# 05-15-2022
uid: 202205150801 tags: #journal
Startup routine:
- Cleared Things 3 inbox: things:///show?id=inbox
Wind-down routine:
- Read at least 15 minutes
- Physical health questions:
- [2-3] Rate your sleep today from 1-5.
- Haven’t checked Fitbit but I was Japjot’s place, and I don’t think I slept too well today.
- [3.5] Rate your exercise today from 1-5.
- I didn’t do much other exercise, but I did around 10k steps, so it was a decent substitute. Planning on going to the gym tomorrow.
- [3] Rate your nutrition today from 1-5. Fairly decent. I had two fairly substantial meals — a burrito, and the pizza from east bay spice company. Going to mark this negatively though because I was hungry and got tempted by junk in the fridge, so I had two ice cream sandwiches at lunch today.
- [2.5] Rate your mental wellness level today from 1-5.
- In some aspects, I did well today — I had interesting conversations with Japjot 202205180042 which was great, had a lot of time alone to myself which was also nice.
- However, there’s currently a lot of stuff piling up, and I can’t help but get the feeling that I’m not spending as much time as I should on doing them. I’m not really spending enough time as I should on hanging out with Mulan, and this is something that she’s also brought up. I’m doing a pretty good job of listing things out in my TODO list, but I not doing a great job of getting through them. There’s too many important things to do, and I’m sort of letting them pile up unfortunately.
- The mulan stuff is something that I need to take direct action on. It also relates to Working Outside Of Work Hours 202205180123. Do I feel like I don’t get enough time before/during work to have alone time and think about myself, so I feel a compulsion to do it after work (and alone) when I could be spending that time with Mulan instead? I think this makes the working outside of work hours issue more important to solve than I previously thought.
- [2-3] Rate your sleep today from 1-5.
- What was one cool takeaway from today? 202205102213
- conversation with japjot about Berkeley 202205180042
- biggest thing was the standard for excellence
- insights from Mulan about working outside of work hours 202205180123. I need to think about what I want to do when I’m not able to do enough work during the day. What will my attitude be towards “making up” for it? How am I planning on making up for it?
- Seems like other people either
- don’t waste too much time during work
- make up for it at weird hours of the day
- I’m personally fine with doing both. If I’m making up for it at weird hours of the day, I need to make sure it doesn’t compromise my sleep time (at least not consistently) and also the time I have to hang out with Mulan.
- conversation with japjot about Berkeley 202205180042
Things I did
05-10-2022
— uid: 202205100801 tags: #journal
Startup routine:
- Cleared Things 3 inbox: things:///show?id=inbox
Wind-down routine:
- Read at least 15 minutes
- Physical health questions:
- Rate your sleep today from 1-5.
- About a 4. Fitbit wasn’t working but I felt like I slept pretty well.
- Rate your fitness level today from 1-5.
- Literally barely did anything. That’s going to change tomorrow.
- Rate your mental wellness level today from 1-5.
- Wasn’t perfect, but I think I managed to resurrect the day after I was feeling extremely unproductive at home. I didn’t force myself to become productive again, which is both kind of scary and also kind of cool.
- What was one cool takeaway from today? 202205102213
- I liked these two articles:
- Productivity - Sam Altman #productivity #physical-health
- Takeaways:
It’s very important to work on the right problems.
Many people spend too much time thinking about how to perfectly optimize their system, and not nearly enough asking if they’re working on the right problems.
Physical factors and physical health (mostly sleep and exercise) are very important, and it’s crucial to work them into your daily and weekly check-ins. This directly led to me including these in my daily journal template.
It’s okay to overcommit a little bit, if it pushes you.
It’s fine if you spend a lot of time in a comfortable and relaxed spot (in a couch, on your laptop)
Eating a lot of sugar makes you feel like shit (I ate so much sugar this past weekend at home, and it make it feel so hard to focus. I’m just going to avoid sugar for the next few days because of this.)
- Takeaways:
- How I Actually Stay Productive (as a Software Engineer) #productivity
- The way the article started — “I must have read at least a dozen books and a hundred articles on productivity throughout my life.” — immediately gave me a sense of kinship and closeness to the author.
- I liked the author’s emphasis on two simple things. I’ve realized that complex methods like GTD are useless if you don’t follow them, whereas a simple method that’s become entrenched enough to become a habit is precious.
- I also got the inspiration for the
morningworkflow from this article. I’ve known for a while that having a good, timely start to the morning is very important to me, but until I read this article, I couldn’t codify it. I now have verification that it’s essential to get an excellent start to the morning, and I’m glad I invested some time to automate that setup process to its full potential.
