Weeknote for 11/10/2024

Politics

🙄

I reconciled myself to the election results, at least enough to get through everyday life. The local elections went mostly the way I voted. The federal results weren’t what I’d hoped, and I felt significant anxiety and depression Wednesday morning. But I leaned on my usual coping mechanism for cases like that, which is to broaden my perspective with a bunch of opinions from commentators, and that helped a lot. The key is to find the right commentators. Here were a couple of videos I found helpful on foreign policy: Trump Has Won the US Election: Here’s Our Foreign Policy Forecast (Warfronts) and The World of Trump 2.0 (Foreign Affairs Interview).

I’m thinking of this second Trump term as a do-over for me, where I try to handle it more constructively. I’ll focus on the more level-headed pundits, and I’ll pay less attention to the scandals and more attention to things I can actually do something about.

One of my early steps may be to move up my schedule of electronics purchases ahead of next year’s possible new tariffs, which will purportedly make many devices much more expensive if he goes through with them. I have a new computer to buy and probably a phone or two. Buying early conflicts with my principle of upgrading my devices only when my old ones are dying, but sometimes circumstances change the calculation.

Holidays

😐

I finished the prototype for my Christmas labels and made plans for collecting the materials. I haven’t been in the mood for this project, so I was glad that at the end of the week I was able to rein in my distraction and procrastination and outsmart my fatigue. This week I’ll try to keep outsmarting myself to get through a big chunk of the remaining work.

Productivity

😬

Changes at work are making my productivity system more important. One of my colleagues has been wrapping up a long and illustrious career, and so we’ve spent the past couple of months distributing his responsibilities to others in the company. I was given the job of coordinating our product data, so I’ve been working on getting a handle on what that entails.

My semi-functioning Notion setup is feeling the pressure of the new tasks that are flowing in and the new knowledge I need to keep organized. The volume of email in my inbox has already increased, which has pushed me to reorganize my mail system a bit. And now after his retirement on Friday, the job is feeling more real.

So I’ll be promoting my productivity system back to being my main project soon. And the task of learning this new business domain is pulling my memory system back to the forefront as well, and modeling too for that matter. Those projects will come later though. First, productivity!