I love this one.
You know the space between your car seat and the console? You know what it’s like to drop something in there and try to get it out?
Good.
Here’s the answer (from Family Handyman). Jam a piece of foam pipe insulation into the gap. Problem solved.
Well, I just spent a good chunk of this week writing code, which I haven’t done this consistently for some time. Two hours on Monday, four hours on Tuesday and Wednesday, and an hour today. Not a marathon, but not too shabby for a code re-nube.
First of all, it’s a big kick. I forgot how much I enjoyed coding and I’m glad to decided to spend some time on it in December. I especially enjoy debugging, for the same reason you love hitting yourself on the head with a hammer: it feels so good when you stop! Wanting to a solve a software bug is a deep itch that nags at you and nags at you, and, when you solve it, it feels terrific.
Actually working at writing code, moreover, is teaching me a lot about the Go language that I didn’t grok from just reading the book. It forces you to make your ideas execute.
Not much more to say about it than that.
Blogging yesterday about the Pomodoro Technique put me in mind of the search for focus, and how it has eluded me.
A good PIM should do (at least) three things for you:
MLO is great for #1. (Any hierarchical PIM would probably do.)
Any GTD-ish system is great for #2. That’s the whole point of GTD.
But #3? Bit of a mystery.
I used a PIM once — briefly — that sorted everything by importance and by what would fit into the open parts of your schedule and then told you what the next thing to do was.
It was terrible. All but unusable. It was too tyrannical, too dependent on the weights you put on everything.
What I do today is gen up the tasks for the day on a list creatively called “@Today” and then pick something from the list each time I come up for air.
(Oh, and I try to get the “@Today” list to be something that could fit in the day. I run through my list of things in the morning and see what I think I can accomplish.)
That’s where the religion of Pomodoro is supposed to keep you honest. By comparing what you thought you could do in a day and what you actually did in a day you’re supposed to get “better.”
I’ve never given up on the notion that focusing on some small # of things (3? 1? One Thing?) will get more accomplished.
The problem is that I often pick things that are urgent rather than things that are important and end up not having much to show for a day or a week.
Am I just longing for someone or something besides me to tell me what to do?
(I have a trick I do sometimes where I get someone else to set me a deadline.)
(“Dan, please finish a draft of 7 Hard Problems by January!”)
(If I say this to myself it has no impact. If someone else says it to me — even if I tell them myself to tell me — it has much more effect. Go figure.)
It seems like a simple problem: figure out which tasks are most important and then do them. But as I’ve struggled with trying to do just that over the past thirty-five years ( which was when I first started using software to help me manage my todo list) I have to admit that the goal remains elusive.
Well, I can’t leave the Pomodoro alone. I can’t live without it, but I can’t entirely live with it.
The Pomodoro Technique is a method for pacing out work. You divide up a big task into 25-minute blocks of effort. You work away at the task for 25 minutes, then take a five-minute break. Each of these is a Pomodoro, or a Pomo for short.
Every four Pomo’s you take a longer break, either a full Pomo or 15 minutes, depending on whom you read.
That’s it. Oh, if you want you can time yourself with a “real” Pomodoro timer, depicted above. But there are boatloads of apps and webapps as well.
What’s the virtue?
Well, I think it’s terrific for pacing out a big task. Need to work on your book for four hours? 8 pomos with associated breaks.
You work away like King Birtram of the King’s Stilts:
Naturally, the King never wore his stilts during business hours. When King Birtram worked, he really worked, and his stilts stood forgotten in the tall stilt closet in the castle’s front hallway.
The King’s Stilts, Dr. Suess
So you work really hard for 25 minutes, and then you do nothing having to do with the work for a five-minute break (ditto for the long break).
In fact, you’re not supposed to do much of anything absorbing during the break; it’s to recharge, not to get stuff done.
If you do this — if you dutifully work hard during the push and recharge during the break — then you will able to continue with a tough or daunting or mind-numbing job for longer than you would if you tried to bull straight through.
The rub — for me at least — comes with tasks that don’t match or exceed the 25-minute limit.
What if you have four short tasks?
The stock Pomo advice is to batch them together into a Pomo.
Oh, and if you finish a Pomo before you finish the task (like your last Pomo)? You’re supposed to mull over the task until the Pomo is done.
There’s more to the system. You’re supposed to start each day with a day’s worth of tasks, and then analyze at the end of the day how you did. Which tasks took longer than you thought. Which tasks took less time.
Here’s how I use it. In the morning I look at the things I would like to do during the day and scope them out in Pomos. I fill the day with Pomo-sized blocks of time — every block — and fill out a special calendar full of Pomos. This is the plan.
Then as I do my work during the day I move things over from Pomo to actual calendar, taking account of what happened when. At the end of the day I have a calendar full of the things I thought I would do and a calendar full of the things I actually did. Pomo by Pomo.
