The Thinkulum | Pages from My Notebook

Weeknote for 10/20/2024

Posted on October 23, 2024 by Andy

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

🙂

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

😎

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

🙂

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

🙂

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.

Posted in Christmas labels, Elections, Nature, Productivity, Spirituality, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 10/13/2024

Posted on October 14, 2024 by Andy

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.

Posted in Elections, Music, Productivity, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 10/6/2024

Posted on October 6, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

😐

As a way to prioritize, I analyzed the rest of my dashboards in Notion for tasks that would make them more usable. Most of the week this project was competing with other evening activities plus fatigue, so I didn’t get much done, but I got through this round of analysis and started matching my ideas with items in my task database. The next tasks are to (1) finish matching and creating tasks, (2) try relating them to each other with Notion’s dependency view, and (3) get a sense from that of what I should focus on next. For the next few weeks at least, this project will have to take a backseat to the election and holidays, but hopefully I can spend some morning project time on it.

Video

🌴😎🏪

I spent my workdays in vaporwave liminal spaces with NightDriveProphecy’s videos as my wallpaper. My grand plan for October this year is to dig into the Wikidot version of the Backrooms by listening through a bunch of the levels to get more familiar with the territory, but until I get that set up, I’m wandering other liminal spaces. I ran across this channel a while back with its ＥＴＥＲＮＡＬＯＦＦＩＣＥ ™ video, and last week I binged a bunch of its others. I like to imagine that whatever’s on my desktop background, that’s where I’m working. So last week I did a lot of “travel” for work to a bunch of slightly surreal malls, superstores, aquariums, spas, water parks, museums, resorts, and random people’s weird homes. The videos are basically slide shows with a background song for each image, so later I’ll be mining their playlists for additions to my Backrooms music.

Nature

😎

I think there were bald eagles at one of my weekly parks. I saw a big bird circling in the sky and thought it was the usual hawk, which I’d seen earlier flying low through the park, but then I realized this new bird was dark with a bright white tail, and then I realized its white head probably meant bald eagle! So out came my phone for a video. I only noticed one until I looked back at the video and saw another farther in the distance. I knew there were bald eagles in this region, but I always think of them as “somewhere else,” not places I frequent. But my boss, who lives near that park, told me the eagles sometimes nest on the light poles there, so maybe I’m in for a closer look!

Posted in Music, Nature, Productivity, Videos, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 9/29/2024

Posted on October 2, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

🤔

I added another feature to my Notion setup and then stepped back to look at the big picture of this project. Things I did:

I created a timeline view for my task history. This lets me review my recent activity to write these weeknotes. It also gives me a convenient way to find the normally hidden completed tasks I need to refer back to in my current work. Plus it’s just nice to see I’ve been accomplishing things, since everything’s normally lost to the fog of my memory.
I paused the project to trace some of its task dependencies. The task list was getting unwieldy enough that I needed to step back, organize a bit, and pinpoint the most important tasks to get done. I’m taking an outside-in approach, where I look through the various dashboards in my Notion setup and ask myself (1) what their purpose is and (2) what I’d ideally need to do to make them as usable as possible. Then to trace the logic of the dependencies, once I had some tasks that would improve a dashboard, I asked about their prerequisites. Some common prerequisite tasks that have come up so far:
1. Decide how to relate knowledge and action items.
2. Determine my policies for refiling old projects and tasks.
3. Refile the old projects and tasks for statuses that already have refiling policies.
I settled on a policy of trying out manual processes before I commit to making them easier through automation. The problem with jumping into automation is that I may have gotten the process wrong, and designing and implementing an automation takes time that can add up. For example, I’m not sure the Advised Status formula I spent so much time on will end up being that useful, depending on how I end up managing my tasks. I should’ve put up with the inconveniences and waited till I was further along in my redesign. So I’m planning my task dependencies in terms of experimenting with workarounds first.

Next up:

I’ll keep sorting out the task dependencies so I can focus my attention more intelligently.
I’ll try out Notion’s task dependency view to see if it’ll be useful, though I’ll try not to go overboard so I don’t waste time on it.
I’ll continue the task reorganizing I started a couple of weeks ago, which should give me a better starting point even if I end up reorganizing again later.
I’ll keep digging into the current philosophy of my system so I have a more concrete basis for deciding the new design.

