Weeknote for 12/29/2024

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Andy

Holidays

🙂

We got into the swing of our still low-key vacation. Once Abbie and Colleen arrived, our family gathering felt complete and a bit livelier, though overall it was another quiet week of Christmas together, which mostly suited me fine. We did our collaborative grocery shopping, decorated the tree, cooked, watched TV, sat around talking or reading, attended our Christmas Eve service, opened presents, walked in the woods and around the neighborhood, shopped at Half Price Books, and did a bunch of eating.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

To go with my productivity system overhaul this year, my gift tags were miniature Kanban boards with Christmas tasks. I wrote the tasks on sticky notes that I arranged in status columns on dry erase sheets, which I sealed in plastic bags to shield them from the elements. The tasks on each board related to the person’s vacation activities. I did stay up a little late Christmas Eve finishing them, but it was because I was waiting till the last responsible moment, when I had the most info about what we’d done and what we’d be doing.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

My New Year’s “resolutions” are taking shape. I was never big on those, and with my increasingly systematic way of life, I thought they were definitely a thing of the past. But after feeling inspired by my family to try some new things, or at least retry some old ones, I realized I do still make something like New Year’s resolutions, but they’re more like themes for prioritizing my projects. I want to read more fiction, drink more tea, cook more meals, bake more cookies, socialize more, get back to my decorating and other creative projects, and maybe get around to some gardening. Will I get to all that? Maybe not, but they’ve been nudged up the list.

Productivity

😎

My experiment with proactively managing my vacation activity was a success. I woke up at a reasonably early time, paid attention to what the group was doing, and fit my activities into it the way I do when I’m improvising with the worship team. Then I focused on getting through each task in the order it needed to be finished. It was all so effective, I even had time to get bored once or twice.

Spirituality

🙂

I closed in on the final few days of my 2024 Bible reading and prepared for 2025’s reading plan and devotions. My devotions in 2024 waxed and waned, but once I came back to them over the last couple of months, I ended up with a vague sense of mission, which I hope will gain more definition over the next year. My devotions for 2025 will mostly be a thematic Bible study on discipleship. It’s a very broad topic, so to start with I’ll try to give it more shape. I’ll also listen through the whole Bible again, this time using David Suchet’s reading of the NIVUK in the YouVersion app. With lots of help from Claude, I created a spreadsheet for 2025’s reading plan based on a Puritan system my dad had assembled into physical bookmarks.

Posted in Christmas labels, Holidays, Productivity, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 4 Comments

Weeknote for 12/22/2024

Posted on December 22, 2024 by Andy

People

😌

December’s parties have been pretty low key this year. Our department Christmas party a couple of weeks ago was at a restaurant with lots of good conversation but only a quiz for a game. The company party last week was a meal at a golf course with a party game that ended up being optional. Just the way I like it. The most memorable party was a small birthday gathering on Sunday for my friend Tim at his favorite restaurant, where I got to know one of his newer friends.

Nature

😎

Sunday Chicagoland had a rare day of fog.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

Holidays

🙂

My vacation with family has been on a slow build as we wait for everyone to arrive. I made it to Texas in one piece this time. So far we’ve mostly been puttering around with everyday life while we wait. There are always new restaurants around here, so we tried a fancy Neapolitan one with very good tear-and-share bread. I asked Claude to look at the PDF menu and tell me what would fit into my diet, and I ended up with a tasty radicchio e farro salad.

I still haven’t finished the Christmas labels. I spent the evening before I flew out preparing the materials to pack for the trip. Since then I’ve gotten past one of the main humps in the design, so now it’s mostly a matter of finding blocks of secluded time to wrap things up.

Productivity

🧐

My productivity project for these couple of weeks is to see how I can hold onto some order while on vacation. Waking up closer to my usual time is making the days more satisfying. I’m still finding that every activity is expanded to 2-3 times its normal length, but starting the day earlier makes it mostly work. I do end up needing a nap, but fortunately my family is accommodating. I’m also paying more attention to our patterns, such as TV time, so I can work around them.

