Weeknote for 3/10/2024

Health

😌

My ulcerative colitis medicine arrived, and I started taking it again. There are a few loose ends to the insurance situation, but for now the crisis has passed, though I’m still processing the implications. In a couple of weeks I’ll find out if there are any hiccups in switching to the new pharmacy.

Elections

😐

I started looking into my election candidates, but I didn’t finish as I was hoping. I’m going to try to wrap that up quickly so it doesn’t eat too much into my learning project. This means leaning more heavily on endorsements, so it’s a good thing newspapers still write those for local races. They’re cutting back on national ones.

Learning

🤓

This week starts a couple of months on developing a memory system. The goal is to help myself remember everyday information and conduct long-term learning more efficiently. To do that I’ll organize memory techniques into a broad system that covers my main use cases. To fill in the system’s details I’ll collect existing memory techniques and invent others as needed, and I’m expecting to make intensive use of LLMs like ChatGPT, which I believe are well suited to this kind of information.

As usual, this is an experiment I’m doing because I have a deep seated need to try it, but if it stalls or bogs down, at least I’ll have a better sense of what works and what doesn’t. I’m also not expecting to finish the whole project this iteration, just to get a decent start. This week will be for laying out the overall requirements and plans.

To put my mind in a memory system mood I’m catching up on the learning-related books I’ve picked up since the last time I focused on this subject. I’m in the middle of Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein, which is giving me both a historical perspective on mnemonics and a personal look at what it’s like to train for a memory competition. Here are Foer’s TED talk and a talk by his memory mentor, Ed Cooke.

History

😍

I finished listening to Walter Isaacson’s wonderful biography Leonardo da Vinci, read equally wonderfully by Alfred Molina. I was hoping to get some tips on productivity from the prolific polymath, and I suppose I did, if it involves getting paid to do your hobbies, being obsessively curious and perfectionistic, amassing copious notes, and rarely finishing anything. So basically what I already do, but more. 😉

But I also came away with the notion that biographies just might be a way I can finally get into history. The book made me care about Leonardo as a person, which made me care about the people and events he interacted with, and the book made those feel real too. So now I just need to find more biographies that are as engaging as this one. Fortunately, if I get stuck, Isaacson has a few more to offer.

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Weeknote for 3/3/2024

Life maintenance

😌

Last week sprang some good surprises, the biggest one being that my health insurance started covering my ulcerative colitis med again. Tuesday’s surprise was that my busy doctor had an opening the next day, so I scheduled a video visit for a much needed conversation about all this.

Wednesday’s surprise came just before the doctor visit, when my insurance called to tell me I could get my refills through another pharmacy. So I was able to give my doctor that info so he could send off the prescription.

In the meantime, to tide me over, the insurance had overridden their claim denial with the old pharmacy, which I wasn’t sure about till that day. The other obstacle to the order was the data processing outage from the Change Healthcare cyberattack. Thursday’s surprise was that, despite the outage, the pharmacy was able to schedule my med’s shipment to arrive the next Wednesday. Whew!

And the surprise through the whole week was that I seemed to be in remission, which my earlier meds never achieved. Whatever else you might say about big pharma corps, sometimes their drugs do the job.

I was expecting to be living in my tunnel of worry through at least this week while I waited to hear about the patient assistance program, so this early exit was a relief. And it gives me time to prepare for the next time the medical system chokes on me.

Now that I have mental space to deal with life, this week I’m finishing my taxes and researching the upcoming primary election. I started the taxes Saturday, and I spent some time organizing my old tax notes and starting a procedure doc so I can think about tax prep less in the future.

Spirituality

🙏

I continued delving into coping with daily routines, an image of rushing water, and a sense of solidarity. While they’re not specifically spiritual, my routines kept my everyday life manageable and unobtrusive while I dealt with my worries.

The water image came from some Immanuel prayer during one of my devotional sessions. It conveyed a sense that God’s power was rushing below, around, and through me for my good. This video of rapids felt like a good representation, so it got a lot of airtime on my more anxious days. I’d switch over to it and ponder how God’s plans swirl around and sweep over each of us like water over the rocks.

While in my tunnel of worry I felt a deep solidarity with other people who felt alone in desperate situations. Now that I’m more free, I’m trying to keep that sense of connection and to keep my eyes open for ways I can help.

Nature

😌

Early in the week when life was still uncertain, I took more therapy walks out in nature. Sunday I visited the horses and woods.

 

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Weeknote for 2/25/2024

Life maintenance

😬

My spring housekeeping was interrupted by a clash with the medical system. I’d learned a couple of weeks earlier that my health insurance had dropped coverage of my very expensive ulcerative colitis medication. The next week, the first solution I was offered hit a snag, and I spent last week scrambling to figure out what to do. I ran out of meds Wednesday, but fortunately my symptoms stayed quiet.

The crisis did get me to start on a housekeeping project I’d been procrastinating on, updating my budget. I also put my finances into my daily admin routine so they’d be easier to keep track of.

