2024-04-16 A Shifting World

As you may know from the deluge of information, Iran has attacked Israel and that means World War 3 somehow. It’s only sensible to stay eternally freaked-out about everything, especially with election season in play. I mean, think of all the good that anxiety does for us!

What I Did

Many of my piles were uncomfortably large, and they were discouraging me. It’s not very encouraging to work through 45 elements of “DNS_TB_1.md” and still have that file sitting around, glaring at you. It’s much more enjoyable to get through “DNS_TB_1.md”, “DNS_TB_2.md”, “DNS_TB_3.md”, “DNS_TB_4.md”, and halfway through “DNS_TB_5.md”!

So, I made the decision to split everything up into a max-10-elements-per-file rule. Worker morale has improved by 79%! I was even able to break into making some minor grammatical edits on my pages as well.

What I Learned

I’ve implemented my new approach, and it’s been very helpful to see marked improvements. My mood management has represented itself into the following rules:

• If I’m motivated to work on a specific task: Sally forward, lads!
• If I’m discouraged over the current task: Hoist a quick project to the main focus! Loosen the stressors!
• If I’m bored with the current task: Grab a large mess! Heave ho!
• If I’m exhausted: To the recovery platform! Full stop and prepare for collapse!

The problem I saw was that the entire project was a discombobulated mess of chaos. Keeping that generalized state of mind means my efforts to combobulate will fail. By contrast, if each domain has a unique scope of awfulness to persevere through, not everything can be lumped together enough to create a state of overwhelm.

In other words, more myopia makes more movement and increased inference intimately irritates and intimidates incessantly.

What I’m Doing

WHAT I MUST DO:

• Working in an insurance office right now.
• Keeping a home together with a beautiful woman at the maximum threshold of the Crazy/Hot Matrix.
• Slowly succumbing to the standard mental decline caused by maintaining two schoolchildren before they’re old enough to vote.

MY HOBBY:

My Grandiose De-Hoarding Mission is on track, loosely guided by a Johnny.Decimal-like system:

• It consists of 6,362 files, each one containing between 1 and 10 elements.
• As I go, each condensation or output will make fewer files, but each re-categorization may make more files.
• The number is moderately arbitrary relative to results, thereby avoiding the risk of Goodhart’s Law while also implying I’ve made some sort of progress.

The project will eventually send everything to 3 possible places:

1. My essays will be updated, most notably NotaGenius and Trendless Tech.
2. My toolbox, if it’s potentially useful.
3. The primitives and templates for future projects.

Throughout the entire system, I maintain a schema that reflects the content I’m building:

1. Items I must re-sort into their corresponding domains.
2. Downloaded content I feel compelled to do something about (e.g., my notes for the essay, photos, PDFs).
3. Links to proper guides on the subject.
4. Commentary on the subject.

The flow of work represents itself through a unique semi-ordered flow of “phases”:

1. Separate out the guides, opinions, and tools for each section (0->a-d).
2. Send grouped inbox items into their appropriate categories (000-001->021-180+toolbox).
3. Update the old content I’ve already written (021-027).
4. Finish out a few easy pages (100).
5. Add ready-to-go content updates (a).
6. Finalize Trendless Tech easy pages (101-104).
7. Finalize Trendless Tech pages I can visualize (105-119)
8. Finalize Trendless Tech pages that are hard for me to conceive the final product over (125-145)
9. Finalize Trendless Tech pages that are either monstrous hairballs of many things or I have very limited knowledge (150-165)
10. Finish the Entrepreneurship pages (170)
11. Finish the Management pages (175)
12. Finish the Math pages (180)
    • I’m aiming for breadth, not depth. I don’t need to perform combinatorics in my head, but I do need to explain in plain English what the heck each math “thing” is.
    • The trek is along a pseudo-path through the route of standard formalized education.
      1. Basic arithmetic
      2. Algebra
      3. Geometry/trigonometry
      4. Statistics
      5. Calculus
      6. Number theory, with a likely divergence into applied maths and game theory. Along the way, I’ll keep a jargon-resistant dictionary of the big math words.