Posted in AI, Christmas labels, Holidays, Nature, People, Productivity, Travel, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 12/15/2024

Posted on December 16, 2024 by Andy

Holidays

😌

I finished my Christmas shopping and made some more progress on the gift labels. I want to get through the main work on those in the next few days, but I’m far enough along that they shouldn’t be hard to finish while I’m on vacation. I could even procrastinate and do a gift tag all-nighter on Christmas Eve, a traditional and strangely nostalgic event for me, but overall I’d like to avoid it.

🙂

The Fullness of Time book series will be my guide through the church year. Getting a better handle on the church calendar has been one of my long-time wishes. A couple of years ago, a quote from the book on Lent in this series caught my ear, and so this year when the Advent book showed up in an ebook sale, I decided to pick up the series and see what it could do for me. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve listened to the Advent book, by Tish Harrison Warren, and the Christmas one, by Emily Hunter McGowin, and they have definitely added a layer to my reflections. In personable writing, the authors condense the history and meaning of these liturgical seasons to their core features so we know how to pay attention and enter into them.

Productivity

😌

I finished linking together some task dependency chains in Notion for my productivity system project. Then I created another timeline view that would make the tasks’ intended outcomes easier to scan through and prioritize. This project is still in the background while I work on the Christmas labels, but my main priorities on it now are simplifying the set of task stages, the way I organize my notes, and the way I record what I work on each day.

Spirituality

😎

AI music is helping me contemplate the eternal realm. Part of my spirituality of coping is to acknowledge that the Christian hope is tied more to the next life than this one (a theme relevant to Advent, incidentally). In my daily Bible reading I’ve been noticing this focus on the future world scattered throughout the New Testament, and I’ve begun asking myself what it looks like for the coming kingdom to shape our actions now. Since music is what carries me where I want to go, on a whim I decided to have Suno generate some operatic music based on the scene in Revelation 21-22. I wouldn’t call them opera, but the songs it created floored me, and I’ve had them stuck in my head since then, drawing my attention to the future like a magnet: “New Jerusalem (Version 1),” “New Jerusalem (Version 2).”

Posted in AI, Christmas labels, Coping, Holidays, Music, Productivity, Spirituality, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 12/8/2024

Posted on December 8, 2024 by Andy

Holidays

😐

I got the barest start on my Christmas shopping. I was a little too occupied with work and blogging. I did order a new suitcase and a new phone for myself, though, so clearly I had my priorities straight. This week I’ll try to finish the Christmas shopping and get back to the labels.

Productivity

😌

I added a feature to my Notion databases to send tasks to my work email. It was a small but important change, motivated by having to reread a bunch of work emails on a regular basis to remember the tasks they called for. Now with the Notion emails I can make those tasks visible and easily open them in Notion to keep working on them. Returning to my productivity system to make this update was a nice break from my regular work, and it was a fun little challenge, since properly formatting a mailto link in a formula was less than straightforward.

Spirituality

🤔

My morning devotions are affecting my life. It’s nothing dramatic, but I definitely feel a slow current. They’re influencing my choice of reading and music, my self-talk, and the overall direction I’m traveling. I still have my old questions and doubts, but they’re much further in the background for now. I’m giving evangelical sentiments more appreciation and benefit of the doubt and inwardly pushing back on them less. I want to see where this current takes me. A lot of the thoughts I’ve had in the past month or so are captured in my reading for today, Ephesians 4-6, especially the idea that our way of life should be driven by our new identity.

Posted in Holidays, Productivity, Spirituality, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 12/1/2024

Posted on December 6, 2024 by Andy

Thanksgiving

🙂

I flew to Texas to visit my parents for Thanksgiving. Thanks to my daily routines and my packing database in Notion, preparing for the trip was a much tidier process than usual, which was a big deal for my travel-stressed brain. The travel itself was uneventful except for the sore back I woke up with the day of my flight and my bruised toe when I dropped my computer on it coming out of airport security. Although the injuries remained for days after, I felt much better that evening when I got settled in at the house, which goes to show the place you’re in and the people you’re with can make all the difference.

Thanksgiving dinner was delicious and a nice time with my parents, but it definitely felt different and made me realize part of Thanksgiving for me is the long day in the kitchen and the buzz of conversation from a large dinner table, which we didn’t have with our three-person gathering and smaller meal this year. But one thing we didn’t miss out on was the leftovers, which still lasted us the rest of the week.