Elections

🤓

I made a spreadsheet that models all the possible combinations of swing state victories by each party in the presidential election: Presidential Election 2024 Battleground Scenarios. This mini-project was inspired by watching videos from Let’s Talk Elections. Making it gave me a much clearer picture of the electoral situation, which is explained well by this Politico article on the key swing states. I might use the spreadsheet on election night to narrow down the possibilities as the results come in.

A guide to understanding the spreadsheet:

I listed the state columns sorted by the number of electors, which is given in the column header (19 for Pennsylvania, 16 for Georgia, etc.).
To make the formulas easier, in the state columns I used numbers to represent each party’s win: 0 for Republican and 1 for Democrat.
The BG columns show how many battleground electors each party won in that scenario.
The States columns show how many battleground states each party won.
The Total columns show how many total electors each party won.
The Winner column shows which party won the election or “?” if it was a tossup.

Nature

🙂

I rescued a yellowjacket at the park. It was lying helplessly on its back on the path, flexing its body and waving its legs in the air. After trying a couple of other solutions, I held a leaf over it so it could grab on, and then I was able to lift it and set it in the grass, where it was able to right itself and crawl around, though still in a wobbly, tumbly fashion. This is something I never would’ve done growing up, when I was always scurrying away from potentially aggressive creatures, but since starting my nature walks and especially using the Seek app to identify things, I’ve learned that in many cases curiosity is truly an antidote to fear.

Stormwater management

😎

I toured an old quarry that the county had converted to a giant stormwater reservoir. I tried to sign up for this tour a couple of years ago, but it was sold out by the time I got around to it, even though it’d only been an hour or so. This time I leapt on it as soon as registration opened, and it’s a good thing—one of the tour guides told us it sold out in three minutes!

The tour was very effective at introducing the department and giving a clear picture of how the reservoir works. Ever since becoming interested in stormwater management, I’d pictured the department employees as these faceless, nameless, unapproachable figures. But it turned out they led the tour, trading off speaking about different parts of the system, and now they’ve transformed in my mind into these smart but approachable and quite regular people. I also learned that this reservoir wasn’t just a random addition to the stormwater management system but is actually the centerpiece of its operation and was a key part of the department’s inception, which occurred after some disastrous flooding in the late ‘80s.

Appropriately it rained on and off throughout the tour, but only a little. Fortunately they didn’t need a flood to demonstrate the first part of the system. They only needed to open the sluice gate, because it’s built into the side of the creek and opens from the streambed, so the creek would have to be a trickle to keep the water out. The far side of the quarry has a scenic view open to the public, so I’d love to come back after a heavy rain to watch the reservoir in action or just on a normal day to watch the wildlife. But if I feel like staying home, there are also live images from the facility’s cameras online.

After the tour I spent another surprisingly interesting hour walking through the past century of the movie industry at the city’s history museum, which co-sponsored the quarry tour. Then I walked some more around a neighboring park, walked down to a local diner for lunch, finally sat down for a while, then walked some more back to my car for a longish drive home with some road work congestion, and then had a several-hour nap. All in all an exhausting but excellent Saturday.

Posted in Elections, Nature, Politics, Productivity, Stormwater management, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 9/22/2024

Posted on September 23, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

😐

For my Kanban setup in Notion, I created a couple of task management features and reorganized some of the status info I’m tracking. More specifically:

I finished implementing a status advisor formula for parent tasks. When I collapse a branch in the task tree, I can’t see the statuses of the descendant tasks, so I’m using the status of the branch’s root task to tell me if there’s any hidden task worth paying attention to. It’d be a lot of work to update those parent task statuses manually, so I’m having a formula tell me what they should be.
I created a timeline view that would show my upcoming deadlines. Here’s an article that demos timelines in Notion. It’s a replacement for my project schedule, because I’m dropping the idea of iterations, where I plan for specific tasks within a certain period and then try to deliver all of them by the end. Instead my work will be more fluid, managed by the handles a Kanban setup gives me.
I separated out the blocking and prioritizing statuses from the list of task progression stages. This change comes from David Anderson’s insight that it’s better to keep your work items flowing in one direction through the stages rather than having them bounce back and forth, since regressing through the flow muddies its purpose, which is largely to track the stages of accumulated knowledge about the item. So I’m tracking those less linear attributes as layers on top of the work stages via separate Notion properties.

