2024-01-31 How to Lose a Life in 10 Months

Posted on by Dave Stucky

What I Did

FRONT-END:

More backlogged content.

BACK-END:

More yak shaving, but more decisive.

What I Learned

As a casual experience when I’m bored, I’ve been proofreading my past content. I sprung for $70 to get a machine-learning-assisted tool to proofread. So far, LanguageTool has been very useful, though the task of proofreading is moderately tedious.

However, in the mix of my proofing, I came back to my success pages. It dawned on me how far things have changed for me, and how much I’ve forgotten since then.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I wrote a great set of essays, and almost everything I wrote was near-solid, factual expressions of the True and the Beautiful Good.

What I did discover, though, is that I’ve slipped on the integration of that information, simply by the fact that I haven’t really re-consumed much of it. Even with a rock-solid memory from a bad case of high-functioning ASD, the brain signals still attenuate, and neural pathways still wear down.

So, it’s been a humbling experience, and I had to update my pedagogy page to reflect that reality.

What I’m Doing

WHAT I MUST DO:

  • Working in an insurance office right now.
  • Keeping a home together with a 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:

I’ve divided my Grandiose De-Hoarding Mission into 2 domains, loosely inspired by Johnny.Decimal:

  • It consists of 3,097 files, each one containing between 1 and 500 subjects.
  • As I go, each condensation will make fewer files, but each re-categorization will 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 software-leaning side will (eventually) go to my toolbox:

  • 015 — sifting through my current toolbox to find existing content throughout the system (73 left)
  • 03X — an inbox of stuff that goes everywhere else, and where I dump any new content when it’s not explicitly obvious or convenient to file away (31 files)
  • 04X — large piles of things that are almost completely unsorted (763 files)
  • 1XX — need to both sift for duplicates in the system and group the information (1,018 files)
  • 2XX — need to sift for duplicates in the system (163 files)
  • 3XX — need to group the information (135 files)
  • 4XX — has been sifted and grouped and ready for the toolbox, presuming I understand it (30 files)

The writing-leaning side spans the output of my Trendless Tech essays and some remaining NotaGenius essays:

  • 00X — needs regrouping into narrower classifications (230 files)
  • 02X — content to update my already-finalized essays (66 files)
  • 1XX — written content (my notes or copy-pasted stuff) that must make its way to an essay (582 files)
  • 2XX — hyperlinks-only guides (32 files)
  • 3XX — hyperlinks-only opinions and expert wisdom (31 files)

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

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

  1. Parse through the pseudo-grouped and inbox piles, get them (mostly) grouped
    • S0->S1
  2. Precisely group the content (alongside Phase 3)
    • S1->S2
  3. Sift through the duplicates (alongside Phase 2)
    • S1->S3
  4. Sift through duplicates in grouped content (alongside Phase 5)
    • S2->S4
  5. Group/merge content into other categorizations (alongside Phase 4)
    • S3->S4
  6. Separate out the toolbox items, guides, and opinions
    • S4->TB
    • S4->W2
    • S4->W3
  7. Regroup the essays and update old content
    • S0->S1
    • S0->S2
    • S0->S3
    • S0->TT/NAG/TLS
  8. Add ready-to-go content updates, which will make all my essays officially “done”
    • S1->TT/NAG/TLS
  9. Make decisions on the guides
    • S2->Maybe/Later
    • S2->?
  10. Consume and update the last of TrendlessTech
    • S3->TT

And there you have it! A slight hoarding problem resolved in a few bazillion easy steps!