People

🙂

The other reason I was in Texas was to attend the wedding of my old college roommate Jason. My parents drove down with me. It was held in a barn and themed after the season, with fall leaves instead of flower petals down the aisle. In Texas fashion the reception lunch was tacos. Afterward Jason and I got to chat about the various ministries in the area that I’d become aware of thanks to No Compromise, and it was nice to see his family again after so many years and to meet his new bride and some of her family. The best part of the ceremony was the bleating goat outside giving its input on the pastor’s sermon.

Christmas

😌

Thanks to a late night Saturday, I got through assembling the rest of my Christmas list. This vacation reminded me vacations with my family are not a time for me to get things done. I tend to go with the flow and slow way down with all the distractions around me. This week I’m Christmas shopping, and then I can get back to the Christmas labels.

Posted in Holidays, People, Travel, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 11/24/2024

Posted on November 29, 2024 by Andy

Holidays

😐

I worked through a big chunk of the Christmas gift label design and then had to switch to updating my Christmas wish list. My family needed the update to start their shopping. My wish list is always a whole research project of its own, but I’ll try to finish that this week and then come back to the labels next week.

Productivity

🙂

My project time expanded when I scheduled it before dinner instead of after. I have a principle that if I want to make sure something gets done, I do it first. Otherwise I lose track of time, and then that first activity crowds out the later ones. Plus I’ve been too tired after dinner to do much of anything. So last week because I was getting nowhere fast on the Christmas labels, I resorted to the project-first approach, and it was so effective it immediately became my new schedule. I’m able to get at least a couple of project hours in each day. A major goal of my productivity system has been to carve out enough project time that I could comfortably fit another round of grad school into my life, and this schedule rearrangement seems like a pivotal piece.

In Notion I added the tasks with rough time frames to my due date timeline. I’m juggling a lot more tasks at work now, and most of them don’t have hard deadlines, but it’s helpful to see how many planned and active tasks I have with near-term soft deadlines. So I added some formulas to calculate those dates, and now my timeline looks appropriately ridiculous. But even a crowded timeline helps me prioritize, and it lets me adjust my expectations on some of the tasks that are waiting. The updated timeline also shows me I have more policies to set. For example, how should I adjust a task that’s “late” according to its soft deadline? And it gives me more food for thought: If these time frames are always changing, is there a better way to think about scheduling work than deadlines?

Health

🙂

I added a few minutes of exercise to my morning routine. My annual physical a few weeks ago reminded me again of the importance of muscle mass as you get older and that I have daily routines that let me pretty easily add activities, so I decided it was time to try a morning workout. I’m starting really small with some push-ups and a plank, which I’ve read is better than sit-ups. I quickly learned that I need rest days even for the little I’m doing, so for now my schedule is Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It should be interesting to see what progress looks like, since I expect to be consistent.

Spirituality

🤔

Keith Green’s biography gave me challenging and inspiring food for thought. When I run across intense people like Keith, I always wonder if it’s everyone’s job to be the same kind of prophetic figure. After this book I think the answer is no: (1) Keith’s perpetual evangelism was part of his personality even before he became a Christian. (2) He willingly listened to his older mentors who tempered his approach. And (3) I think the gospel needs all types of delivery, because there are all types of audiences and circumstances. Some will respond to a fiery outburst, while others need more of a warm glow. But it’s good to stay alert to the needs of the moment rather than becoming complacent.

How do we become people who meet the needs of the moment? In the epilogue Melody gave me a new, gardening analogy for the systematic way I try to cultivate my state of mind: “The Creator of the very first garden gave us a list of the fruit he wants in our lives. If we study just a little, we can find out what the fruit of the Spirit is—and know exactly what kind of seeds to plant to get the crop God is looking for. … Now let’s talk about how we need to be living our lives today so we can leave behind the legacy we desire.”

Posted in Christmas labels, Exercise, Holidays, Productivity, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 11/17/2024

Posted on November 19, 2024 by Andy

Holidays

😐

I shuffled a little further along in my Christmas labels project. I collected a key supply and made some more decisions on the design and execution. It really shouldn’t be taking this long even with the other things I have going on, and I’m a little impatient to get back to my productivity project. So this week I’ll implement more time management hacks to get myself through the rest of the project.