Coming up:

To see what I worked on when, I want to add a timeline view for recent tasks.
To make my tasks easier to manage on a daily basis, I want to update the Kanban boards I use in my admin sessions.
To reduce my task list to a manageable size, I want to start updating the details of all my current tasks to correspond to my new setup.
To keep my notes more centralized, I want to start separating them from my tasks, which tend to fragment the information about their related topics.

Fiction

😄

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata reminded me that normal people are weird. It was very funny in places as main character Keiko Furukura tried to navigate normal society and understand how it worked and how she could fit in or at least keep it off her back. As cliche as it sounds, the book empowered me to be true to myself. If some aspect of the world finds me to be a natural voice it can speak through, then regardless of other people’s preferences or agendas, maybe it should. The audio was narrated by Nancy Wu, who also read another book I enjoyed with a neurodivergent main character, Ada Hoffmann’s The Outside.

We had our first Brothers Karamazov book group meeting. I’m starting to see why the book has risen to the level of a classic. A lot of interesting thoughts were shared, and the discussion highlighted how much there was to unpack in the novel and how much may be going on under the surface.

Music

😎

I spent the week making a covers playlist for the worship song “Yet Not I but Through Christ in Me.” This song was in the lineup for our worship team at the start of the week, and it got stuck on repeat in my head as I was preparing for it. Whenever that happens with a song, I make a background project of assembling a playlist of its renditions ranked roughly in the order in which I like them. “Is He Worthy?” is an earlier example. Here’s my Spotify playlist for this one. I’m still shifting songs around a bit, but it’s mostly in the right order now. Here’s the YouTube video for the original band’s live recording. And here’s the video for my favorite recording.

Although I primarily do it out of obsession, there are a few benefits to this kind of exercise: (1) It lets me listen to the song a lot without getting tired of it so quickly. I even find different recordings playing in my head at different times. (2) It makes me aware of a bunch of different artists who’ve recorded the song, so sometimes I look up their other music. And (3) It gets me to pay more attention to the lyrics and musical features of the song, like a prolonged meditation on it.

Posted in Fiction, Music, Productivity, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 9/15/2024

Posted on September 21, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

Waking up at a consistent earlier time is turning out to be a great addition to my routine. It somehow makes my whole day feel more stable and energized. I think it’s because it gives my day a predictable, reliable start (6 am, if you’re wondering) and gives me an extra chunk of time to get something done before the “real” day starts.

Whatever I work on in that period tends to tumble around in my mind throughout the day and pick up more ideas and embed itself in my future planning, so it makes my project work feel more reliable too. And if my evening crowds out time for projects, at least the morning gives me some time.

I’m still a night owl, so getting myself to bed earlier is still a struggle, but I’m also seeing that a consistent wake up time gives my sleep schedule adjustments a bit of an anchor. If I need more sleep, my early mornings push it to happen at night when I’m too tired to stay up. That’s how it’s working out so far anyway.

I worked through some complicated questions on my Kanban setup.

Last week’s progress:

I decided what to do with the confusing statuses I’d been assigning to my projects and tasks. This was mainly “Ongoing,” plus the questionable time scope setting of “Long-term.” Sorting those out gave me the strategy that when I’m working through a tangled issue, I should separate its threads early on, before it utterly confounds me. In this case the threads were not only about the concepts that make up Ongoing and Long-term but also the different questions that go into how I’d use each of those concepts when I’m operating the system.
I decided how to hide container tasks in the management views. Since I normally don’t need to see them, they’re just confusing clutter on the board … except in some cases when I do. So I worked out the slightly complex filter for hiding them only when they’d get in the way. During this work I practiced noticing my confusion early and listing out the issues, and it did help.

Coming up:

I’m finishing some work I started on managing tasks that have children, a branch of their own on the task family tree.
I’m hoping to add the helpful timeline views for seeing where I’ve been and what’s coming up.
I also want to start updating my daily admin session views so they’re finally useful after all this time and the very sight of them stops annoying me.

