There are several facts about the nature of what I write:
- It’s never really “done”: I’ll always find a stray idea or wayward thought that fits into what I’ve already written.
- It’s hard to define when it is done-to-publish: The basics are covered, but is it thorough enough?
- The style is always bad: My ability to cogently express an idea without misrepresentation or pedagogical insularity keeps improving, thereby rendering my old style somewhat obsolete.
These 3 thoughts together mean giving updates about my creative works is more of a marketing effort than any type of need-to-know basis, and it almost conflicts with my life’s purpose. Plus, I like the anonymity of being a C-list blogger.
As a full disclosure, I hate updating the world about what I build. Social fashions have a tendency to obfuscate the relatively trend-deaf approach I make to life.
On that subject. Happy Juneteenth? If you’re in Texas, I guess that matters. If you want to celebrate the spirit of slavery’s end as a complete institution, you could always celebrate September 22 when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Or we can go to June 22, 1772, where the Mansfield judgment was the first win for abolitionism. Or, you could not celebrate the end of slavery because debt and oppressive business contracts still exist. I’m sure there’s no political reason for this being signed into federal law.
What I Did
FRONT-END:
My interesting GainedInSite essays are all apparently based on how my lower-level essays interpose the ways of living and thinking we take for granted, so I decided to put them all here at once.
To start, there are a few more Philosodata to pull from:
Some aspects of conventional human society start to express in groups of 3 or more:
Once they become larger, they start to express distinct characteristics:
- Family
- Small-Group Leadership
- Large-Group Leadership
- Rules
- Why Bad Systems Persist
- Conservative/Liberal
- Leftism
- Large-Group Conflicts
- Technology
- Social Trends
- Sustainability Factors
Finally, an articulation as to why I made Gained InSite in the first place.
BACK-END:
With the exception of the essays on NotaGenius that correspond with management, entrepreneurship, and math. Contrary to what any sane person would think, this caused me a tremendous amount of anxiety.
I investigated the matter further, and that’s a huge aspect of the next section. In the process, I built a new productivity system.
What I Learned
I have been obsessing about getting my essays done. I wouldn’t be able to count how many times I’ve had the following thoughts:
- “Wow, that sounds like a good tech project that I could WAIT NO GOTTA GET MY ESSAYS DONE FIRST.”
- “Hey, that’s a neat idea that one of my future projects can use to NO WE’RE NOT DOING THAT YET GOTTA FINISH THE ESSAYS.”
- “Ooh, a fun thing to read! I’d certainly love to learn about distributed systems are NOCAN’TDOITYET.”
- “This would be a neat group to check out when I DON’T HAVE TIME YET.”
This method makes me highly productive, but somewhat unhinged and miserable.
This method also has the added downside of suppressing any critical thinking about the specific reason why I write the essays.
Of course, I had to think about The Forbidden TechSplained Essays I Can’t Think About once I had to start into Entrepreneurship and Management, which will heavily connect back-and-forth (a bit like how my AdequateLife and TechSplained jobs pages are companions to one another.
So, I had a bit of an emotional meltdown for a few days, though my Wummy Nuggers can testify that it was a much smaller meltdown than before.
One of my own quirks, likely related to my ASD, is that I have an excellent grasp of both the mundane details of my projects and the big picture, but not that in-the-middle perspective. So, planning for my day and year is top-notch, but not my week.
To that end, I decided to build a new productivity system.
It’s still a work-in-process, and I’m still reworking it (and have quite a few additions I may add later), but I’ve beefed it up into its proto-version:
This system hybridizes multiple other systems:
- Every new item that’s clearly actionable (even if it needs fleshing out) goes on a project list.
- The Johnny Decimal system is used throughout my naming conventions:
- 00-09 Unsorted
- 10-19 Meta Things
- 20-29 Day Job
- 30-39 Household Management
- 40-49 Thought-Heavy Tasks
- 50-59 Physical Effort-Heavy Tasks
- 60-69 Social Tasks
- 70-79 Recharging/Relaxing Tasks
- I’ve incorporated the subcategories to reflect pieces of the GTD system:
- [#]0 is reference (e.g., 40 is thought-based reference)
- [#]1 is miscellaneous
- [#]8 is later
- [#]9 is maybe, as well as any stray ideas
- For myself, the 40’s have several subsections:
- 43 – Writing
- 44 – Hardware
- 45 – Software
- 46 – Coding
- 49.43, 49.44, 49.45, 49.46 – Writing/Hardware/Software/Coding Ideas
- If there’s a specific domain (e.g., NotaGenius, TechSplained), I have to classify it for convenience.
- Everything I have is tracked through several incondensable boxes with the above-stated Johnny Decimal system:
- Files stored locally on the computer (including stray notes as a text file) and cloud synced
- icouLdfAiL
- Bookmarks (which I recently migrated to Raindrop)
- If I run across any other stray things, I either save it via browser bookmarks (backed up with Firefox sync) or a cross-platform web notes app (I use Standard Notes). This gets purged and sorted at the end of the week.
- Break out each item into Kanban divisions on the right side, with categories that make sense and may move around as the situation permits.
The problem is that finding an all-in-one productivity system (I’m looking at you, Notion) comes with the weakness of being too open-ended, and finding a larger-scale system (e.g., Zoho Workplace) is a bit too rigid to adapt to the oddities of a personal productivity.
But, that’s okay. A spreadsheet is optimal because it is a simple 2-D database, meaning it’s automatically parsed if you don’t use nonstop soft line breaks to add more content. Until I can create it in my programming projects or find something in the 1,958 tools I’m planning to add into my toolbox.
What I’m Doing
Working in an insurance office right now, and homing with an almost-as-crazy woman derided from the clutches of sanity by two schoolchildren.
Several non-specific and very large tasks with the time left over:
- Cleaning up dead links from my essays.
- Meandering through and sifting out the 9,951 articles I was obsessive enough to save, with the hope that I’ll update them into my TechSplained essays.
- Purging out 1,958 hyperlinks to merge tools into my toolbox.