It sounds like a big hassle but it actually doesn’t add that much overhead to my day.
I guess I’m getting better at estimating how many Pomos things will take to do. I BS myself less about how long things will take. Both ways: how long they will take and how short they will take. So I have a pretty good idea what I can accomplish in a day, and a fair idea of what I can accomplish in a week.
It’s like a system I used to use when I wrote software, where I would break my work down into half-day sized tasks and then add up how many of them there were on my schedule. I was pretty good at that.
The fly in the ointment is the sub-Pomo tasks and the not-quite-finished-with-a-Pomo tasks. I sort of see the point to it. But not really. You’re supposed to sit around the think for the rest of your last Pomo? Really? What for? Sometimes I do do that, just to get closure on a big task I’ve finished, but other times I just want to push back and take my break early.
I figure I need something to link my aims to my effort. Pomo isn’t perfect, but I have yet to find something better.
Have you?
Maybe it’s the holiday season (or the Holiday season, I guess), but what popped into my mind while considering the CoC entry for this week was: what about Satan?
In the early ‘Aughts I was in a rock and roll band — an “aging farts’ rock band” as I called it — where our lead singer, who had a beautiful voice but not much irony, refused to sing Sympathy for the Devil because it glorified Satan.
Two pagans and a Christian have written humorous pieces that call for attention when considering Satan:
These all have in common the use of unusual narrative structures. Twain and Lewis are epistolary essays in the form of whimsical letters to or from the Earth. Bierce’s book is a mock dictionary.
They also all assume a level of irony which I enjoy.
The Screwtape correspondence is between a senior devil, Screwtape, and his nephew and protege Wormwood. Wormwood is looking to make his mark by winning a “patient”, as they call the humans they are tempting, over from “the Enemy” (who is God). Screwtape keeps urging Wormwood to work with the grain of human nature. For example:
Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
Screwtape Letter XII
Lewis is urbane and worldly, used to temptation himself. It’s a good read.
Twain is Twain. What can I say?
For instance, take this sample: he has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights, the one ecstasy that stands first and foremost in the heart of every individual of his race — and of ours — sexual intercourse!It is as if a lost and perishing person in a roasting desert should be told by a rescuer he might choose and have all longed-for things but one, and he should elect to leave out water!
His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values. It consists — utterly and entirely — of diversions which he cares next to nothing about, here in the earth, yet is quite sure he will like them in heaven. Isn’t it curious? Isn’t it interesting? You must not think I am exaggerating, for it is not so. I will give you details.
Most men do not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay when others are singing if it be continued more than two hours. Note that.
Only about two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument, and not four in a hundred have any wish to learn how. Set that down.
Many men pray, not many of them like to do it. A few pray long, the others make a short cut.
More men go to church than want to.
To forty-nine men in fifty the Sabbath Day is a dreary, dreary bore.
Of all the men in a church on a Sunday, two-thirds are tired when the service is half over, and the rest before it is finished.
The gladdest moment for all of them is when the preacher uplifts his hands for the benediction. You can hear the soft rustle of relief that sweeps the house, and you recognize that it is eloquent with gratitude.
And yet Heaven is sex-free, filled with singing, praying, and churchgoing…
Ambrose Bierce sounds pretty 19th-century today, but here are a couple of his dictionary entries that are fun:
DIPLOMACY, n. The patriotic art of lying for one’s country.
GUILLOTINE, n. A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with good reason.
I loved Devil’s Dictionary when I was a boy. It hasn’t aged as gracefully as I thought.
Continuing this week with work on MLO Parser.
It turns out I had gotten a basic parser turning over which could echo some fields to the output and visit every node of the XML, but not much more.
Task this week is to turn that raw prototype into something a bit more robust.
First order of business?
Many years ago a software mentor told me, “Dan, the problem with software is that entropy seeps into it, and so you always have to be pumping the entropy out.”
She hit the nail on the head. Of course, entropy probably seeps into everything, but software is nothing but entropy-waiting-to-happen, so the seepage is much more obvious.
“Refactoring” is part of entropy control, but really only a part.
In this case, the main thing is going to be getting the parser to visit every node, and getting it to do something uniform at each node.
Part of my addiction to Personal Information Management (PIM) is constant flirtation with platforms I haven’t tried… or even ones I have tried but want to revisit.
Waxing philosophical for a second, that probably goes with the territory. Part of the obsessiveness that goes with an interest in PIM is FOMO, Fear of Missing Out.
“What if there’s something to that alternative GTD software I didn’t try? I owe it to myself to just take it for a spin, just trial it.”
Well, there’s no such thing as “just trial it” with PIMs. You have to actually run a decent simulation or you don’t find out what you need to know: does this PIM system have something new I can add to my bag of tricks.