Walks

😎

An experimental walk at the hospital turned out better than I’d hoped. Tuesday my usual lunchtime walk was preempted by a meeting, so after work I took the opportunity to take a nostalgic walk I’d been planning at the hospital where I used to get my infusions for ulcerative colitis. I had two agendas: (1) get a better idea of the layout of the infusion department and (2) absorb the hospital ambience.

I’m cursed with both a need to understand my memories and a weak spatial awareness, so the circuitous route the nurse had led me through in and out of the infusion room had left me wondering, Where was I? The floor plans I’d found on evacuation maps and online only partially helped, since I couldn’t identify the room itself on them. Walking the empty hallway again—somewhat anxiously because I didn’t know what security would think of my non-medical reason for being there—helped me match the doorways to the best map I had, and then I found another evacuation map on the wall, which I hastily photographed before making my escape. Examining it later, the mental details finally snapped into place, and I was able to see the infusion room and how it related to everything around it. As often happens when I see a map, the layout turned out to be less complicated than my impression of it, with the overall route a simple loop.

I didn’t get to absorb much hospital ambience, because the route I used to take through the hospital for my infusions went through the inpatient center, and on arriving this time I saw a sign that asked visitors to register at the front desk, and I knew I’d have a hard time explaining my visit. So I walked around the outside of the complex, which I’d been halfway expecting to do anyway. But on my way back, I did stop by the reception desk and asked if the cafeteria was open to the public, since I might want to eat there sometime. She said yes and that people from outside the hospital walked around in the building all the time, which was the best news of the day. To me a well-funded hospital is a symbol of professionalism, scientific progress, and intricate, large-scale systems, and I like having access to an environment where I can absorb that vibe.

Later I asked ChatGPT for other indoor places open to the public for walking, and it gave me a long list that included airports, museums, and stadiums, so the wheels are turning and I might make that my winter walking project, a new set of walking spots to explore.

Nature

🙂

I spied a crayfish and some big tadpoles at the lake near work, where the water has been clearer lately. I remember my friends talking about finding crawdads in the creek as a regular pastime when I was growing up, but I never spent enough time in nature to run across them. As I was filming them, a retired man came over to say hello, and we chatted about the lake a few minutes. He had thought I was fishing and was going to ask what I was catching. He mentioned something I’d suspected, that the only big fish in that lake were carp.

I had a close encounter with a hawk. I’ve been waiting for months to get a closer look at any of the hawks I see flying in the distance around here, and finally one swooped down to oblige. The guy shooting hoops in the court right by the light pole was inexplicably uninterested in the bird.

As a bonus, have some adorable painted turtles.

Posted in Nature, Productivity, Sleep, Walks, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 9/8/2024

Posted on September 9, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

😌

My latest productivity lifestyle change is trying to wake up consistently early. I learned from my productive Saturday that starting the day early boosts my morale at least as much as getting enough sleep, so I’m going to try prioritizing my wake up time rather than trying to make up for a late bedtime in the morning.

Again I poured a lot of time into progressing a few more steps on my Kanban setup. I’m eager to reach certain milestones of Kanban functionality so I can use the system to work on my other projects. Still, even before I reach that point, I’m seeing some incremental benefits from what I’ve added already.

Parts of my Notion Kanban setup that I worked on last week:

I created views to help me make decisions on tasks that have been sitting in one status for a long time, such as Priority or Paused. Creating these felt settling, because ever-growing lists of stale, forgotten tasks has been a long-term problem in my task management, and now I feel I have a sensibly organized, workable way to address them.
I added dates for calculating lead and cycle times for each project as a whole. The ages of my projects immediately reminded me time passes quicker than I think and motivated me to make the most of it.
I added filters to my overall Kanban boards to hide tasks from projects that aren’t currently relevant. Establishing this new way to shrink the amount of information I have to process at once felt satisfying.
I analyzed how to track the status of tasks that have sub-tasks, which conflict a bit with the more linear way Kanban tends to track work. It felt clarifying to sort out some of the ways I organize information and how they should and shouldn’t change.

