily imaginable analogy for thinking about more cerebral processes like software development.
I also found that the Toyota Production System gives me permission to dig deeper into my preference for checking things out, thinking carefully, defining standards, and working with other people to get things right. Along with the incremental experimentation I’ve been trying to absorb, these seem to be traits Toyota has built their success on. In this way the book is a nice companion to Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto and the mis-en-place approach I appreciated in Dan Charnas’s Everything in Its Place.
Spirituality
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I added devotions to my morning schedule. Early in the year I started having daily devotions in the evening, but I dropped them in April during my post-vacation slump, although I more or less kept up with my Bible listening. After getting my life back in order, I was reluctant to add them back to my evening schedule because I was spending so much time on them before, but now that I have extra time in the mornings, I decided to try squeezing in a simpler version then. It’s worked very well this first week, so I’ll see if that continues. Last week was the gospel of Mark, and this week I’m starting Luke.
Nature
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Wednesday my lunchtime walk was preempted by meetings, so I took a nice evening walk at one of my usual nature spots. Twilight adds so much character to a setting even as the darkness hides the detail.
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