A journal experiment for the month of April in 2018
I am live-blogging my entire process and thought patterns around work this month. Follow along!
Posts:
- Wed at 07:34 - An update: one thing
- Sat at 01:14 - Closing projects from C to G
- Fri at 14:51 - Hoodies and website edits
- Fri at 12:46 - Learning to say no
- Wed at 08:41 - Issues with streaks
- Thu at 22:13 - Silent Book Club
- Wed at 16:49 - Maintainer Repository Audits and Open Collective
- Wed at 12:16 - Open Source Meetups in Montreal
- Wed at 11:31 - Why am I writing on this site?
- Wed at 11:27 - Planning better social media integration for posts
- Tue at 20:54 - The CBC and daily roundup
- Mon at 20:08 - Web development day
- Mon at 11:38 - The Litt Review
- Mon at 11:32 - April priorities
All content CC-BY-NC © 2018 Richard Littauer.
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.
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.
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 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?
Well, I can accept that I won’t be able to find the time to do it. I’ve opened an issue about asking people to step forward to help collaborate. And now I am going to put this in the waiting section of my todo list, as there’s nothing to do but wait for others.
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.
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.