Parts of the system I’ll work on next:

I’ll clarify some of my confusing, ambiguous statuses, such as “Ongoing.” Like many of these other discussions, it’ll keep me from continually scratching my head as I use the system.
I’ll revise my Kanban board for the individual project template. Updating this view I haven’t been using will let me focus on managing my workflow within one project rather than sifting through all my tasks at once.
I’ll create a timeline view that visualizes tasks that have due dates. This will give me a high level overview of my time limits to help me prioritize my tasks.
I’ll create a timeline view that visualizes my task history. This will help me review where I spent my time, which among other things will help me write these weeknotes.

Audiobooks

😎

I finished listening to books 1 and 2 of The Brothers Karamazov, the reading for our first book group meeting in a couple of weeks. It made the same kind of psychological deep dive into the characters that appealed to me in Middlemarch. Then the interesting discussion on church and state added to my sense of overlap between my interests and the novel’s. And some of the dialogue was hilarious, mostly thanks to the way Luke Thompson interpreted the characters.

While waiting for the book group to start, I’ve been catching up on some of the short books in my Audible library. Here’s what I’ve listened to so far:

Finding Your Best by Michael Gervais and Pete Carroll – A casual but inspiring conversation on some principles of mindset and coaching.
Wally Roux, Quantum Mechanic by Nick Carr, narrated by William Jackson Harper – The reading and production were fantastic. The story took half its length to feel like it was going anywhere, but it tied things together by the end, and there were some funny moments along the way.
Who Is Elmyr?, written and read by Max Horberry – A fascinating example of metafiction in real life.
It’s Not What It Looks Like, written and read by Molly Burke (YouTube channel) – I’m on the tail end of this one, a moving, enlightening, and enlivening look at what life can be like for someone who’s blind.

Posted in Biography, Fiction, Productivity, Sleep, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 9/1/2024

Posted on September 3, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

😌

I finally got back to making a bunch of progress on this project. Despite that, all I finished was adding calculations for lead and cycle times and creating views for evaluating the status of old tasks. But those took a lot of time, most of it spent typing out discussions with myself to work through the many design decisions. It reminded me that while success may be 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, in software perspiration is 10% implementation and 90% deliberation. Notably I had to learn what lead and cycle time were exactly and why they were useful to know, and then I had to decide what part of my workflow should count as the starting point for my lead time, which ended up being the point when I prioritize the task for action within the next month.

Coming up I need to:

Add some finishing touches to the Kanban overview boards.
Update the Kanban view in the individual project dashboards.
Begin updating the statuses of my tasks according to their current workflow positions and my new rules.
Update the timeline views to match my new approach, moving from iterations to deadlines.
Design some reports.

Food

😌

I was reminded it takes special circumstances to motivate me to cook. Saturday morning I prepared my meals for the next month, which took the form of heating up packaged frozen meals on the stove and in the oven, things like lasagna and garlic chicken pasta. It’s easy but takes a lot of time, which is something I normally feel I don’t have, but if I’ve already spent a lot of time on my projects and I have a large block of time free, I don’t feel too much resistance. The exception that gets me to prep meals at other times is when cooking is itself a project. So now I’m thinking about whether I can use these observations to create a more natural cooking schedule.

Nature

🧐

A big tree at one of my usual parks was knocked down. Some parts of my area had a big storm a couple of days before, so I’m guessing the tree got struck by lightning.

Fiction

🙂

I joined a book group at work that’s reading The Brothers Karamazov. As usual, I joined primarily because it’s the easiest way to get myself to read a classic, and as usual, I’m listening to the audiobook. We got the reading schedule on Thursday, so I found the audio edition and jumped in. The narrator is Luke Thompson, an actor in the show Bridgerton and the movie Dunkirk and terrific as a reader; and despite being a classic, the book is more listenable and entertaining than I expected. Interesting characters are my favorite thing in fiction, and so far that’s exactly what we’re getting.

Posted in Cooking, Fiction, Nature, Productivity, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 8/25/2024

Posted on August 27, 2024 by Andy

Project

😐

I set up some Kanban boards for managing my work tasks. As with the project boards, these views should translate over to my personal tasks with only some light adjustments. This week I’ll try to finish updating my various boards; revise my project schedule timeline to match my new, more fluid approach; and start moving my projects and tasks into their appropriate Kanban columns based on their current positions in my workflow.

