Productivity
🤔
I got close to finishing setting up my priority tasks for the upcoming work on this project, my productivity system in Notion. I’m creating items in my task database to correspond to the plain text list I assembled in my analysis of my Notion workspace. This project is currently a side project, so it’s moving more slowly than before. This week I’ll finish the setup, and then I’ll start working through the tasks, probably starting with a visual map of the task relationships using Notion’s dependency view.
I listened to an old thread on Hacker News with lots of helpful productivity advice for grad students, a situation I may find myself in again someday: I’ve procrastinated working on my thesis for more than a year. The glimpses I got there of PhD life reminded me I still don’t really know what to expect from that kind of program, and I’ll need to do a deep dive before I embark on it so I can make good decisions and try to shape my experience there.
Election
😐
I made the easy decisions on my election ballot. I’m taking my usual approach of researching the races, filling in my mail-in ballot, and taking it to a ballot drop box. Now that I’m past the easy races, I’m researching the propositions while I wait on newspaper endorsements to help me with the harder ones. I find that my voting decisions can’t only be informed by lists of the candidates’ positions on the issues. I want to know if they have the right experience and a good track record and if they’ve had any controversies I care about. Since I don’t follow those things regularly, I need the media and other online postings to help me out.
Music
🙂
Another song caught my attention from my worship team’s set on Sunday, “There Is a Redeemer.” It was originally recorded by the legendary Keith Green but written by his wife, Melody. Listening to it as I practiced, I was struck by its earnest simplicity, and I thought that in the unlikely event I ever led worship at a missions conference, I’d definitely want to include it, somewhere toward the end where it could be a response to all the sharing.
So I made my usual playlist of covers and then decided to start listening to Melody’s memoir of their ministry, No Compromise. I’d picked up the ebook a while back on sale and didn’t really think I’d get around to reading it, but clearly you never know. I’m listening to it in bits in-between other things, and it does a nice job of humanizing this larger-than-life, radical figure who I only vaguely knew of because he was a little before my time.
