Weeknote for 6/6/2021

Posted on June 6, 2021 by Andy

Finances

😐

I started researching grad school costs. What I’ve learned so far is that university websites are confusing. I’m going to try not to get lost in the details, because right now I’m only looking for ballpark figures. I’m impatient to get to other topics, so I’ll try to finish that this week.

Research

🤔

I paused my finances project a few days to study my research methods. Taking notes on one of my books reminded me that my note-taking techniques are slower than I’d like, so I spent some time analyzing them. Reworking my study skills may need to be a major project at some point, but for now I’ll do it on the side.

Productivity

🤔

The next few weeks I’ll focus on my productivity system. Despite my time management improvements over the past few months, I still have plenty of tasks that get put off or forgotten because my productivity system is in an unfinished state and a little too hard to use. Next week starts the Thinkulum month of Sol, and I’m going to spend at least part of it on that project. Then I’ll get back to finances.

Business

😎

Introduction to Business by OpenStax gives me a helpful overview as I think about how business fits into my life. I had previously listened to The Portable MBA, but this book was more listenable and engaging, probably because it’s an undergraduate textbook, and it was far from sterile and perfunctory. The authors seemed to truly care about students’ success. I highly recommend it.

What made it especially interesting were the many examples permeating the text. For example, I didn’t realize how many businesses are making serious efforts to be socially responsible. The book made it sound like it’s the in thing to do. Even the appendix on law was interesting and helped me understand things like contracts.

Housekeeping

🙂

The Home Edit by Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin gives some chatty and reassuring tips on tidying. The book had caught my attention for being aesthetic and popular, so I wanted to see what they had to say, and last week my hold on the library’s ebook came up. The book was shorter than I expected, so I think most of the benefit I get will be from studying it to draw out more of the principles they’re using.

I did like finding a name for one of my life philosophies. They call it the Low-Bar Lifestyle. I think of it as counting up from zero. When I assess my day, I like to compare whatever I did to doing nothing, as opposed to doing everything on my to-do list. If I did something, the day was a win.

It was also nice to hear from people who aren’t Marie Kondo but still make tidying work. Kondo has helpful advice, but she gets a bit insistent on her point of view, and some of it doesn’t really fit me.

Health

🙂

I got my first COVID shot Wednesday. I went with Moderna because I need to work around my other medical treatments, and that vaccine fits my schedule. My second dose is on the 30th. I’m already planning my reentrance into society.

People

🙂

Sunday I introduced Jeremy to my favorite nearby walking spot. It was one of our rare get-togethers during these pandemic times. We had a picnic and walked around the lake and the woods. He even noticed some large, predatory-looking birds I hadn’t seen there before, so in future walks I’m hoping for a closer look at those. And hopefully soon we’ll get back to our regular meetups.

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Weeknote for 5/30/2021

Posted on May 30, 2021 by Andy

Finances

😕

I examined some opinions on long-term care insurance. I spent more time on them than is really called for at this stage of this project, since I’m only collecting costs, but I’ll need to look into it sometime anyway. My impression so far is that even though it can cost $100,000, it can be worth it if you want a better level of care than state-run facilities and if you have assets you want to leave to heirs or charities rather than depleting on years of long-term care. There are other factors I still need to weigh, so I’m nowhere near settling on a decision, but for now I’m moving on to grad school costs.

Programming

😐

Testing Computer Software by Kaner, Falk, and Nguyen makes testing feel possible yet still daunting. At work I’m catching up on some software development listening. Software testing is an area that has always stymied me, so I’m making my way through a few key books on it. Especially helpful in this one is the appendix that describes dozens of common software errors. Especially scary is the chapter on ways you can get sued for your software’s flaws.

Sleep

🙂

I gave myself a bedtime of 10:30. I already had an elastic habit for getting to bed in time for 8 hours of sleep, but I wanted to get more specific so my wake-up time would consistently be before 7. If I can keep that up, I’ll probably move it again to 10:00. So far, so good. Little by little I’m hammering my schedule into shape.

