One of the projects I gave up when I archived and deleted the vast majority of my projects was this one. I didn’t mean for that to happen, but it did, and I’m not sorry for not updating you in a while.
I’ve been working on my thesis. As a result of having one thing I am doing every day, I’ve written more in the past two weeks than in the past four years. I’ve been deprioritizing my business, coding, writing, and anything else that gets in the way. Instead, I’ve been working for hours every day, learning, writing, and contributing meaningfully to something which has been bugging me for half a decade.
I’ve also been, almost uniformly, happier. I’m utterly shocked by how easy happiness in work is to achieve, on how focused you can be, if you drop everything else and work on a single project. I’m going to keep going.
I am going through my list of projects (which I keep in a folder, mostly as Markdown files) and removing and closing as many projects as I can. By definition, this is a largely personal exercise, but you may get some small use from reading these.
The Carbon Neutral Nomad
Keeping this one and actively working on it, specifically with a friend.
Carbon Zerow
In January of this year, four of my friends rowed across the ocean. I’ve set up a website for them at carbonzerow.org, and I ran their social media while they were rowing. As far as I know, I have one more task to do for this - to make a final printout of their speech they gave to family and friends. It should take an hour or two to clean up. Then this will be done.
I’ve taken five minutes now and added this project to my website, from which I realised it was lacking. You can see it here.
High Point all of the 50 states
It is my goal to hit all of the high points of all 50 states. This is an exceptionally lazy goal, but I do manage to rack up a few every year. As there is no expressed need for this to be sped up, and nothing to do but wait until my Pittsburgh trip next week where I hope to summit five more states, I am just going to put this on hold for the rest of the summer. That means taking the placeholder out of my todo list.
Code Poetry
I will not start or work on a website for code poetry this summer. Goodbye.
Dean’s Sun’s Site
I need to make a website for my friend Dean’s son, Sun. This was part of $2117, which was successful in that I reached my goal, but less successful in that I didn’t do all of the work when I actually ran the project. So, this will have to get done in the next few weeks. Luckily, this is clearly scoped; when it is done, it’s done.
Essays over coffee
I won’t start a blog about essays over coffee this summer. Perhaps next. No.
Ethereum.js
I won’t get involved with Ethereum.js this summer. Perhaps in the fall. No.
Ethereum
I won’t set up an Ethereum wallet, either. No.
Friends
I keep a list of friends to contact periodically. I’m going to keep this as a priority.
Francis Bacon and Eggs
I unfortunately won’t get to do any of these this summer. I may do an ad hoc episode, but I won’t be actively planning on doing any at the moment. It’s not a huge priority for me, although it is fun.
I eagerly look forward to returning to this when I have a new place to live in September. (Sorry, Fred.)
Get over my fear of sailing
I won’t be sailing this summer, unless I randomly make a trip to Sicily that I don’t currently have planned. Moving this to the fall.
Get paid to write a book
This may happen, but I’m not going to priotize making it work this summer. No.
Get published in the new yorker
Not this summer, either. No.
Get rid of all of my debt
Not this summer, either. But I should plan on getting rid of at least two loans, so this would be a good thing to have open. Keeping this as an active project.
GitHub Portfolio Site
This one is tricky. I could make some money from it; I could make it a business; I could help others; and I could probably make a splash. But I’m not sure I have the time to develop it and ship it, and once I do ship, I don’t know if I’d have the energy to keep it going. I’d have to offload the majority of the work. But that’s not a reason not to do it.
Right now, a friend of mine is going through a process that would benefit from this site. So, it might be worth actually speccing this out now. I’ll ask him if he’d be interested in doing it with me. If not, I am going to shelve this until the fall.
Grants
While cool, I don’t really have a reason to apply for an Awesome Foundation Grant at the moment. However, I should look into getting some adventure grants for my trip. Let’s add that to the list of things to do for the 500 mile trip, and remove project as something I’m thinking about.
I posted the last link on Twitter, and I got some feedback from my old friend Jana. I’ve gone through and edited the pages to have a bit better styling, in particular adding a button to project pages. This little touch will add a lot - I’m glad she pointed it out.