Productivity

🙂

Work is continuing to nudge forward my productivity system improvements. My experiment in email organization and tagging is taking shape, and I’m starting another one on organizing my meeting notes. My approach right now does feel like a lot of bureaucracy, but time will tell how much of it is helpful and how much is busywork I can drop.

I’m also finding that a new endeavor like this metadata work can really be invigorating if you have the right collaborators. I especially felt this in our dinner meeting last week with a potential vendor, an industry acquaintance of mine from way back. Even going into the meeting I felt myself absorbing the energy of the gathering. And the sense of drive has continued even on ordinary days.

Posted in Christmas labels, Productivity, Weeknotes, Work | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 11/10/2024

Posted on November 10, 2024 by Andy

Politics

🙄

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

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

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

Holidays

😐

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

Productivity

😬

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

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

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

Posted in Christmas labels, Politics, Productivity, Weeknotes, Work | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 11/3/2024

Posted on November 6, 2024 by Andy

Holidays

😐

I made about a third of the prototype for my Christmas labels. Making it is already teaching me the needs of the project, so I’m hoping I can get through the rest of it this week and make whatever preparations I need for the actual labels.

Productivity

😐

I didn’t do much of anything on the productivity system. It’s only a side project at the moment, but the slow progress on both that and the Christmas project remind me some weeks will be more projectful than others. Sometimes you’re too busy working late, blogging, practicing music, and otherwise dragging yourself tiredly through your evenings. But I do want to increase my project time even then.

Nature

🙂

I took my first water sample of this season’s chloride testing. I decided to volunteer again this year (see my blog post from last year), and this time I was able to get an early start before the first snow like the organization prefers. I chose the same sampling site, both to make the setup easier and to let the organization compare data for the same site over multiple years. I found out that last year my site’s chloride numbers were only sort of high compared to some other sites, so I have a bit of context for judging how well the numbers turn out this year.

My friend Jeremy tagged along and helped me grab a decent amount of water in the bucket, which was fighting our attempts to fill it, maybe because we were tipping it in a downstream direction rather than upstream. So far, so good: The chloride level from this test was 119 PPM, a little less than last year’s first sample from mid-December.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

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

Weeknote for 10/27/2024

Posted on November 1, 2024 by Andy

Holidays

😐

I didn’t do anything on the Christmas labels last week. Too many other activities crowded my evenings. I’ll see what I can do this week. The good thing is I already have my idea and I don’t think it’ll be too hard.

Productivity

🙂

I finished setting up the Notion dependency timeline. I was especially pleased with the way I got it automatically laid out in an outline-like arrangement like this one by giving each task a sort key made of the item IDs of its ancestors. Now I’m linking the tasks I came up with for making my system more usable so I can use the dependency view to find out which tasks to focus on first.

Nature

🧐

I solved the mystery of the depth of one of my regular lakes. One of my walking spots has a couple of lakes with piers that extend to the middle of them. I’ve always wondered how deep they were. The water is pretty opaque, and I was imagining 3 to 6 feet. I sometimes feel uneasy around dark water. You never know what could be lurking in the murk or how far down you’d fall if you tumbled in.

But the day I walked there, the low water level made me wonder if these lakes were actually pretty shallow. So I found a stick about 2-3 feet long with convenient branches to divide its length. I took it to the end of the nearest pier, crouched down, and, with a little trepidation, dipped it into the unknown.

When the water was almost to the first branch, the end of the stick encountered something squishy. I pictured a layer of seaweed at the bottom and cringed a bit. But I tried again and struck solid ground under the mush. No lake monsters leapt out to grab me, and I determined that the depth was only about a foot. The squishy layer was mud, which billowed up when I lifted the stick.

😎

We’ve reached peak fall again. I’ve learned that this is the best time of year for me to be in a bad mood, because when I’m driving around and a brilliant tree comes into view, it instantly captivates me and blows the clouds out of my mind.

Posted in Christmas labels, Nature, Productivity, Weeknotes | 1 Comment