Music

😎

Here are some playlists I use for my housework soundtrack.

Cleaning

  • Mrs Bucket – Classical music so I can feel like a fake aristocrat.
  • Summer – This is my favorite cleaning music. It’s also great for walks.
  • 90s CCM – This is my version of Top 40s radio.
  • Battle – For the days when cleaning feels like one.

Cooking

  • Community Folk – So I can feel like I’m cooking for a barn raising.

Shopping

  • Shopping – My stereotype of 1950s grocery store music.

Paperwork

Posted in Housekeeping, Money, Music, Programming, Sleep, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 5/23/2021

Posted on May 23, 2021 by Andy

Business

😎

How to Manage Complex Programs by Tom Kendrick has returned me to my project of treating my life as a business. A program in this context is a set of interrelated projects. Kendrick is writing about corporate programs, but the term pretty much describes my life. And everyone’s life, but especially the way I think about mine. Kendrick’s book makes me feel it’s possible to lay out the whole program of my life and manage it in a coordinated and adaptable way. The idea dovetails nicely with Douglas McCormick’s Family Inc. I’d like to try it and see where it takes me.

Productivity

😎

I hit a record high in Elastic Habits. When I came back to time blocking, I figured it would lower my habit points because I was fitting all my tasks into a more balanced schedule. I’d have fewer double-Elite days on my projects. But I ended up with 300 points in Thinkulum May, 11 points higher than my previous record in April. It’s another sign to me that my new system is working. Also I’ve been time blocking for four weeks now, and it still feels sustainable.

A recent assignment at work has motivated me to develop my hacky programming skills. I tend to be idealistic about the way I work. I don’t have the most sophisticated coding technique, but it’s what I strive for, and I’ve developed some habits along those lines. Sometimes working that way takes too much time for projects like the one at work that need a short turnaround. But since I’ve already reformed my coding habits to be more idealistic, I have to relearn how to work more simply. My experiment using this assignment was promising.

I’m thinking I’ll incorporate this method into my programming in general as a way to get a rough draft written quickly that I can revise into a more maintainable form afterward, which is pretty much the programming maxim “Make it work, make it right, make it fast.” The techniques will probably end up somewhere in my software development notes.

Work Clean by Dan Charnas gives me a focal point for my productivity experiments. It’s about applying the culinary philosophy of mise-en-place to other settings, especially knowledge work. It’s the approach kitchens take to reach high performance under challenging conditions. Nat Eliason has a summary. I relistened to this book because it fits my current way of life, and I wanted to see what ideas it had that I’m ready to explore.

A few that stood out to me this time were arranging your space for efficient action, finishing what you start (if you’re almost done), immersive vs process tasks (tasks you do yourself vs those you start and let work in the background), and the importance of calm (as opposed to stress and panic). I also appreciated that a cook’s mise-en-place takes decades to develop. The approach embraces incremental learning and innovation rather than imagining perfection can be achieved all at once (or even at all).

Charnas lays out a system similar to GTD, but it includes the scheduling element that to me is a gaping hole in Allen’s method. He also goes in much more depth on the daily review (or Daily Meeze, as Charnas calls it). I’m going to study his system in detail and see what I can do with it.

Finances

🙄

I’m wrestling with long-term care insurance. Long-term care is expensive, and so is the insurance. Is it worth the premiums? The decision feels complicated and a little distressing. But I’m using it as an exercise in using my problem solving techniques to stay calm and gain a sense of control. I have 10 or 25 years before I’d feel the need to commit anyway. Right now my objective is to determine how much it would cost so I can set a potential savings goal. This week I’ll study opinions from the Bogleheads. But I won’t spend too much time on it, because I want to get to my research on grad school costs.

Housekeeping

🙂

The storage boxes in my closet are more organized now. I was even able to consolidate some boxes. It’s nice to have my bedroom floor back. An organized closet should make my boxes easier to purge by category when I get to that point. This week, though, I’ll fix my matted microfiber duster and work on listing my old TV for sale.

