Weeknote for 7/25/2021

Posted on July 25, 2021 by Andy

Finances

😕

I looked a little into estate planning and medium-term investing and defined some deliverables. I struggled to get anywhere on this last week. Fatigue and other tasks kept intruding on my project time. And I didn’t have a good plan of attack on the work itself. Defining the deliverables gave me some concrete goals, so now I feel like I have an anchor for my planning. And I decided that instead of frantically trying to survey a bunch of sources at once, I’ll study the Bogleheads’ advice and bring in others if I have time. This week I’ll touch on my budget algorithm and then spend most of the time on investing.

Productivity

🙂

I made some more timers. One was for my daily Admin sessions, and the others were variations on my morning and evening routines. The routines needed medium and short timers for the days when my schedule is more cramped. The Admin timer is already helping me limit the sessions so they don’t run over into the main event, my project time. Now I just need to limit everything else.

I’m learning about waste and continuous improvement from Agile. I investigate Agile periodically, and each time I take something new from it. This time those are the concepts that are standing out to me. My timers have been a great help for eliminating waste. On continuous improvement, I’ve decided that instead of wringing my hands about project problems while trying to forge ahead with the work, I’ll try being a Toyota assembly line and stop the whole operation to address the problem before continuing.

Health

🙂

My doctor told me not to worry about COVID. The part of the immune system the vaccine works with isn’t affected by my medication. And the part my med does suppress is what makes COVID infections so severe, so the medication will actually help me if I do get infected. So now I’m just following the CDC’s guidelines for vaccinated people.

Posted in COVID-19, Money, Productivity, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 7/18/2021

Posted on July 18, 2021 by Andy

Blog

🙂

I got the new email subscription set up. The signup form is in the sidebar, ready for your address.

Finances

🙂

Last week I reduced my monthly expenses by about $80. I cancelled some subscriptions, went back to doing my own grocery shopping, and did some research on lowering my auto insurance premiums. Friday I called my insurer and was able to apply some discounts. It’s the kind of conversation I don’t like having, so I was proud of myself for pushing through it and getting it done.

This week I’ll start some research on medium-term investing and estate planning. That way I’ll have the rest of the month to process what I learn. I’ll also work on my Quicken budget, since I can never do things the easy way and Quicken doesn’t quite accommodate my complicated budget algorithm.

Business

🙂

Principles of Marketing reinforced the notion of marketing as the company’s general customer-facing role. Whereas before I thought it was almost a synonym of advertising, I now see it as all the activities that shape and communicate the value the business offers. This includes product development, so when software developers determine a minimum viable product to create, they’re performing a marketing function. The book also gave me a sense of the many means marketers have at their disposal to get you to buy their stuff. Just imagine being pulled under by a giant, tentacular squid, and that’s basically any marketing department.

Faith Driven Entrepreneur applies general principles of Christian living to a business context. It pays particular attention to issues entrepreneurs commonly face, such as stress and loneliness. The book is basically a sermon, fairly short and not very detailed, but it reminds you of the broad ideas you already know, maybe correcting some of your misconceptions (such as the idea that religious professions are more spiritual than secular ones), so you can think and live a little more Christianly. The book had a few examples to illustrate its ideas, and it reminded me that examples to study are what I really want from discussions like this. So if you ever write a sermonesque book, just pack it with a ton of examples and I’ll give it an extra star.

Health

😐

Wednesday I crossed the CDC’s threshold into full vaccination. But I’m not quite out of the COVIDy woods yet. The medication I’m on for ulcerative colitis is an immunosuppressant, so there’s a chance my vaccine was less effective than normal, and I’m not sure yet how to tell. Luckily I have a doctor visit scheduled for this Thursday, so I can ask what he thinks and then decide on my COVID policy. Meanwhile, I’m cautiously reentering society with my mask on. On Saturday I got a haircut and did some grocery shopping, and this week I’m going back to the office.

