The Thinkulum

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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:

1. I’ll keep sorting out the task dependencies so I can focus my attention more intelligently.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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:

1. 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.).
2. 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.
3. The BG columns show how many battleground electors each party won in that scenario.
4. The States columns show how many battleground states each party won.
5. The Total columns show how many total electors each party won.
6. 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.

 

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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.

 

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