Buy New Hoodie
This is on my list of items because mine, an old cotton hoodie from Uniqlo, has officially died. And while it is tempting to say that this takes no time and shouldn’t be there, there’s something I want to do: research what hoodies are good for hiking, what hoodies are sustainable, and what it would cost to find a combination of the two.
Looking online, there are sustainable hoodies, but I would have to pay shipping anyway. I think it makes more sense to stop looking for a sustainable hoodie altogether, and perhaps buy a cheap cotton one next week when I am in Philadelphia, for all of my city-non-backpacking needs.
On the other hand - if I am ultralighting, bringing along my current wool sweater is a horrible move. It wears 496g, and takes up more space than my tent, and will take up even more space and weight if it gets wet (although it will keep me warm). A 250 Merino hoodie from REI costs $115, and would do me far better than spending another $40 at Uniqlo for a cotton hoodie I can’t bring with me, and should be a workable substitute for a massive all-wool sweater. Looking now, Smartwool, Icebreaker, and Ibex (the main designers I looked at) all have competitive features, but they range higher. This one looks good, but the price is prohibitive.
I am going to keep my £20 wool sweater I got at a charity shop, and if it gets too heavy, I’ll think about getting a new one. For now, the price of cutting down weight is too high, and with summer around the bend, anyway, I’ll just have to go hoodieless for a while. That’s OK; hats and jackets remove the need for a hoodie, in any event. It’s just wasted fabric.
I’m going to decide not to spend any more time on this, and moving it to waiting, as there’s nothing for me to do but to see if I like a hoodie when I see one.
More overhaul
Unfortunately, I got dragged into another issue on https://burntfen.com. I should have prepared for this. Now, however, you can click through to other projects from within a project page. This will dramatically improve site flow, I believe, as users will bounce around more instead of just clicking on a few projects. I also fixed up some assets and removed a lot of poor css. Ok. On to the next thing.
I want to be able to focus on less things. I’m finding that difficult, because I simply have too many things going on. Each day, I’ve got a functionally infinite number of small tasks to do, because I’ll never get to the end of them. They can easily fill up a day without me being satisfied that I actually achieved anything.
There’s only one real solution to this problem: to learn to say no to things. That means shutting down projects, stopping investing time in things I don’t want to invest in, and cutting ties to communities that I feel aren’t helping me in a tangible way.
Unfortunately, I have hundreds of projects. This makes it difficult to choose a particular project and shut it down, and it makes it hard to say no to things. Also, I don’t like the idea of saying no forever. What I can say, though, is no today.
Assuming I am planning on going fastpacking with a laptop for the next few months - which is my current plan - what can I say I won’t do in that time? That is a much easier thing to commit to.
So, I’ve made a list of projects currently in my workspace. Let’s go through them one by one, and shut them down or actionably schedule work for them, in the next three months.
I started this post and these projects yesterday, so here’s what I have at the moment. I realised I could live blog each of these little projects, and that might make this process easier. So, that’s what I am going to start doing.
Adventure Site
This project is one I shouldn’t shut down - it’s the basic name for a set of projects I’m planning on ramping up for my walk in Scotland and in the Adirondacks. I have some actionable items here, most of which will get done in the next few months.
Artificial Intelligence
This project is a placeholder for my desire to learn AI. At the moment, this involves reading a few books and doing work on them. I don’t see this happening in the next three months. Unfortunately, one of these projects involves going through an entire book on Tensorflow that Zach generously bought me. I really do want to do this! But I don’t see it happening in the next three months. The solution, here, is to write him and let him know; offer the money back for the book if he feels that he wanted me to make something sooner; and to schedule it for later.
Alternatively, I could look at it and see if I can get it done in the next hour. This is not the right move, because it’s far too easy for me to get distracted and do this for everything here. However, I don’t actually know if five minutes would get this done or not. I’m going to set a timer. It’s 18:30. Let’s check back in at 18:35 - if I know I can do something quickly, let’s do it.