Space

🙂

Sunday morning I watched the age of space tourism begin. Richard Branson reached space on his company’s spaceplane, and this week Jeff Bezos will have his turn. I used to think space tourism was a frivolous idea, but now I think it’ll help people think of space as a normal place to visit, so the idea of living and working there will be less of a leap.

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Weeknote for 7/11/2021

Posted on July 11, 2021 by Andy

Blog

😐

MailPoet has taken a lot of time to set up. However, I’m down to the last few steps, so my email subscribers will be getting a request to reconfirm their subscriptions very soon.

I unsubscribed from my text-to-speech service, Play.ht. It’s a good service, but it costs more than the benefit I get from it. I’m not sure which of its features are available for free, but if it ends up being too restricted, I’ll switch to BingeWith and see how that goes.

Productivity

😐

I failed to create a project map. For the final week of the productivity project month, I tried to start mapping out the relationships among my major projects and missions. My main goals were (1) to give myself a set of predefined projects for easily organizing new tasks that crop up and (2) to move myself toward managing my life like a program of projects. Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far, mostly because I spent too much time on other things. I’ll probably pick it up again after this month’s finance project.

My everyday admin activities are taking too much time. Since I’m switching to another project for this month, I’ll only be able to improve the admin procedure on the side, but it’ll be my top side project.

🙂

Overall, last month’s productivity system project was very beneficial. The routine timers made my mornings and nights more predictable, giving me more time for activities I care about. I turned task management into a daily priority, so I have a basis for getting things done in a timely fashion. I intensified my use of procedures, which should help me continuously improve the way I live. And I reintroduced myself to Notion, which is a potent tool for managing projects and notes.

Finances

😐

July’s project will be a return to personal finance and investing. I plan to reduce some expenses, finish setting up my rather complicated Quicken budget, look into estate planning, and hopefully do some actual investing.

Business

😎

Principles of Management by OpenStax gave me a way to think about my life goals. The whole book was interesting and potentially relevant to me, but the main chapters I cared about were on decision making and planning and controlling. Management along these lines is one of the major mental frameworks I discovered in myself this year, the other being economics.

The planning and controlling chapter especially caught my attention with the idea of domain or directional planning, which defines actions that could lead to a range of acceptable goals within a particular domain, as opposed to goal planning, which defines actions leading to a specific goal. Domain planning is an apt description of the way I’ve been planning my life, since my goals are very general and hazy, but they definitely lie in one direction and not in others, and the plans I’m making will push me in that direction. Seeing this directionality more sharply was the main benefit of the little project mapping I did last week. The chapter’s discussion also brings up hybrid planning, where a specific goal emerges as the situation becomes clearer over time, which is what I expect to happen with my life planning.

Space

😎

To have something spacey to stare at, I made a multistream of space footage streams. It has NASA’s two channels, an ISS stream of Earth, footage from ISS spacewalks, panoramic views from Mars, and a LabPadre cam showing the SpaceX Starship launch site.

Posted in Blog, Business, Money, Productivity, Space, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 7/4/2021

Posted on July 4, 2021 by Andy

Blog

😐

I’m working on the email subscription replacement for Feedburner, which will be MailPoet. If you currently get my blog updates over email, in the next day or three I’ll be sending you an email with instructions on how to confirm your new subscription.

Productivity

😐

Through much struggle, I got my administration procedure into a usable state. “Administration” covers all the bureaucratic and technical tasks that keep my life flowing smoothly and legally. The basic idea of my procedure is to choose the projects and tasks for the week during the weekly session, then choose the day’s tasks in the daily session, while also funneling new inputs into their proper buckets, GTD style. This week I’ll see where I can get with mapping out my big list of projects.

Business

😎

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries expands and sharpens my knowledge of agile thinking. Some negative reviews made me think the book would just be a bit of fluff, but instead it added significant insights to my understanding of iterative and incremental development. One that stood out is the need to measure the right metrics in your product and marketing experiments. Not only do you need to measure something, but it needs to be something specific and also not a vanity metric that makes you look good but tells you nothing useful. This book will be another one I’ll study, even if only for managing my personal projects.