And so I’ve frequently been in the situation of running two PIM systems simultaneously, one as my standby and one as a trial run.
And so it was, at the end of November/beginning of December. I spent two weeks running BuJo and MLO side-by-side, trying to see what I could learn about either.
“MLO” is my standby, MyLifeOrganized, which I’ve been using for a few years. I blogged about my crush on MLO some years ago here.
But a bigger and bigger % of my day and week is going into MLO daily and weekly planning and support. I found myself wondering if there were something… leaner?
Enter BuJo, which is the shorthand for “Bullet Journal”, a wildly different PIM approach described on the bulletjournal.com site.
But the promise of the system is that it’s lean.
The lean “promise” was appealing to me. My MLO implementation has gotten more and more… involved. My Saturday and Sunday planning (yes, I do some planning on each day) probably takes 2-3 hours all in. My morning routine probably takes an hour.
I guess I was hoping that I could scale some of the kruft off my MLO practice with some hot ideas from BuJo.
So what happened?
I dug in, I read the book. I decided that a few things in my and monthly reviews could be streamlined. I decided that I liked the telegraphic BuJo note-taking format and would try to use that in my daily Evernote entries (part of that morning routine I was grousing about above).
And I decided that, for now, I was happy with MLO and was going to continue on with it subject to those tweaks.
Growing up as an semi-assimilated Jewish boy in suburban Washington, DC, I “read” the Hanukah story as YASOOAJ (Yet Another Saga Of Oppressors and Jews).
Not hard to understand why. I was assimilated enough, but also different. When I started in 1st Grade everyone else in my school was saying the Lord’s Prayer at Assembly. I didn’t even know what it was (although I learned to fake it).
I was called “Jew boy” more than once, although not often or routinely.
I gravitated towards the only other Jewish boy in 5th and 6th grade.
In short, it wasn’t harsh, but I was ghetto-ized, and I ghetto-ized myself.
Natural for me to believe that the Greeks — Antiochus and his Hellenist crew — had it in for the Jews. Natural to believe that it was David vs. Goliath all over again.
Except a few years ago I read an account — in Tikkun, I think, but maybe not — of Hanukah from the Hellenistic point of view.
The Hellenists were a pretty tolerant bunch. They had been all over the Mediterranean by the time of the Hanukah story, and seen all kinds of different peoples. They were tolerant of all kinds of stuff, as long as you paid your taxes and cooperated.
But what they couldn’t stand about the Jews was infant circumcision, or, as we might call it today, male infant genital mutilation.
To the Greeks, the body was sacred, and you didn’t cut parts off, no matter what your tribal God said to you.
So they forbade the Jews under their dominion from doing it.
The Jews were a bit like a Taliban today, though. They didn’t want foreigners imposing stuff on them. So they entered into guerrilla warfare, led by a Duck-Dynasty type family from the sticks, the Maccabees.
Lurch. From David and Goliath to Taliban vs. liberators of male infants.
Maybe the Hellenists had a point.
Well, that has been quite the extended Thanksgiving holiday! It’s been two weeks since I’ve posted.
(Which calls for a word or two of self-criticism. At the end of the post.)
This week I’m continuing to work on the Go Language and the MLO parser. I think I’m going to continue with this through the Hannukah and Christmas holidays. So I’ll probably pick up 7 Hard Problems in January.
The goal this week is to find the right architecture for the parser now that I’ve read most of the Go Language book (except for the sections on concurrency, which I’m not ready for and which is not an issue for my parser project.) I’m wrapping up the book this week (again, except for those concurrency chapters 8 and 9).
This week is going to be a combination of reading and work on the parser, which I haven’t done since September. So there’ll be some context switching and dusting-off to do.
After the dusting-off I want to find the right way to handle the key problem of the parser, which is how to treat the various actions the parser might perform in response to the same input for varying contexts.
For example: I want to be able to parse an MLO file and output just the “views” from the file in a way that they can automatically synchronize with MLO instances on other computers and platforms. Right now I have to do this manually.
Another example: I want to be able to translate an MLO file into a nearly-equivalent ToDoist file (which is complicated because the ToDoist paradigm isn’t really hierarchical.)
We’re traipsing through a giant XML file in the same basic fashion for both of these, but the actions to be taken for each node in the XML couldn’t be more different.
I’m looking to use Go’s interface capability to represent these similarities and differences in a uniform manner.
Enough said. Happy to say more offline if you’re interested in Go, interfaces, MLO, my parser, and anything else related.
Now for the self-criticism…
I don’t know whether or not I’ve blogged about self-criticism, but I have a couple of non-standard ideas about it:
What makes a self-criticism real?
So here, what’s the self-criticism:
I think that’s a decent self-criticism. What do you think?