Yes, there is something I can do here - in relation to my thesis. It’s possible I can do some basic machine learning classifications of data from repositories mentioned in my endangered-languages repository, which would be relevant to that end. In that case, let’s move ai into that project, for now. Done.
Let’s also email Zach and let him know. Done.
All Contributors and Name Your Contributors Integration
All Contributors is an awesome tool for working to show your contributors to a project. I’ve built a tool - name-your-contributors - that would work well with it. But there needs to be an integration. I don’t have time at the moment to do this, and I’m unlikely to have time in the next few weeks. How can I move this forward?
This takes up some amount of mental space, and I don’t think the current iteration works. I am going to close it. I’ll email Jen about it. Done.
This will be a huge weight off. As I wrote this, Uyama Hiroto’s song Imagination was playing, and the words “Have a nice evening. Goodbye.” played. Fitting.
Apply for an Uncharted Journalism Grant
Uncharted Journalism is an awesome grant for journalists going to places off the map, doing great reporting work. I’ve submitted two grants before - one on documenting indigenous hunting techniques used by second generation Naskapi in norethern Quebec, and one on high tech solutions developed in Tuvalu to internet and green energy. Both didn’t make it, but I’d like to apply for more.
I missed the deadline for this, unfortunately. Moving forward, I’ve messaged Phillip Smith about the possibility of a thirty minute hangout call to talk about uncharted journalism and how I can segway to doing good journalistic work on my expeditions, as opposed to just doing tech work with companies in the future.
Removing this entire goal, for now. It’s not going to happen in the next few months.
This is a pretty awesome project that I’ve had some TODOs for internally. However, looking at it now, I think that it is fine as it is, and that I should ideally work on speccing it out and building it up when I need to, but not before. There’s nothing to do now. If anyone wants to help, there are open issues, but I don’t think I am going to prioritise closing them anytime soon. This is a tool for a job; when the job doesn’t exist, it doesn’t make sense to keep polishing the tool.
If I end up using this to work on Probot, then this will make more sense to take the dust off. For now, I’m good, and that is logged in this isssue anyway.
The website I currently have set up for Burnt Fen Creative, my company, functions more as a personal portfolio than anything else. I need to rethink how it functions and what I show to people.
I realise, looking at the issues I have here, that a lot of this could be done right now. So, I just took thirty minutes and refactored the website to be clearer: I moved the note about what it is to the top, made the design cleaner, removed some sections and work, and most notably made it clear that we’re available for hire. I have a few more tasks open in the GitHub issues - like make the blog more accessible - but those are not priorities. So, I am considering this entire overhaul done. I did a lot of work two weeks ago on this, so I’m proud I’ve managed. Nothing left to do here, move along. Fantastic.
I’ll add more in the next few posts, and refer back to this one.
One of the issues with intending to do a streak of posting is that if you miss one day, you’re far more likely to miss the next day. Also, it enforces poor behaviour; you’re more likely to push out posts which are suboptimal because you feel you need to post something on a certain day, than because you actually think a post is worth posting.
I’ve fallen prey to both of these already in the past few days. Not a very long run. Let’s get back to posting here.
After a work day (largely rote tasks, but also another Maintainer review, and some interviews), I rested by going to my second meetup I hosted this week. The first, last night, was the Decentralized Web Meetup here in Montréal, where we talked about open source and ways of funding it. I ended up talking more than I expected, which often unfortunately happens.
Tonight, the opposite occurred - because it was the Silent Book Club. At Drawn and Quarterly, a graphic novel publishing house and bookstore, around nine people came from seven to nine on a weeknight, sat down, didn’t say much to each other (in three cases, nothing at all), and then read books for two hours. I read some of William Morris’s early fantasy short stories, and Deep Work by Carl Newport.
Maintainer Mountaineer offers repository audits. These are manually done; I go through a checklist and see if I can make sense of the repository, if there are any issues in the README, or package manifests, or Contribute files, and so on. They generally take around 45 minutes, but often take longer as I get distracted and spend time fiddling with things. I bill them through Maintainer at $75 each.
Today, I did my first one that I’ve done in a while, for octobox, which I was scheduled to do since @teabass asked me to do some for him a couple of weeks ago.
