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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

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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

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.

 

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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.

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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 ＥＴＥＲＮ  Ａ  Ｌ ＯＦＦＩＣＥ ™ 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