- Productivity - Sam Altman #productivity #physical-health
- I liked these two articles:
State dump 10:04 PM: Revamped my Zettelkasten workflow and my daily notes workflow. See changes in the zettelkasten workflow and the morning workflow. I feel very much ready to tackle the workday tomorrow. See excellent takeaway notes above.
Journaling
Random brain dump of thoughts.
I need to set up Twilio to send me a text of the 3-5 things I want to work on for the next day. I’ve realized that the texts are super important for me to be able to respond to effectively. I think it’s a (somewhat conscious) product limitation of Airtable that it doesn’t have a way of getting data in easily, and that’s what something like a text would solve.
Alternatively, I should try to find some app that is good for ephemeral notes that I don’t care about viewing later, like an index card (which is the analogy that was brought up in Pmarchive · Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity
I should try to make a project log page for all of my major projects. This log should be an append-only log that I incrementally add thoughts to.
- When I get interrupted, I should take the time to summarize my progress and any next steps I can take.
Something I read in some page — separate tasks by high-priority and low priority.
I have some duplication in functionality between the apps that I’m using.
- For collecting interesting links, I’m using Hook (not much though) and primarily Pinboard.
- For taking notes on articles that I read, I’m mostly using Hypothesis, Matter, and Pinboard.
There is a balance to be struck between not over optimizing things in the moment (Premature Optimization Is The Root Of All Evil 202204101914), but also being a bit insensible and not doing things in the moment at all that I know are going to make things easier down the road. The big #insights here is that it’s better to have something partially completed rather than nothing down, and that applies for things like productivity software more than most things. 202205030156
I’m very happy with my gymming habits the last few weeks. I think it’s to the point where I’ve been able to think about working out consistently, and it’s a very fully integrated part of my life. I think I can see the results for the most part in my physical fitness as well.
- Things I need to do for shard assignments
- forget about tests.
- Fix the in-memory op so it actually works. Screw getting the interface correct. Done
- For this, I would probably also have to implement the AdminFlag logic. Abstract that away for now. Pretend that the InMemoryCache has a hardcoded TTL value.
- Make a list of the changes I made
- Changed the ops so that they take in a callsite throughout.
- (Don’t need to discuss) Modified the strategy interface so that it uses a legacy accessor
- Set up the logic in mysql message poller so that it works fine, assuming that the ops are implemented correctly
- Did a bunch of funky business with AsyncOpsOptions. I went with a simpler solution the first time I implemented it, which is that I didn’t think about it entirely, which was kind of a mistake. I want to think of a solution this time that is somewhat generally flexible, but I think some of the arg parsing stuff is not necessary.
- Make the change to the AsyncOp so that there’s a parameter for read replica fallback. It assumes that there’s a composite connection as the main connection on the domain. If there isn’t, it errors. (Actually, don’t even need to do this). I can just pass in the query resilience strategy, depending on the boolean flag that’s passed in. Done
- Start writing a test. Get Andrew’s code that assumes main is down for a specific query, and do that with the message poller (given that the Admin Flag has a specific strategy). done
3-5 things I want to do today 202205030143
This is the kind of brain dump that I really care about in being able to do in my note-taking app 202207051347
uid: 202205030111 tags: #journal
Using Anki for Novel Thought Patterns
We can use Anki for the cases when you have a certain thought you want to be having or an action that you want to do in certain situations, but you forget about it or the trigger never fully comes to your attention.
Anki makes it so that these if-else action plans are always somewhere at the back of your mind, preferably not too far from the working memory, always at the edge of awareness.
How can I use this?: I can use it with productivity tips, and other things that I want to always be thinking at different points in time. Examples:
- Social to do in social situations
- Productivity things
- Good habits to follow
- Ways to treat Mulan
- How to follow through with tendencies, etc.
- Workout stuff — how to motivate myself to actually work out.
Implementation details
To try this strategy, you need to create a new deck in Anki, and create a Basic type note, which has e.g. “less than 3 minutes” on Front card and “If a task should take less than 3 minutes to complete, I will just do it instead of postponing it” on Back card. I have a “thought_pattern” tag associated with these notes.