You can see what a finished audit looks like, here. If you’re interested in getting one, do get in touch!
I spent some time working on my process, and logging some issues in an internal repository I use to keep track of the shell scripts and templates I use to make this work fast. These are the kind of issues I opened:
5: [audit] Add a way to automatically post gist
4: [audit] Generate js fields with flag or omit them
3: [audit] Have audit copy name and gh-description into template
2: [audit] automatically point out all spellchecked words
I also opened a PR for git-extras to add documentation around the --org option for git fork, which is a handy way to fork a repository from your CLI.
I have a few more of these coming, too.
For billing, instead of billing by email, I used Open Collective. I have a profile for Maintainer there, but wasn’t able to figure out how to invoice from a collective to another collective - we’ll figure that out later. For now, I’ve submitted an invoice manually by PDF through OpenCollective, and it’s already been approved.
The meetup scene in Montréal is pretty strong, compared to what I noticed in Boston. People tend to start meetups easier, and actually attend them. I’ve been involved with more than a few, and attend JSMontreal, Drawn and Quarterly’s graphic novel book club, and Coffee and Code whenever I can.
Tonight, I’m helping host the Decentralized Web Meetup, where we’ll discuss sustainable ways to fund open source projects, focusing on things like Patreon, Open Collective, and OSCoin. I’m looking forward to it. It’s less of a talk and more of a discussion, which is something I want; I’m tired of going to a meetup for an hour and hearing one person speak on something I’m only tangentially interested in.
And on Monday, I’m hosting the first Open Source Montreal meetup, where I’ll talk about Maintainer’s open source repos on GitHub - probably on Build A Space or the Dashboard - and then we’ll have lightning talks from participants about their projects. I wanted a langauge-agnostic meetup for people to just talk about open source, and now, thanks to my friend Ruy kicking me in the ass and helping set it up, we have one. This comes out of the Open Source Cities org on GitHub I’ve set up, to track open source in various cities around the world. The Montréal repo has the highest activity, so it makes sense to start here.
This is also my swan song for Montréal. I’m heading out on the 17th, and am unlikely to be back for another meetup in May before I fly out to Dublin. I hope that what I start here continues; we’ll have to see.
I realise that I haven’t been clear how this blog is useful to me. Here’s the short version: this blog helps me distill my thoughts by forcing me to write them out for an external audience, in a sort of rubber-ducking. It also helps me point those thoughts at others, so I can ask questions or get feedback. Finally, it’s helpful as a reminder that I’m not working alone; I have friends and ‘followers’ (whatever that actually means) who are interested in what I’m doing, and whom I may be able to help and who may be able to help me in approaching our goals. Making in public is better, for this reason, than making in private. It enables community, even if community in this case consists of writing posts like this.
There are downsides. It takes time, for one. For two, it’s public - I’m not exactly holding back a ton, here (unless you want to know about stress fracture recovery and the plumber fixing my sink this morning). For three, it’s low signal. A lot of these posts are wandering, scattered, and I write more than most people would like to read. I don’t have an answer to that. I know this helps me, so I plan to keep going.
This morning I spent twenty minutes over coffee finishing up The Physics of Star Trek, a little book I’d been reading off and on for the past few months. Then, completely against my current process of ignoring my own process, I did what I ought to do: I sat down and immediately transcribed and wrote a review for the book. The whole process - light for this book, as I only took a handful of notes that weren’t worth transcribing to my electronic notes - took around twenty minutes, give or take. That’s from starting the review to sending it out on the website, on Buffer to Twitter, and through Mailchimp.
In the process, I realised once again that I am under-utilising my programming skills and marketing skills. While this wasn’t a particularly illuminating review, it did reflect thoughtful content that I put out on a daily basis. I ought to be posting this to a few venues, every time. For instance, I’d rather my Instagram feed had all of the books I read and review on it - that more perfectly captures how I would like to be seen and perceived, and the kind of audience I want, than random photos of cats in windows. I should also automatically tweet and mail out my reviews, and this blog, instead of manually running the process.
