Personal Information Management

PIMCraft: The Pomo Revisited (Yet Again!)

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?

Cabinet of Curiosities

Cabinet of Curiosities: POV Satan

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:

  1. The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis, a serious Christian with a decent sense of humor
  2. Letters from Earth, by Mark Twain, who may have loved many a Christian but had no great love for Christianity, as shown here.
  3. The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce, a mid-19th-century American writer most remembered for Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.  

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.

Deep Work, Developer stuff, Programming

Themes for work and Learning — Week of December 9, 2018

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.

Personal Information Management

BuJo, MLO, and me

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.

  1. Biggest surface difference: BuJo is analog.  You keep your accounting in a paper notebook and you fill in stuff with pen or pencil.  It’s really analog.
  2. Core BuJo is not particularly supportive of GTD.  The core of GTD — putting everything into the system, managing all open loops, organizing stuff by context, picking next actions — can be done in BuJo to some extent, but the system doesn’t really support it, and probably isn’t meant to be used in that way (FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m of course not a BuJo adept and I’m sure there are many decent implementations of GTD using the BuJo “platform”
  3. The standard system has no weekly review.  This was a big conundrum for me, because I’m deeply addicted to weekly review as the main tool for constraining what I work on.  “Native” BuJo has a daily flow and a monthly flow but no weekly flow.  I suspect this is by design, although the core Bullet Journal text has a nod to weekly review as something you can implement if you want.

But the promise of the system is that it’s lean.

  1. You take lean notes (the term “Bullet Journal” comes from the bulleted telegraphic style in which Ryder Carroll, the inventor of BuJo, advises you to take notes).
  2. You struggle to exclude “stuff”, not include it.  Part of the methodology calls for regularly “migrating” entries from one place to another (to Next Month, to the Future, to the Next Day, etc.)  The virtue of migrating by hand is that you take a hard look at what goes forward and what does not.  Migrating is core to the smooth operation of a BuJo process.  (One of the core tenets of GTD is that putting everything into the system — instead of trying to keep it in your head — makes your life easier.  My guess is that Ryder Carroll would not agree.)

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.

Cabinet of Curiosities

Cabinet of Curiosities: Hanukah from the Greek Perspective

1 Comment

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.

Developer stuff, Personal Information Management, Programming, Self-criticism

Themes for Work and Learning – Week of December 2, 2018 (and a Self-Criticism)

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:

  1. It’s actually a good thing, provided
  2. You do a real self-criticism.

What makes a self-criticism real?

  1. You have to cotton to the problem: “I screwed up.  I shouldn’t have called you those names.”
  2. You have to say something about why the problem happened: “I get defensive when I feel like it’s my fault something bad happened.”
  3. You have to say how you think the problem can be averted in the future: “I think I can keep from lashing out if I take a moment between feeling responsible for stuff  and reacting.”

So here, what’s the self-criticism:

  1. I didn’t really process that I was going to be on the road and on vacation during the week of Thanksgiving, so I should have said up front that I wasn’t going to be able to keep up my pace of blogging.  In the week after, I thought to myself, “well, in a dime, in for a dollar” and decided to not blog last week either.
  2. It’s a cycle familiar to me from diets and other attempts to break bad habits: you realize you’ve screwed up and so you give yourself permission to screw up big time!  “What’s another week of not blogging?”
  3. I think I can avert the problem in the future if I’m straight with myself beforehand about what I can and can’t do.

I think that’s a decent self-criticism.  What do you think?

Cabinet of Curiosities, Lifehacking, Workhacking

Cabinet of Curiosities: Tim Ferriss’ Hack for Learning Anything Quickly

Do you know Tim Ferriss?  No?  A pity.  You should.  As Han Solo said about Lando Calrissian: “He’s a scoundrel.  You’d like him.”

I’m not sure how he describes what he does nowadays, but at some point he said he “deconstructed world-class performance.”  In other words, he figures out how outliers do the things they do.

If you know anything about outliers, you know it takes 10,000 of deliberate practice to become world-class at anything.

Which is why it’s surprising, at first, the Tim Ferriss has a hack, sandwiched right in the middle of The Four-Hour Chef, for learning how to get pretty good at anything, quickly.

“Pretty good”?  For Tim Ferriss, that means “top 5% of practitioners”.

“Quickly”?  That means 6 to 12 months or even — if you’re manic like him — 6 to 12 weeks.

So, you can choose: 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to get world-class, or 6 months of somewhat deliberate practice to get to top 5%.

What’s the system?  Two acronyms: DiSSS and CaFE.

The main one is DiSSS, which is

  1. Deconstruction.  What are the minimal learnable units, the Lego blocks, to start with?
  2. Selection.  Which 20% of the blocks gives you 80% of the competence?
  3. Sequencing.  In what order should you learn the blocks?
  4. Stakes.  Set things up so you work hard at it.