Then go to deck options and create a new Options group. Key settings are:
Steps (in minutes) — I set to 1 5 10 40 120 360 1440, but you can experiment with this Graduating interval — 1 day Easy interval — 1 day Interval modifier — anything less than 100% (otherwise 1 day limit would be ignored) Maximum interval — 1 day
How to start using: https://docs.ankiweb.net/#/
Options for decks
max 1 day — a deck which contains thought patterns I want to review daily. max 21 days — a deck which contains formulas and concepts I want to be able to retrieve readily. It has a maximum interval of 21 days. max infinity — a deck which contains all the cards that I want to learn but don’t absolutely need to be able to recall immediately. poems — a deck which contains poems I’m learning. It has the same settings as “max 21 days” deck but I like to review poems separately.
uid: 202204170212 tags: #advice #utilities #tricks #productivity
04-10-22
I currently have a lot of thoughts. It’s 3:20 AM, so I’m going to try to write them down stream-of-consciousness style before I go to bed, and hopefully come up with some tangibles out of them.
- I read this article: Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now - Alexey Guzey, and it was completely inspirational. I then read and took notes on this post: Matter | Thoughts on Meaning and Writing, which I felt even better about. I love this person’s writing style, and the things that they write about I relate to very deeply and personally. #blogging
- Writing is really fucking hard, but you should finish writing things when you’re in the middle of writing them because it’s going to be hard to get that momentum for writing again. #blogging
- When I’ve writing or thinking consciously about producing thoughts and ideas for a couple of days, I notice that my brain subconsciously starts to have so many more ideas. It happens like clockwork. I wish that I documented these thoughts better as I had them in a bathroom, but alas there’s only so much that you can do.
- Read this beautiful short story about regret, friendship, and loss: Caroline | Jonathan’s Nifty Website
- Read this post and found so much value from it: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life | Hacker News Used it as a launch point to read more about a bunch of other things. #links #productivity #selfgrowth
- [This could be a blog post of its own] I realized that there’s so much value to 1) try out a bunch of things that are potential solutions to a problem and 2) come back to it a year or so later and think about what still makes an impression afterward vs. what has just dissipated. Time is such a valuable tool for understanding how valuable something is. #blog-ideas
- I’m going to try writing as one of my primary hobbies.
- I always thought that I was doing tags in my Zettelkasten wrong. However, after seeing the tags that other people have used in Pinboard, which are not too dissimilar from mine, I feel way better about the tags that I’m using myself (even though I didn’t change anything about the tags I was using). Feeling like the work that you’re doing fits in socially is such a hugely important thing for productivity.
uid: 202204100318 tags: #journal
“active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes,” end quote.
the environment you’re in makes a big difference in how you think / how well you think?
And as Andy Clark points out, a computer would never have an idea printed out, have to read it with their eyes, make up lots of marks in the margins, and then pass it around to their colleagues and then have a whole new understanding of that idea. That’s not how computers work, but that’s how people work. And so when we think of ourselves as loopy creatures, we can kind of create those loops where we’re passing information and ideas in and out of these different domains — the body, spaces, other people’s minds — and then back through our own heads. And that’s a much more fertile and generative way of dealing with information than just always keeping it inside our own heads where it’s not going to be changed or altered or improved in any way.
the idea of loops is interesting — makes it so much more valuable to get feedback from people
And the best results are produced by those people who have a kind of oscillation between talking with people, going back and having a private space and private time and quiet to think about their own ideas, and then it’s actually another kind of loop.
maybe I should try to do this
And that always struck me as the odd irony of open floor or open office plans. And you tap this in the book, that there’s some evidence that when companies move to being an open plan office, they often see a reduction in the amount of collaboration and conversation that happens. And when I used to do that, I had noise canceling headphones on all the time, and I was simultaneously always over socialized and a little under socialized, which is to say that I couldn’t get away from people. So it’s not like I was yearning for more people. But the interactions I was having were not deep and they were not interactions I often wanted. So at the same time, it wasn’t that I was getting my social needs met. And I thought back to other times when I’ve been in offices or in more cubicles when you’re working and you want to leave the office and talk to people. You want to move to that other modality, which I guess speaks to your idea of looping.
I kinda agree with this. Still to be seen how much collaboration happens once more people start coming to the office, but as of now, I don’t think the open-floor plan contributes to collaboration at Airtable at all.
But really what produces effective work in our own daily lives often involves offloading our mental contents onto physical space, whether that’s a whiteboard or a set of post-it notes, which is my favorite tool, or onto multiple monitors so that we can start using this whole other suite of abilities that are built into the human organism.
I really think I would benefit from having a whiteboard to write ideas on. Some big canvas where I can easily brainstorm things.
even just having a more accurate conception of your own mind allows you to work with it differently
yeah, this is what I’m trying to do, but a ton of people don’t get the opportunity to do this (because they don’t have the luxury of spending 90 minutes on reading articles like “thinking about thinking”
tags: #productivity #insights