I wrote up an issue on my knowledge repo, where I keep public processes and notes I’ve written up. Here’s the text below
Buffer is useful for Twitter, but it underperforms for Instagram, and it isn’t connected to other social medias.
When I post a book review using this process, I should also do the following:
Post the URL to Twitter with the image and a specified comment
Post the book title to Instagram with a link to the URL
Post the review to Scuttlebutt
Post the review to Facebook (if Facebook is something I’m interested in maintaining, which it isn’t clear it is, as I have it disconnected most of the time)
Post the review to Medium?
Post the review to the Mailchimp list
Post the review to my Tinyletter list
Add the review to my weekly newsletter roundup
Post to relevant Slacks
Right now, I post only to Mailchimp and Twitter - the former manually, the latter through the Buffer API.
All of this is contingent on putting out high noise, medium signal messaging. Basically - if I write something, post it for people to see. I’m not entirely interested in high signal, low noise messaging: that’s what my weekly newsletter is for. Twitter is high noise low signal by default, so I can push everything there with impunity.
I’m not entirely convinced that my book reviews (among other types of content, like my 2018-april blog going on right now) are actually low signal, anyway. I know people enjoy reading them, and measures of signal seem arbitrary.
In any event: there ought to be a shell script or a webapp that I run which does all of this posting for me, or some way of setting up a non-brittle poster through various APIs and connected services - for instance, through RSS (something I’m having issues doing through the Jekyll RSS feed plugin).
This probably isn’t a solitary problem, and may help others.
This is related to my Jekyll scheduler, too. Right now, I have a backlog of book reviews to publish (and a massive backlog - around 40 books - of books to review which I’ve read in the past few months). I may be able to kill two birds with one stone, if I get the Jekyll scheduler up and integrate an API or automatic posting into it. Something to think about.
Yesterday, I said I would get to the maintainer audits today. I wasn’t able to orchestrate a deep work session. Instead, I bounced between the following tasks:
Went on the CBC - Radio Canada. I talked about the Silent Book Club I’m hosting on Thursday at a local bookstore here, the first time the event has been hosted in this city. The listernship was something in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands, and at least one friend emailed me to say he heard me talk at 6:10am in the morning.
Visited the Montréal Basilica for the first time, and meditated in the giant Catholic church.
Visited my girlfriend in the clinic for emotional support, especially as it was my car door that accidentally broke her finger.
Watched half of Randy Pausch’s video on time management. His grid proved useful.
Bought a bike pump converter.
Had a power nap, as I woke up at 4:30am.
Booked a car from April 17th to April 27th to Pittsburgh. That means I am definitively driving to Heartifacts, and that I am going to be hitting up Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Burlington, Boston, and the high points of five states on the way. You’re all invited.
Booked a plane to Dublin from May 14th to July 13th, for the summer. I’m also likely going to the Node Collaboration Summit in Berlin at the end of May and JSConf in early June.
Finished the paperwork for my taxes and accounting for 2017, and talked to my accountant;
Bought new fastpacking shoes from inov-8 after my X-Talon 212s were too narrow, even when I ordered a size up.
Researched and worked on physio for my ankle dorsalflexion and for my metatarsal stress fracture rehab. Wrote my PT with some open questions.
Answered all of my outstanding altMBA letters from alumni.
Post mortem
I was too tired to functionally make myself stop and focus today, which shows a lack of discipline and order that I am unhappy with. I was also too tired to realise that I skipped lunch, so I’m amazed I got anything done at all. All that having been said, for a day in which I effectively didn’t manage to get deep, focused research done, I did manage a wide variety of tasks that will make the rest of my life easier. I now know where I will be until July 13th; I have my route planned through Scotland, and am committed to my trans-Scotland walk; I’m also committed to Pittsburgh and a single route; and I’ve also done something that makes me, an American in Canada, proud - I’ve contributed usefully to global Canadian culture, in a way that made my barista roll his eyes and say: “How f*cking millenial”.
I should have taken a second nap. I should have done the tax work, earlier in the day. And I should have emailed my PT two days ago, instead of festering over the work.