My cleaning routine is taking shape. Since I have more time on the weekends, I’m cleaning the bathroom on Saturdays and mopping the tile floors on Sundays. I basically clean half the kitchen every day, so I might dedicate a day to it only as needed. This week I’ll try cleaning both the bedroom and living room on the same day. My goal is to give myself extra days for tidying, since that will take way more time than cleaning, and it’s more fun.

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Weeknote for 5/16/2021

Posted on May 16, 2021 by Andy

Housekeeping

😐

I’ve entered the messy phase of tidying. Marie Kondo says you need to purge before you organize, but really there’s some pre-purge organizing you have to do. You have to get all the items from the category you’re working on in one place. That’s what I’m doing now with my semi-organized storage boxes. I have them all piled up by category in my bedroom. That made it easy to sort the other boxes I’d lazily thrown random things into.

Coffee

😐

Beaumont Colombian Ground Coffee: 3/5. I struggled with it less than the Beaumont Classic Roast I tried, and I pretty much stopped noticing the variation in the brewing results. It’s not my favorite, but I’d buy it again, especially since a tub lasts a long time and is cheap.

Finances

😐

I caught up on some of my church donation backlog. Regular donations to church (usually 10% of income) are a Christian tradition and one that is deeply ingrained in me. But as someone who has only paid spotty attention to his finances, I’ve gone for long periods without giving as much as I intend. Then every once in a while I wake up from my negligence and catch up.

This time, after calculating and donating my salary-based backlog, I realized I needed to account for my freelance income, and since I’m more financially literate now, I decided it would make sense to pay “interest” based on inflation. I calculated the remaining amount, but I decided to give the remainder once I have a better picture of my total financial situation and other factors.

I took a closer look at retirement and found out it costs too much. My question was, if I’m expecting to retire in two to three decades and to spend in retirement at about the rate I do now, how much do I need to contribute to my retirement accounts, given expected inflation and investment return rates? The Wiley books don’t really address this, but The Balance comes much closer. The answer, if I’m running my numbers right: about a third to half my current salary. It’s not feasible, and it’s further motivation to increase my income.

This is one reason I wondered how low-income earners could ever practice the typical notion of financial responsibility. It’s way too expensive. Maybe the real answer is: Don’t retire.

This week starts the Thinkulum project month of June. My plan is to finish my cost estimates in the first couple of weeks and plan my investments (or at least learn in detail how to plan them) in the last couple of weeks. I’m thinking in July I’ll put my financial plans in motion.

Business

😎

In The Messy Middle, Scott Belsky tells us how to keep a startup alive. It’s aimed at founders, so on the surface it isn’t that relevant to me (yet), but I’m intrigued by the idea of managing myself as a team and my life as a startup, so I’d like to study how I could adapt his advice. One reviewer complained that the advice was disappointingly standard, but I still found it thought provoking. It got me thinking about how to be a quality employee and about the main business venture I have in mind. My one gripe is that the advice seemed anecdotal rather than statistical, which I suppose is common for books like this.

Rescue the Problem Project by Todd Williams appealed to many of the values that are especially vivid to me right now. It highlighted the power of thoroughness and order. It reminded me how deeply I care about principled action. It told me that with the right perspective and enough preparation, you can face tough problems with confidence. And it reminded me that the ideal solution can be the wrong one if it doesn’t fit the project’s constraints, a caution I often need to hear. The book was a satisfying listen.

One quibble I had is that he thinks agile isn’t suited for large R&D projects, but one thing that’s drawn my attention back to agile recently is Everyday Astronaut’s discussion of SpaceX’s development process. I suppose you could say project size is relative. If your budget is big enough, iterating on an enormous rocket every month isn’t a big deal.

The Art of Taking Minutes by Delores Benson is a dated handbook on meeting minutes that nevertheless feels like a solid starting point. I bought this on sale a while back because I care a lot about recordkeeping. But I knew it was time to listen when Todd Williams told me meeting minutes were important for project recovery. I was intrigued by the glimpse Benson gave into corporate life, and I have a new appreciation for the work of a secretary. The book even had a handy list of common terms and phrases you can use in your minutes write-ups, which is something I value because most writing should be as mechanized as possible.