Food

🙂

Barissimo Fair Trade Colombia Ground Coffee: 4/5. It was consistently good. I also liked Beaumont’s Colombian pretty well, so I’ll be interested to see if the pattern holds with other brands.

😩

I spent the first half of the week cooking so I wouldn’t have to if my COVID shot made me too sick. I’ve been working through the recipes in Betty Crocker One-Dish Meals, starting with the soups for dinner and the salads for lunch. Letting the cookbook plan my meals saves me time on deciding what to make while keeping me from getting bored. I’ve found that wanting to explore the cookbook conflicts with wanting to cook bigger batches less often, which I was certainly wishing for last week after so much time in the kitchen. But smaller batches means that if I don’t like a recipe, I won’t have so much of it to eat. In a future post, once I’ve rated the recipes I’ve made, I might list my favorites so far.

Health

🤔

I got my second Moderna shot Wednesday afternoon. Thursday was a little rough, with fatigue most of the day and in the evening a fever, so I skipped my walk, but I worked a full day from home, and Friday I was feeling mostly better. I imagine I’ll still take most of my usual COVID precautions even after the vaccination has taken effect, but we’ll see how I feel about things then.

People

😔

Tuesday morning I found out one of my old friends from high school, Peter, had died over the weekend. I didn’t learn any details except that it was unexpected and apparently of natural causes. We’d been mostly out of touch since high school, except for being connected on Facebook. But even in the extra-loner period of my life before I discovered what friendship meant, he’d made it into the circle of people I considered friends. He was vivacious and gregarious, intelligent and creative. I appreciated reading the thoughts and stories of people who’d stayed close to him.

Posted in Blog, Business, Coffee, Cooking, COVID-19, Death, Productivity, Site updates, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 6/27/2021

Posted on June 27, 2021 by Andy

Productivity

😎

I made a couple of interval timers to march me through my morning and night routines. A sign of a disturbed mind, I’m sure. I chose those routines because in theory they should fit into reliable time frames, but in practice they don’t. I get sidetracked very easily, so the time expands and runs into other things I need to do, like go to bed or to work.

So far the timers have been very effective. They’re only training wheels, so hopefully once I’ve practiced enough, I can drop them. I’ll probably make them for other activities too. Anything with a consistent procedure is a good candidate.

I’ve replaced housekeeping in my schedule with blocks for administration and side projects. Those blocks each get half an hour. I’m still housekeeping, but I’ve split it into two parts: tidying as my main side project and cleaning once a month. For my elastic habits, I’ve replaced housekeeping with administration, since the river of my life was getting clogged by my inconsistent attention to task management and miscellaneous life maintenance.

Housekeeping

😐

I’m ordering my categories for tidying based on annoyance and speed. Last week I finished up clothes and linens. I was going to resist Marie Kondo’s “correct order” of tidying (clothes, books, papers, miscellany, and sentimental items), because she cares too much about clothes and too little about books. But I ended up starting with clothes anyway because I didn’t have space to store the boxes they were in, and I was tired of having them sit out in the open, and I didn’t think they’d take too long. I had towels jumbled in with the clothes, so I tidied the linens too. The next category I’m working on is cleaning supplies and other household items.

Finances

🤔

Rich Dad Poor Dad is another mix of good and suspect advice. I listened to this one because his distinction between assets and liabilities seemed helpful, which came up in this video. I thought this Bogleheads thread had some good comments, especially this referenced critique by John Reed and this post on finance books in general.

But criticisms aside, I think the book has some value. I was intrigued by the “financial genius” he thinks everyone has. I doubt we do, but it would be useful to unpack the concept. And I’m definitely on board with his take on games in education. A game is instruction that is personalized because the player is confronted with their own unique interaction with it.

TV

🙂

I started watching Person of Interest. I’m four episodes in. I was feeling nostalgic for older action shows, and this is one I’d been meaning to get to. I’m sort of considering it part of my AI watching project, but even though AI is part of the premise, so far it’s not as much an AI show as a vigilante antihero show.