Today, I spent hours fixing up my website. Specifically, I learned how to implement and fix my sticky footer problem; I redesigned and rewrote the contact section; I added In Development and inyoman.com to my projects; I fixed design issues on The Litt Review; and I learned a lot about image optimization and brought the size of my website down from 20mb to just above 2mb, meaning it’ll load a lot faster and won’t clog up people’s phones anymore.
I didn’t get to much more work than that. I posted the December’s Ghost review I wrote this morning, on permission from the author, and I got paid for that job. That means I’m starting the week with some money in the bank, although at this rate I’ll only make $7500 this month, which isn’t enough. I’ll need to do better.
I also found out that I could build a 6x6x6 foot cage out of 2-by-4s and mesh for around $150, and what I estimate would be four hours. I’m not going to let you know what this is for unless you ask. It’s not a project for this month; hopefully in a few months when I have a more settled location. If I built it now, I would just have to take it down again.
There’s more work to do on my website. I need to make it clearer that I’m available for hire, and the kind of work Burnt Fen Creative does best. However, I can get to that another day. Today I wanted to close the job I had, and I decided while I was at it I would close open issues on the website. In the future, I’ll have to be more wary of feature creep like that.
It’s now 8:00. I’m tired, but not exhausted. My foot is killing me, and I want to spend some time researching how to make it feel better, perhaps to ice it. And I need dinner.
This morning, I had a few goals. The first was to finish my reviews for Gracestone Publishing, a publishing house that reached out to me to review two of their books. The founder used to be my old youth group leader. I reviewed one of the books - the young adult fantasy - this morning, and have sent off the review. I just got off a call with them, as I’m not going to be able to read the second book - it’s a retelling of the Biblical story, and I don’t think I could give an impartial opinion on it as an athiest, and I don’t think I would have enjoyed reading it.
This was the first paid review that came out of me opening up my book reviews on The Litt Review. While I am focused on that work, I want to close up some issues on the site. That done, I should be able to put the Litt Review out of my head for a while, until I read another book, at least. Let’s clean up some other issues on burntfen.com while I am at it.
April. A new month. My goal last month had been to write my thesis; I wasn’t able to complete this in time. I still have time, but it does push back my plans a bit. This month, I am hoping to do better.
Focusing on multiple priorities hasn’t proved to be a useful exercise. At some level, I’ll never be able to focus entirely - I still have to eat, sleep, exercise. However, mentally, I ought to be able to focus on one thing at a time, by time boxing certain activities and with adequate planning.
The first priority are my clients, mostly freelance, and my paying customers through Maintainer. The second priority are my Patreons, who expect something from their donation. The third priority is my thesis, which I’m going to focus on weekend evenings until all of my client jobs are done, at which point it’ll go back to being first priority for a while. Last month, I tried to focus on the thesis first - and I didn’t get very far in terms of client work, or making money. Let’s fix that this month.
My money situation isn’t great. I’ve spent roughly $3000 a month to live over the past few months. I want to make sure that I’m able to make that much money, after taxes, this month. I also want to pay off my two remaining Federal loans; as of right now, that’s $8,808.33. These have a lower interest than my other larger loans, but I pay proportionally more for these as the minimum is higher, and I want to use the snowball method to pay off my loans, because I think that has better psychological feedback than hitting the larger loans first. That means I need to make roughly $18,000 before taxes this month, or set up contracts where it’s possible to do that in the future. This is an outlandish goal, but I don’t think it’s impossible if I focus on providing value (as opposed to just getting money, which can more easily lead to shoddy work). It’s a moonshot; I just happen to be predisposed to moonshot goals.
Finally, I’ve got some travel planned this April. I’m driving to Pittsburgh on the 16th, and may not return to Montréal immediately afterwards. So, I need to also plan for both that trip and for any other trips happening in May and June, and to move my stuff out of Montréal by then.
My goals for this month, in bullet points:
Close all open client jobs.
Earn $18,000.
Finish my MSc thesis.
Wrap up my time in Montréal.
Blog on this website at least once a day, without fail.
Weekly newsletters and patreon posts, without fail.
Drive to Pittsburgh; highpoint New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.