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Weeknote for 5/9/2021

Posted on May 9, 2021 by Andy

Blog

😐

A couple of housekeeping notes about changes in the next month or so.

I’ll be ending or replacing the audio version of the posts. The audio service I’m using for the blog is a good one, but it costs more than the use I’m getting out of it. There are some free services I’ll look at again.

I’m switching to a different email subscription service. Google is ending FeedBurner’s email subscriptions in July, so I’ll be looking for another provider.

Productivity

😎

My time management system is continuing to improve. Every few days I think of a new change to try. You may have noticed I’ve posted the last few blog updates on time. Sunday is the deadline I’ve had in mind since I started my weeknotes, but it wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I decided to imagine I had a weeknote presentation Sundays at 5pm I had to be on time for. That’s done the trick, at least for now. It also helps that I give myself a couple of hours to write the post. My time management changes have begun merging the two different systems I’ve been using at work and at home. I’m using my work timer for some of my home tasks, and this week I’ll try planning out my work day with time blocks.

Productivity for INFPs by Amanda Linehan nudges me to experiment with intuitive planning. Like The Art of Procrastination, it highlighted the importance of individual differences when it comes to managing life. She wrote the book (or the blog posts that became the book) because the typical productivity advice didn’t work for her and she found her own techniques that do. The book was another good catalyst for reflecting on how I work, since as an INFJ, I have a lot of overlap with INFPs. Interestingly, it seems that one way we differ is that Linehan wanted to focus on the intuitive side we share that I typically discount. It makes me want to experiment with paying more explicit attention to my intuition when I’m planning. However, I’m not giving up my lists! She trusts her mind to remember much more than I trust mine.

Making It All Work by David Allen is a large and familiar stepping stone on my current path to revamp my productivity system. I’ve read both this book and Getting Things Done before, and since GTD is basically how I like to work and I reread GTD last year, I thought it’d be good to reread MIAW. This book is a slightly different angle on the system and goes into more depth on certain topics. Actually right now my path for this project is like ice, and I’m sliding down it freely. Thanks to my familiarity with GTD and its compatibility with the way I think, along with the progress of my outlook since last time I visited it, it’s sparking many thoughts. Allen is right: Returning to the material does reveal new insights.

Finances

🤔

I came up with a ballpark estimate for disability insurance. My sources say to expect a premium of 1-3% of your income, so I went with 3%. A slightly intimidating number, but still doable. I’m training myself to think of disability insurance as just another given of financial life, like health and auto insurance. My employer’s benefits already include both short- and long-term disability coverage, but I may want to supplement it to cover a larger percentage of my income and so I can hopefully have some coverage in case of unemployment. Later in this project I’ll look into the specifics of buying the insurance.

I found out I’m already in the advised range for retirement saving. I’ve seen ranges of 12-15% and 15-20% of your income, including any employer contributions. If I’m reading my numbers right, I’m at 15.6%. Next I’ll look at retirement savings advice in more detail, because I’m still confused about things like how inflation fits into these calculations.

Housekeeping

😐

I’ve been getting my old CRT TV ready to sell. Now that my cleaning is under control, I’m starting to add tidying to my housekeeping time. The first item on that agenda is the big TV taking up space in the corner of my living room. This will probably lead to organizing my closet, since it’s been annoying digging through my storage boxes to find the equipment I need to test the TV. My digging has already unearthed a digital kitchen scale I forgot I had, a thing I was about to buy, so who knows what other treasures I’ll find?

Health

🙄

Wednesday was my latest ulcerative colitis treatment, two weeks overdue. I’ve had some run-ins with our complicated medical bureaucracy in the past, but this time it stepped its game up a level. My pharmacy entered some kind of business arrangement with another pharmacy, which was now supposed to be handling my medication. But they couldn’t fill it because of the way my insurance was classifying my treatments. With help from the specialist nurse at my doctor’s office, I spent the month of April making many phone calls to resolve the situation. I got switched to yet another pharmacy, and after a few more calls they worked out how to get my medication shipped to the treatment center.