I like it so far. It’s fun to see what kinds of twists the creators come up with on their premise. And there are a few mysteries that are kind of interesting, so I’m curious how much they’ll do with those. I’ll probably intersperse this show with other things so I don’t feel like it’s holding up my other viewing. I’ve been wanting some space shows too. Maybe I’ll catch up on The Orville.

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Weeknote for 6/20/2021

Posted on June 20, 2021 by Andy

Productivity

😐

I planned the productivity system update project. After umpteen projects, I’m still figuring out how to plan them. This time I listed the sources I wanted to consult, the needs the project would address, the topics the project would involve, the deliverables, and possible next steps. I’m going to try to take an agile approach, where I do a task for a time boxed period, then decide what task makes sense to do next.

I set up some new daily schedule templates. This was the first substantive task. I created schedules for a few different kinds of days, and I added more time for miscellaneous tasks so I wouldn’t put off things like email replies for so long. Since Elastic Habits tends to define its habit levels in terms of time, I’m going to rethink how I implement it so it doesn’t interfere with my priorities.

My theme right now is working more efficiently. The main work I have in mind is reading and writing. My thought is that I’m trying to accomplish things in my off hours that other people do in their day jobs, so I’m going to need to get more of the important things done in less time. One key I’m finding is to try to work breadth first so I don’t get lost in the first step and leave no time for the rest.

I’ll also need to save time during my regular non-project tasks. An experiment I’ll try is creating interval timers to direct my daily routines using the Seconds app. The idea is to train myself not to waste time during the side tasks I do every day.

Business

🤔

The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss is a strange mix of good and questionable advice. It’s good to rethink what you want out of life. It’s good to consider breaking rules that are unhelpful and unnecessary. It’s probably not good to break rules like honesty, which is what a lot of his techniques amount to, in my opinion. I like that he goes in depth on setting up passive income streams, but I’m still not sure what to think of that concept or his specific advice. Passive income is on my agenda to research.

The book is really two books in one. The first is how to extricate yourself from normal work to do what you love; the second is how to become a world traveler, since that’s of course what you love. I can’t say I want to quit my job to spend my life on travel, but I’ll give him credit for getting me to think about were I might want to go and what I’d do once I got there. I ended up wondering if it’s possible to rent a room in an old British mansion. I’d spend the whole time wandering around, taking pictures, and writing about what it all means to me.

Movies

🤔

Parasite got me thinking about the gridlock of economic class. I was confused about what I should be taking from the ending, but once I found out, the problem solver in me felt a little bleak. The quote that sticks with me is Ki-taek’s weary commentary in the middle: “You know what kind of plan never fails? No plan. No plan at all. You know why? Because life cannot be planned.” It’s certainly the pattern of the story.

It highlighted for me that when life turns you around, it helps to have a moral compass. It seems to me things in the movie go the most wrong when the characters’ disrespect for each other shows through. But it’s the type of disdain that could easily be a blind spot, which highlights our need for prophets and mentors who will show us the dangers we put ourselves in.

Posted in Business, Movies, Productivity, Travel, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Weeknote for 6/13/2021

Posted on June 13, 2021 by Andy

Finances

😐

I finished my expense goal calculations with grad school and a pet. For grad school I chose about 20 schools for AI and cognitive science based on their rankings at US News and CollegeHippo, and I gathered tuition data from CollegeHippo. The costs were intimidating but not unexpected, $50,000 a year toward the upper end of the range. In this phase of my planning I didn’t look at financial aid or researcher salaries, so I’m left in an uncertain state about whether it’d be a good investment, but that’ll come eventually.

I haven’t had any pets since I moved away from home, and the place I live now doesn’t allow them, but if I get one someday, it’ll most likely be a cat, so I based my calculations on that. The articles I looked at gave me a rough estimate of $1,000 a year.

I set up my freelance invoicing in Quicken. Previously I did my invoicing via a rickety set of scripts I wrote that grabbed and formatted data from GnuCash, when they worked correctly. When they didn’t, I had to fix them, and the result was that I regularly put off invoicing for months at a time. Invoicing with Quicken turns out to still be somewhat cumbersome but hopefully less glitchy.