Spirituality

🙏

On my spirituality statement, I added some notes on the reasons I lack clarity, and I collected thoughts on coping based on my insurance crisis. My need for clarity came down to the fact that the Bible and Christian theology paint in broad, patchy brushstrokes that leave out some important perspectives for the believer to fill in. For a relevant example, we’re told we’ll have much suffering in this world and must set our hopes on the next. Yet God will care for our needs like the flowers of the field. How should we reconcile those claims?

On coping, one very practical technique that I was reminded works well for me is pacing and writing. It lets my mind wander to places it needs to go while giving my body something to do, and the writing anchors me in the places I’ve reached.

Nature

😌

I took full advantage of the warmer weather to do more coping out in nature. I made the rounds to some of my usual parks and forests. Even though my mind was preoccupied a lot of the time, it was good to be out there, and the interesting sights sometimes pulled my attention away from my troubles.

 

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Weeknote for 2/18/2024

Housekeeping

😐

For my spring housekeeping, I spent some time on catch-up cleaning and boxing up my accumulated clutter. My kitchen floor and bedroom look a lot nicer now. This week I’ll continue sorting through the clutter and try to get to some invoicing and investing research.

Spirituality

🤔

I started working on my spirituality statement. It’s an exploration of my personal views and style that I’m writing during Lent. So far I’ve jotted some thoughts on my purpose for doing the project and my idea of its scope. The basic idea is that clarity would help me navigate the complexities of life and resist both distraction and pressure, both from outside and inside myself. I know I can’t spell out everything I think in this area, so I’m aiming to hit the highlights, enough to give me direction. This week I’ll look at how my views developed.

Philosophy

🤓

Arthur Melzer’s Philosophy between the Lines took me on a fascinating dive into the relationship between philosophy and society. The book argues that philosophers up to the modern era hid their real positions in roundabout writing, so I was expecting it to be an interesting side trip into an unusual form of cryptography. It was, but in the process he examined the rather profound reasons they felt the need to write esoterically and why we find this idea so hard to accept.

Fundamentally it’s because earlier philosophers thought of society and philosophy as being at odds so that they had to be protected from each other, and now we believe they ultimately benefit each other. Esoteric writing was also meant as a teaching device to prompt aspiring philosophers to work through the issues on their own. There was a fourth purpose that came into play once philosophy was seen as a benefit—to nudge society gently in the philosopher’s preferred direction. Melzer also includes an intriguing discussion of Leo Strauss’s arguments against postmodernism (or historicism in his terminology), which Strauss held arose partly because the historicists failed to read earlier writings as esoteric.

Stormwater management

🙂

I took another walk at the local dam that’s my personal symbol for stormwater management. It was one of the first locations I visited after deciding it was a subject I wanted to pay attention to. I was in the area again last week, so I stopped by.

 

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Weeknote for 2/11/2024

Productivity

😌

I made good progress on my Make integration with Notion, which will register a day’s session of work on a task. I’m switching projects now, so I’ll have to pick up the integration again in a few months when I get back to another iteration on my productivity system. But it was satisfying to fit in a decent amount of project work for a change. And what I’ve done so far accomplished the goals of getting over the initial hump and teaching me more about Notion and Make development.

Programming

😎

I toured the fascinating history of cryptology with Simon Singh’s The Code Book. I finally understood why the Enigma machine was such a big deal. And I now have a clue how public key cryptography works. And I’d wondered if anyone was working on a cipher to stay ahead of the quantum computing cryptocalypse, and it turns out they are with quantum cryptography.

Life maintenance

😐

The next couple of weeks will be my spring housekeeping, where I’ll focus on tidying and investing. I have some piles of clutter that have been accumulating over the months that need storing. And I only have a little research left on my medium-term investing project from way back when, so I’m hoping to get that resolved.

TV

🧐

I started a media tracking project in Notion to remind myself of the shows I’m watching. I’ll expand to other media in the future. My tasks database has a set of statuses I can assign to a task, and these work well for media too. The statuses are suggested, planned, blocked, active, completed, and dropped. I have enough shows in progress (the active status) that I was forgetting about some of them, and there are others I’d paused to return to someday (some of the planned status shows), and I was forgetting those too. Adding shows with a blocked status got me to research when the next season of those shows will be premiering. Star Trek: Discovery will be in April. The others are up in the air.

Spirituality

🤔

This week starts my Lent project of articulating my style of spirituality. I’m expecting that clarifying my views will help me live from them with more consistency and conviction.

The latest addition to my devotional procedure is intercession during the prayer time. I’m accumulating prayer requests very selectively and keeping track of them in a Notion database. This month I’m also following a prayer challenge from my church where each day we pray for a different missionary we support.

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Weeknote for 2/4/2024

Productivity

😌

I finished separating my intervals database into iteration and day databases. This week I’ll try to get through creating a Make scenario for automatically registering work sessions for my tasks in Notion. I do it manually now, and although it’s helpful to have that data recorded, it’s an annoying amount of actions when I just want to get started on the task.