This experience has revealed to me that it really can pay to be your own advocate and not just trust the system to get the right things done. I’m grateful to my nurse for encouraging me to take this approach. It actually felt pretty empowering. But I know a lot of people have even more tangled and stubborn situations than mine, and it seems like there should be a more systemic solution than expecting everyone to manage the bureaucracy from the bottom up.

Technology

😐

I started setting up my new Surface. My 5-year-old Surface Pro 4 was physically breaking, the screen bowing outward and starting to separate from the frame, which my work Surface had also done. So I ordered a new one, a Surface Pro 6, which isn’t the newest model but almost as good, and I saved $500. Last time I thought I’d use my Surface as just a dumb terminal to my desktop, but it ended up being my main computer, so this time I got the highest specs I could, 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB hard drive. I was a little uneasy buying it from a random third party supplier over Amazon, but despite being an old model, it was sold new, and so far so good.

Unlike some people, I don’t get excited about setting up a new computer. I’m just trying to get stuff done, so interrupting myself to spend hours replicating my setup is a chore. But I have the basics done so it’s usable for my everyday purposes, and the rest I can set up as I need it. I can even treat some of it as housekeeping, since I have a mountain of files that need to be tidied.

Posted in Blog, Computers, Health, Housekeeping, Money, Productivity, Site updates, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 5/2/2021

Posted on May 2, 2021 by Andy

Productivity

😎

My time blocking is still working. In terms of productivity, this is basically the minimum state I’ve wanted to reach, being able to plan a reasonable day and do it. The few times I’ve gotten to this point, it hasn’t lasted, though before last year it always fell apart after only a few days or a week. Last year it lasted a while longer. For now this way of living feels very sustainable, and I’m sure a large part of it is that I’m getting more sleep. Another factor is that Elastic Habits is giving my schedule more purpose and specific guidelines, to maintain my chosen habits.

I’m reworking my productivity system. This involves rethinking the projects I sort tasks into and regularly assessing how my productivity techniques are going. I’m treating these system updates as a project and giving them time in my daily schedule.

The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll is a 2-in-1 productivity system and general self-help book. Since I’m done with financial books for now and productivity is one of my current themes, I’m going through some productivity books before I get to entrepreneurship. I figured the official bullet journal book would be a good source of ideas for ways to revamp my system, as well as ideas for analog information management, which is a topic of interest to me.

The book surpassed my expectations. It’s well written, incorporates the kinds of techniques I would use from software development, and suggests ways to use your BuJo to help you find meaning, set goals, and deal with life’s troubles. I might try bullet journaling. I can think of some uses. But I’m addicted to the power of digital information management, so I’d need to think carefully about the role each system should play.

The Art of Procrastination by John Perry is a funny though wordy book organized around a few good ideas. It’s for people who get things done in order to put off more important things. It doesn’t seem to be relevant to my life right now, though it has been at other times, but the advice seems helpful. It did get me thinking about the way I work.

One tip that did seem helpful to me is to work with people who aren’t procrastinators. I have noticed that it’s easier to stay on task this way, and so when my friends tell me they’re putting something off, I ask them about their task in case the conversation helps them get started. This is one way journaling my work can be helpful for me. It’s the next best thing to conversation. I should make more consistent use of it.

Housekeeping

🙂

I was able to spend less time on cleaning. I took care of some more catch-up cleaning and only needed about half an hour each day. This left me a lot more time for project work, which is the balance I’m looking for.

I reduced my big cleaning schedule down to a one-page checklist. I found out most things in my apartment don’t need to be cleaned every week, so my new schedule is to clean everything “as needed.” But I don’t always remember where to look, so I made a list based on the original schedule. It’s literally a checklist of things to check to see if I need to clean them.