My finances project is on hold for the next few weeks. But I’ll probably still work on it on the side, mostly in the realm of reducing my regular expenses.

Business

😎

Entrepreneurship by OpenStax makes starting a business feel difficult but doable. On the difficult side, it laid out many, many issues to research, decisions to make, and risks to handle. On the doable side, it presented the many resources available to help with those challenges. As usual, the book kept me thinking about my plans in this area and sparked some ideas. One of them was to practice by applying some of the book’s methods to the simpler business ideas I’ve picked up from YouTube. It even gave me a potential direction to take my next, non-entrepreneurial job search, whenever that will be.

Productivity

😎

I learned that The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is, in fact, very good and not a book of clichés. After hearing about this book for decades, hearing Dan Charnas reference it again finally motivated me to put it on my to-read list, and my library hold on the audiobook came up last week. Even though many of the concepts in the book were familiar, what kept them from being clichés is that they were fertile. You could plant them in your life, and they’d bear fruit. Of the many quality ideas Covey puts forward, one I keep returning to is to schedule activities from each of your key roles each week. I’m also intrigued by his principles and techniques of deep communication.

This project month of Sol I’ll work on my productivity system. This time, in addition to GTD, I’ll incorporate ideas from Everything in Its Place, The 7 Habits, and Algorithms to Live By.

Housekeeping

🙂

I started the purging phase of tidying with my shipping materials and clothes. Half of tidying is purging and organizing. The other half is coming up with a system to keep it that way, which is both my MO these days and an emphasis of The Home Edit. So as I purged, I wrote down the criteria I was coming up with, which I’d previously also done for my book weeding.

Coffee

😐

Barissimo Donut Store Blend: 2/5. The quality was very inconsistent and ended up sour too much of the time.

TV

😎

Westworld is a fascinating examination of AI, freedom, and invisible oppression. I finished season 3 last week. I’ve been watching the show via Netflix DVD. It’s many times better than the movie it’s based on, which I wrote about in an earlier post. (If you want to watch it, keep in mind that it earns its TV-MA rating.) My impression is that stories about AI have gotten smarter in recent years. If that’s true, I imagine it’s because of the public’s easy access to information about the current AI spring. My AI takeaway from the show is that in contrast with the dangers of making AIs too alien, there are dangers to making them human enough to be treated (and mistreated) like humans.

Space

🙂

I made a multistream for watching everyday SpaceX Starship operations. It has all of LabPadre’s feeds except the thermal view. I grouped them spatially. The launch site cams are at the top, and the production site cams are at the bottom. Here’s a good overview from NASASpaceflight of the latest activity and plans for the Starship program.

Sometime in the next few months I hope to spend some time on space. I have some books to listen to, a page to post, and maybe even some games to play.

Games

😎

I reinstalled Minecraft and started exploring my old worlds. I’ve barely played any video games for the past few years, and I rarely miss them, but the one I do miss is Minecraft, especially when I listen to its soundtrack on my nature walks. And recently I discovered my favorite Minecraft YouTuber has begun uploading again after five years of silence. Now that I have better control over my time, I think I can fit in some gaming, so over the weekend I installed Minecraft on my new Surface.

Setting up the game took several hours because I needed to transfer my files from my old computer. But once all that was done, I could remind myself of what some of my more mysterious old worlds were about. The first one I tried was the one I’d been hoping to find, one where I’d built an elevated base made of glass. Even though I abandoned it for another Minecraft project, it occupies a special place in my mind, and I’d like to see what else I can do with it. The third one I tried only had a bit of mining. But the second one turned out to be the source of a dim memory of an underground Nether portal near the place I’d left the game. Where will I end up when I retrace my steps from long ago?

Posted in AI, Business, Coffee, Housekeeping, Money, Productivity, Space, TV, Video games, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in Business, Health, Housekeeping, Money, Nature, People, Productivity, Research, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

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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