You need help with this.  Ferriss discusses several cases in Chef, a couple of which spoke to me:

Shinji Takeuchi is an ordinary Japanese gentleman who developed an approach to swimming which emphasized effortless pleasure instead of the usual competitive thing of maximum output.  Terry Laughlin wrote a book about Takeuchi’s method,  Total Immersion, which does you the favor of doing steps 1-3 for you.  He tells you what “alphabet” you have to learn, which are the most important elements, and in what sequence to learn them.  Alas, he doesn’t give you the stakes :-).

Ferriss also does a case study on shooting basketball three-pointers.  What’s interesting here is that, like Tim Ferriss, I have very little interest in basketball, but a strong contributor to my lack of interest is that I’ve always pretty much sucked at it.  So I was interested.

His recipe:

Find a guru.  He suggests finding somebody who is 5-10 years past fame, so that they’re still fantastic but don’t have an ego about it.

Offer them something for their help.  Probably not money, but a mention in your blog?

Ask them about 1, 2, and 3.  1) What is the “alphabet” of basketball shooting. 2) What the the most significant things that bad players do wrong?  What are the most significant things that bad players can to to improve?  3) What does a progression of exercises look like?

There’s a lot more.  And there’s a lot more in the book.  Highly recommended.

Deep Work, Developer stuff, Programming

Themes for Work and Learning, Week of November 18, 2018

Because of the holiday this coming week, I’m trying something different.

Instead of working on the next chapter of 7 Hard Problems I’m going to give myself kind of a treat and flip over the Deep Work to learning how to program in Go.

Actually, I’ve been at this for a while.  I’ve done the basic tutorials.  I’ve carved out a project — writing a parser to take input from MyLifeOrganized and use it for a variety of outputs — and I’ve got the bare bones of the parser turning over.

I ground to a halt by “death of a thousand cuts” because I basically wasn’t very fluent in the language.  Each time I hit a snag — and they were often basic snags about syntax — the wind would go out of my sails and I’d lose time on the project.

So I decided it was time to read The Go Programming Language, as near as I can find to a definitive reference, from cover to cover.

I’m about halfway through.  In Chapter 5 (“Functions”) to be exact.  I’ve been fitting it in around the edges of the work on 7Hard.

Well, I’m going to shoot my Deep Work wad this week on Go, and hopefully bull through the rest of the book.

Where will I be at after that?  An expert in Go?  Maybe.  What I’m hoping is that I’ll now be fluent enough that I can work away on the parser in smaller dribs and drabs — a Pomo or two at a time, say — and not lose my gumption every time I hit a snag.

Because I have a mission.  My next weight-loss treat.

I’ve been using tech toys to spur my weight loss.  An Android tablet.  An Android watch.  A Sonos sound system for our house.  Etc.

Well the next tech toy is not going to be a product, it’s going to be having permission to finish the MLO Parser.

Why reward myself for writing software?

  1. It’s off-purpose.  I’m supposed to be mainly about 7Hard this next six months or so.
  2. It’s a treat.
  3. It’s not harmful

So off-purpose treats that aren’t harmful are great weight-loss rewards.  And that’s what I’m going to do.

Lifehacking, Workhacking

“How to Skip to the Good S**t in a Long YouTube Tutorial”

I dug this up in Lifehacker.  On the off chance you don’t regularly read it, you should!

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-skip-to-the-good-shit-in-a-long-youtube-tutorial-1830466952.

I’m always vexed by video content because you can’t skip ahead.  You’re forced to drink in info at the rate the author wanted you to.  What good is that?

This post has three or four suggestions about how to skip the guff and get to the point.

Have a great weekend!

7 Hard Problems

Summing Up the Week’s Work

A friend wrote yesterday:

The cooperative/competitive discussion is going in a great direction. Love your application of it to education. And your flat-out declaration that it doesn’t prepare for work – which I agree with.

First of all, thanks for the feedback, DB.  I try to pay attention to every bit of feedback.

I think the tack of doing case studies from various institutions — family, school, workplace, government — works well for this chapter.   A lot of interesting anecdotes flow out of this, and it’s a nice framework for thinking about the dichotomy Cooperation/Competition.

I was disappointed as usual with the amount of vomitout I got done this week, but I’m holding myself in check on that until I finish all 7 of the problems and see if the overall project has helped forward the book.  I kind of think it has.

David Graeber’s books on bullshit jobs and the joys of bureaucracy were great serendipitous arrivals this week.  I immediately pressed Bullshit Jobs into service for the vomitout, and intend to do the same with Utopia of Rules once I read it.  Graeber is amazing IMHO.

I was able to get some stuff down on paper about hyper-partisanship as a form of failure on Cooperation/Competition but I’d also like to have more of a theory of “why hyperpartisanship now?”  I expect it has at least something to do with technological advances in both audience segmentation and soundbite-ology which are hastening a “normal” corrosion of democracy as we slide downhill toward… the death of the Republic?

On that cheerful note…

Benefit from my 35 years of tech industry experience