Finances

🙂

I finished planning my savings goals for technology, clothing, and home goods. In addition to the cost of each item, I spent some time adding three other pieces of info: (1) On a scale of 1 to 5 I rated the certainty that I wanted to buy each item. (2) I estimated the time frame I was planning to make the purchase (in 1 month, half a year, 1 year, 5 years, or 10 years). (3) Using the same set of durations, I estimated how often I’d need to replace the item.

I wondered if I was wasting my time deciding all this, but it turned out the certainty ratings and initial purchase time frames were helpful for planning what to buy now. And using the time frames to calculate the monthly costs told me my existing budget for clothing and miscellaneous purchases was pretty accurate. The monthly costs also gave me a number for my tech budget.

I fixed my emergency fund calculation, and now it looks more manageable. Next I have some scary numbers to add in, like health and disability insurance.

Principles of Economics by OpenStax gives me a basecamp for exploring economic thinking. I realized a few months ago that economics is one of the frameworks I see life through. I’m always thinking about how to make decisions and plan using limited resources and how to increase my outcomes along various values. But I understand this way of thinking in a very piecemeal fashion. It’s nice to have a whole field to explore where people have worked out many of the issues in a disciplined fashion. This textbook will be a good resource to return to as I work through the details.

A project idea that developed as I listened to all the math flow by is to create a simulation of the world economy from the ideas in this book. It’d be an experiment in learning about simulations, economics, and mathematical modeling. It’d be interesting to see what gaps in the model I’d have to fill with my own speculation or additional research. I don’t know when I’d get around to this project, however.

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Weeknote for 4/25/2021

Posted on April 25, 2021 by Andy

Productivity

😎

I’m time blocking again, and so far it’s working very well. My disorganized evenings the week before didn’t leave much time for projects, and I spent most of the time blogging. This highlighted a dissatisfaction I’d been having, that I was developing some good routines that were tangibly improving my life, but only in its day-to-day aspects and not in relation to my longer-term goals. I needed to carve out time for my projects. Returning to an idea I picked up from Cal Newport, I created a new spreadsheet template that lets me plan out blocks of my personal time and then record how I actually spend it. Comparing my planned and actual schedules should help me plan more realistically. And planning out my whole day instead of only part of it should keep my evening tasks from being derailed by a disorderly afternoon.

Housekeeping

😎

I did a bunch of cleaning. Now that I had a tentative cleaning schedule and a way to reserve time for it, I spent the week trying it out, especially tackling the harder parts that have been burdening my mind with their griminess. I took a different room each day and dedicated an hour to however much I could get done, with exceptions for a couple of rooms that took more work. It definitely feels like my home has entered a new plane of clean. Next my goal is to reduce my regular cleaning time to 30 minutes a day, which I’d like to spend on the Maker Method‘s “express clean” for the day’s room plus one or two extra spots that need attention.

Finances

🙂

I continued researching my simpler financial goals. I spent last week on technology and home goods I might want to buy over the next few years. Thanks to my time blocking, I was able to get through much more of it than before. For this research I’m focusing on how much money I’ll need for these potential expenses and over what time frame. Later I’ll look at how to reach these goals.

Decolonizing Wealth by Edgar Villanueva (video interview) got me thinking about what to invest in. I rarely hear from Native Americans, so his comments were very interesting and thought provoking. The primary audience for the book is philanthropists, so listening to it was like peeking into another world, but it did get me thinking more seriously about socially responsible investing (Ben Felix’s take), or even the more ambitious concept Villanueva prefers, mission-related investing.

Movies

🙂

Wall Street left me with mixed opinions. I wasn’t a fan of the soundtrack, and I’m sure some of the casting choices could’ve been better. But it’s a very quotable movie (I found out it’s where “Greed is good” came from), and I’m happy to report that the villain is not my only favorite character this time. I also liked Bud’s father, Carl Fox, and his boss, Lou Mannheim, who reminded me of the authors of the investing books I listened to, people in finance who actually have a heart. And thanks to those books, I again halfway understood the plot of the movie. Hopefully once I dig into my own investing decisions, I’ll learn enough to understand four-fifths.

