Gardening
I read a few posts awhile back (I’ll link to them at some point, Will Larson) about a digital garden. Something that’s a little messy, your little corner of the internet. It’s not fully edited, it’s not trying to be anything.
That’s something I liked. That it’s mostly for me, but I can keep iterating on it.
https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden
https://lethain.com/exuberant-sketches/
https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/
Nesting
One of the things I found compelling this week was building a floorplan of the apartment I’m renting with my partner. I used “SweetHome 3D”, an open source app (after a lot of googling, and looking at pricing pages). The initial requirement was so that my partner could start strategizing for a couch purchase, and try to figure out what would fit where. But I found myself continuing past the point that I met that requirement. It felt like I was making a little home.
That feeling (and the prospect of another month’s ghost.org bill without having written anything in a year) is what compelled me to try out a garden. If I could edit it more closely, and really make it my own, maybe I’d get that same “nesting” feeling I got building the floorplan.
Evergreen notes
One idea in this same vein is the idea of collecting thoughts in a “personal wiki” and then publishing them when they’ve reached critical mass. I really liked Andy Matuschak’s take on this. It seemed to take this ambiguous idea of knowledge work, and put a process to it. The idea of an “atomic note” that really captured an idea. I liked the bit about taking a stance on an issue. When I tried to employ it for awhile, it did result in some interesting writing. It got a little abstract / up my own butt.
This was when I was deep in the “Roam” sense. I actually went back and read some, and it was actually kind of interesting.
I go back and forth between wanting to have produce these magnum opus exciting pieces, and wanting just stream of consicousness dumping grounds. The “write-only” style lends itself to a bunch of content not really worth revisiting, but also lowers the barrier to writing.
Logseq
I’ve started using Logseq a lot more for work and for personal use. It’s essentially “offline Roam” which means I can use it for work and not worry about losing stuff. The most useful thing I’ve found it for is keeping me to a morning routine and a wind-down routine. I had started using my calendar to block out my day, and pull some metrics around the same time. I initially did this at the start of the pandemic around the same time that my stress levels at work were getting pretty high. We set a goal for engineers to spend 30% of their time recruiting, and I wanted to measure it to see if that’s actually what I was doing.
I also recently read that Tanya O’reilly does a similar thing (TODO), although she uses it for a TODO list. That inspired me to do a similar thing for my personal todo list. The best protip out of that exchange was to realize that you can right click on a calendar event to change the color. There’s something really satisfying about changing an event from red to green to mark it as done that I had been missing out on before. Also the explicit “yes I did this” is a helpful check-in to see if the calendar matched reality.
It feels a little tedious at times, but often helps me feel like I can be on autopilot while still achieving goals. It’s not perfect, and relies on past me thinking more strategically than current me chugging a long. But it also makes me feel like I have a couple leverage points where I can inject more thoughtful changes to things.
I keep saying that, but I don’t think I’ve made any significant changes as a result of looking at the data. I find value in just blocking out my day anyway so I can realistically guess what I’m going to be able to get to that day, but I sometimes wonder if all the overhead means my net output is lower.