Writing

🙂

Stephen King’s On Writing showed me I’m a bit of a pantser. As much as I like the idea of planning everything out, when King laid out his very unplanned way of writing, I recognized in it the way I work—starting with a core idea that grabs me and working outward to see what it grows into as it follows its own hidden logic. The other aspect of the writing process I took from the book was the dynamics of revision: Write the first draft only for yourself, take a long break so you forget what you wrote, reread it, and then write the second draft for your readers, especially your Ideal Reader, a specific, real person who can give you feedback. King’s reading of the audiobook has personality, and the 20th anniversary edition I listened to had some nice bonus material, his son Owen reading his article “Recording Audiobooks for my Dad, Stephen King” and a fun excerpt from an event with Stephen King and his son Joe Hill.

Nature

😒

I found an unsettling patch of nettles. A lot of the woods around here have scattered poison ivy, but at one of the less frequent trails I walk, my nature app identified a great stinging nettle. On my walk there last week, I found out it wasn’t alone. It was accompanied by a large patch of them between the trail and the woods. I like to joke that I’ll pick some poison ivy for my salad, but even without my app to warn me, I tend not to touch things when I’m out in nature, because spicy plants like to look innocent. This trail is near both an elementary school and some healthcare facilities, so I hope there’s some precautionary nature education happening at those places.

Posted in Nature, Productivity, Weeknotes, Writing | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 8/18/2024

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

😐

I determined the initial work-in-progress limits for my work projects, and I was reminded of the value of such limits. I target 5 to 10 hours a week for project work, but last week I got sidetracked enough, mainly by music, that I missed even the lower end of that range, which highlights the importance of managing work with the system’s capacity in mind. This week I’ll continue the Kanban setup with my work tasks, hopefully with less distraction from other interests, and eventually I’ll end up with a visualization for my work that will help me manage it more purposefully.

Nature

🙂

I met a toad. On the way to my car Monday morning I thought I spied the chipmunk I’ve seen around, but its movements were too slow and jerky, so I took a closer look and found this amphibian, which my app said was some kind of North American toad. I don’t know what it was doing in our parking lot.

Music

😎

I got acquainted with Mahalia Jackson. Seeing all the music genres available on the AI app Suno revived my interest in an old project, learning about the evolution of popular music. Looking for a starting point, I remembered reading that rock came from jazz, which came from blues, but then Musicmap told me blues came from gospel, so I started there and took the opportunity to look into Mahalia Jackson, who is considered to be the most influential gospel singer.

It’s not the kind of music I would normally listen to casually, but when I first encountered her work with “No Room at the Inn” years ago, her performance was so intriguing and endearing that the song quickly found a place on my Christmas playlist. This time I wanted to see what her performances looked like, so I watched a few on YouTube, the most engrossing of which was “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” possibly her last filmed performance. It’s still not really my style, but watching closely let me appreciate her effortless power and sincerity and her swings and swoops of improvisation, and I found myself carried along by the music like a train on a track.

I was similarly entranced by “St. Louis Blues,” the only video recording of blues singer Bessie Smith, one of Mahalia Jackson’s major influences, who had an equally effortless power.

I generated a couple more Suno songs. Generating them is quick, if your prompt is simple, but extending and naming them can take a while, so I’ll need to be aware of how much time I can spend on it. I’m learning that as with other generative AI, Suno doesn’t necessarily follow your instructions, so you have to keep your mind open and embrace serendipity. I still have more to name, but for the country sitar songs Suno gave me, I came up with “Sitar Stomp” and “San Antonio Sitar Spring.”

Posted in AI, Music, Nature, Productivity, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Politics

Holidays

Productivity

Spirituality

Nature

Productivity

Election

Music

Productivity

Video

Nature

Productivity

Elections

Nature

Stormwater management

Productivity

Fiction

Music

Productivity

Walks

Nature

Productivity

Audiobooks

Productivity

Food

Nature

Fiction

Project

Writing

Nature

Productivity

Nature

Music

Search

Subscribe to Blog Updates

Get Blog Updates by Email

GoodReads Feed

LibraryThing Feed

Archives

Categories