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Weeknote for 4/18/2021

Posted on April 18, 2021 by Andy

Website

😐

I updated my website software. I made a WordPress update, which broke the blog, updated my PHP version, which broke the wiki, and updated MediaWiki, which fixed the wiki except for the abandoned extensions I’ll have to replace. The wiki took up my project time on Saturday because it’s less automatic than updating WordPress, which is why I haven’t updated it in a few years, but it took less time than I expected. Now everything is shiny and new, but only behind the scenes.

Finances

🙂

I planned out my simplest goal, my next car. I’ll try saving what I paid for my current one, adjusted for inflation, with a target date of 15 years from that purchase. I’m not sure how used car prices behave over time, but I’m thinking they’ll either rise with inflation or they’ll stay about the same and I’ll be able to buy something more expensive, maybe an electric car. Or maybe I won’t need a car by then, who knows? The world keeps changing.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator has lessons even for people who aren’t into stocks. It’s the fictional memoir of a stock prodigy’s journey of learning. I recognized some of its advice from other investing books, such as buying as the price is rising from a dip and selling as it’s falling from the peak. If you can wait out the stretches of jargon-heavy narrative, you’ll hear that even a natural has to learn, and learning can be found in any experience—failure, success, and even partial success. My other key takeaway was that some fields are extraordinarily counterintuitive, so it takes exceptional discipline to succeed at them. Some fields are practically antisocial. In stocks you have to follow the logic of the market and not the pressures of social connections (such as tips, favors, and the enthusiasm of the masses).

Video

😎

I kicked off my finance movie project with Trading Places. It was okay. My favorite character was the affably evil Randolph Duke. Trying to understand the trading floor scene will be a project in itself. The movies in my project are from this Investopedia article and a Letterboxd list or two.

I found some good YouTube channels on finance. These stand out to me because they seem sensible and well researched. I’ve been watching through their uploads.

Life maintenance

🙂

My whiteboard of life maintenance is filling up. I added a printout of my new cleaning schedule based on Clean My Space. I settled on a one-month table with a column for each week so I can check off each task for that week. The three pages take up the bottom half of the whiteboard in my bedroom. The top half has my Elastic Habits printouts and an empty space that will be filled with a graph for my habit scores, once I figure out how to make it. It all looks very sterile and corporate except for the colorful magnets I’m using to hold up the pages.

 

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Posted in Housekeeping, Life maintenance, Life management, Money, Movies, Productivity, The Thinkulum, Videos, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 4/11/2021

Posted on April 15, 2021 by Andy

Productivity

😐

I’m getting back into GTD. I’m trying to use it as a low-energy activity to stay productive when I’m tired after work. So far I’ve mostly been organizing the uncategorized tasks I’ve accumulated in Nirvana over the years.

Housekeeping

😐

I decided on a cleaning schedule, and now I need a layout for it. I’m loosely using the schedule in Clean My Space by Melissa Maker, adjusted for Elastic Habits. That is, I’ll do more on some days and less on others, depending on circumstances. I’m trying to find a way to display it so I minimize the amount of printing it takes.

Coffee

😑

Barissimo Breakfast Blend: 2/5. It was good when I could get it to taste right, but it was finicky and unreliable. It often had the too-sweet problem I had with Dunkin, though not as severely.

Finances

🙂

My next task is to quantify my financial goals. I’ll see if I can do one per week.

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain made sense to me and pushed me further away from cryptocurrency. It wasn’t exactly a balanced discussion, but if Gerard is missing the point of crypto and blockchain, it at least gives me talking points to research. I do want to look into blockchain and Ethereum sometime just to see how they work.

Investing for a Lifetime takes a deep, mathematical dive into retirement planning. It came at a good time in my reading schedule, since I’m at the point of examining my financial goals and finding strategies to reach them. I may use it as my starting point for studying investing in detail, since he carefully lines up the options and weighs their pros and cons.

How a Second Grader Beats Wall Street takes a deep, amusing dive into the Boglehead three-fund portfolio. I would recommend this one over the similar Larimore book because Roth goes into much more detail. But while Roth tries to keep investing simple, in my experience with these books there’s only so far that can go. There are always caveats and circumstances to consider, and the arguments for the various options get a little involved. It’s hard to sort out while listening. But I was able to pick out some of the factors to compare, which I’ll nail down when I come back and study it. I’m coming to the conclusion that the key to really grasping investing is to make comparison tables and graph a bunch of equations.

With that, I’ve finished the Humble Book Bundle on personal finance and investing by Wiley. All in all an excellent collection. Of course, as a neophyte I can’t properly evaluate them, but I feel they’ve put me in a much better position than I ever have been to understand finance and make financial decisions.

I’m not quite done with financial books. I have the OpenStax economics textbook to finish, a novel, a book on social justice, and some Nassim Taleb to revisit. Then, unless my financial reading list expands even more, I’ll be on to entrepreneurship.

Exercise

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I’m getting used to walking. My goal was to increase my endurance, and now I feel unsatisfied with less than 30 minutes. I’ve rarely ever wanted to challenge myself physically, but I’m starting to see how it could be appealing.

Video

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I’ve expanded the walkthrough travel videos I’m watching. First it was deserts, and now I’m taking my virtual trips everywhere. Here are a few you might like:

Posted in Coffee, Exercise, Money, Productivity, Travel, Videos, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 4/4/2021

Posted on April 5, 2021 by Andy

Blog

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I’m rethinking how I write these weeknotes. I spent way too much time last week writing my update. And what I was trying to write would’ve taken much more time, but I scaled it back. Since I need to spend that time on my substantive projects, I’m taking a closer look at how to fence in the blogging.

Finances

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I finished my taxes. It was more work than I expected. Next is planning the rest of the project and continuing to improve my budget setup.

I looked into the FIRE movement. That’s Financial Independence, Retire Early. It came up in some of the income videos I’ve been watching. It appeals to me because I’ve been casting around for specific financial goals and strategies, and this movement has them. I’m toying with the idea of Barista FIRE, where you semi-retire and work part time. I suspect the AI work I want to do might involve an uncomfortable pay cut, so it’d be nice to be able to make up the difference.

Cryptocurrency Investing for Dummies still left me wary of crypto. I did end up with a more complete and organized understanding of it, but I’d have to do a lot of paper trading to convince myself crypto’s prices are at all predictable. I still don’t get what fundamentals a cryptocurrency can have that would anchor its value.

Video

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I finished Twin Peaks: The Return. This completes the whole Twin Peaks saga, unless they make another season. I loved this season. It was interesting and weird to the end, and it was more my style of weird than the earlier installments. It was also very confusing, so after the finale I immediately turned to YouTube for commentary. Here’s a fascinating take by Nyx Fears. That was all I got around to, but I’ll watch others later.

Westworld (1973) is disappointing on AI but effective as a suspense and action film. I’ve returned to my AI movie project, which I’ll intersperse with some finance movies. This one is an object lesson on mistakes in risk management. Sometimes our disaster mitigation is too little too late. Michael Crichton was very expository in the two books of his I’ve read, so I was expecting more on the concepts, but evidently that’s not the kind of movie he was making. I did notice it was surprisingly current with the idea that the robots’ developers didn’t understand how they worked and that some of the designs were produced by computers. My next AI “movie” will be the Westworld TV series.

Outdoors

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I accidentally found out I can visit the lake closest to home. I thought it was strictly functional and blocked off by trees, but it turns out there’s a path around it. So now I have a new everyday walking spot.

 

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Spirituality

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Happy Easter!

I made a tentative daily schedule of liturgies from Every Moment Holy. Even though Lent is over, this project will continue. Next I’ll experiment with following the schedule.

Posted in AI, Blog, Dusk, Money, Movies, Nature, Spirituality, TV, Weeknotes | Leave a comment