I cooked most of the rest of my packaged frozen meals, and now I have food for a month. I haven’t really had a regular routine for my packaged meal prep, but I’m starting to settle into one where I cook several of them at once, and I think doing all of them the week I buy them would be a good policy. That way I can forget about food prep almost completely on my off weeks when I’m not grocery shopping.

Learning

🧐

I started writing a procedure for managing my Anki flashcards. I let the study wagon leave me far behind in the dust months ago, but I’m running to catch up so I can learn some C# and .NET for work. When I was studying math last year, I came up with a spreadsheet I could use as a generic format for most subjects, so I’ve been using it to take notes on these programming ones. Anki has its own learning curve, so during the math project I took a bunch of notes while I figured out how to get the spreadsheet data into the app and operate the study controls, and now I’m reworking the notes into a repeatable procedure for these new subjects.

Nature

🙂

Even when the snow is mostly melted and the land is brown and the ground is muddy, there are still interesting things to see.

 

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Weeknote for 1/28/2024

Productivity

🤔

After seeing that my non-project time blocks were taking over my evenings, I began instituting another little productivity hack: a 15-minute timer. I put it in my interval timer app alongside my daily routine timers so I’d see it and remember to use it. It worked pretty well when I did remember, and it got me to decide more consciously what tasks were worth spending that limited time on. As always, my hope with these hacks is that little by little, I’ll clear away project time and learn how to make the best of it.

😐

I started working on separating the project interval types into iterations and days in my Notion workspace. I’m hoping to finish all that this week and move on to learning Make scenarios for Notion.

😎

I listened to The Wandering Mind by Jamie Kreiner, a survey of the ways medieval monks dealt with distraction. A fascinating book that covers several of my major interests. I’d be interested to see a similar treatment of Eastern monks. My main takeaway is that there’s no silver bullet for distraction, at least none that the monastics found. What especially stood out is that external tools and practices and environments won’t focus you on their own; you still have to work to align your mind with them. The book also highlighted that even the advanced monks were just people and had the same struggles as anyone else.

Programming

🧐

I got my feet wet in cybersecurity with Foundations of Information Security by Jason Andress. Aside from dipping my toe in here and there, up till now I’d been avoiding this aspect of programming out of intimidation, but I decided this was the year to wade in. It’s especially important now that I’ll be doing some web dev at work, and it fits in with the preparedness theme I have in mind for the year. This book was a good intro.

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Weeknote for 1/21/2024

Productivity

😐

I started fixing some issues in the design of my Notion workspace that had been bothering me. I merged a couple of redundant database columns, which came from the way my data is cobbled together from different sources. I was basically double-entering the status of each task until I could work out how to handle the updates.

I also started investigating the opposite issue, how I can separate two kinds of data I have in another column. It contains different sizes of time intervals, mainly iterations and days, and when I created it, I didn’t realize how differently I would be treating them. But now they’re each integrated with other parts of the workspace, so I need to assess the various relationships before I can create separate iteration and day columns.

Spirituality

🙂

My devotional sessions are settling into a procedure. I listen to the passage during my afternoon or evening routine, then listen to music that sets the tone, then connect with a joyful memory in Immanuel fashion. Then I write my thoughts on the passage, focusing on whatever stood out to me and especially the parts of the passage that relate to the memory. I end with a brief prayer that expresses the main ideas of the session. As I’m writing, I highlight key statements so they’re easy to return to later.

The pattern is working well for me. My sessions feel substantive rather than perfunctory, and themes have been emerging and starting to affect my thinking outside the devotional time. I’m intrigued to see where this project will go.

Nature

🧐

I walked again at my usual lake and, as usual, found interesting little surprises. This time it was the striking lighting and a bunch of footprints over the ice.

 

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Weeknote for 1/14/2024

Productivity

🧐

The next four weeks I’ll take care of some work-intensive parts of my productivity system that will set me up for future improvements. The main two are (1) learning how to automate Notion with Make and (2) learning how to script Google Sheets so I can glean better insights from my schedule tracker data.

Spirituality

🙂

I realized I needed more prayer in my life, not just Bible reading, so I started incorporating a light form of Immanuel Prayer into my devotions. It’s how I’m reflecting on the Scripture readings, and it’s giving each devo session its own unified theme. I’ve used this return to Immanuel as an excuse to order the official Immanuel Approach book to review my rusty skills. So I’m looking forward to perusing that.

Nature

🤔

I took another water chloride reading. This time Tim joined me. The chloride level was 329 PPM, higher than last time and higher than the recommended 230 PPM. For some reason I was feeling some dread about filling out all the details on the observation form, so I made a procedure, researched the unclear parts, and got through it.

😎

We’re in a deep freeze now that’s keeping me inside, but before that I got some nice snow photos.

 

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Weeknote for 1/7/2024

Productivity

🤔

I spent the first half of the week scheduling my projects for the year. My experiment with full-year project scheduling last year worked well enough that I decided to keep it going with some changes. The main change is that instead of cramming in a bunch of little projects and trying to address a broad sweep of my interests, this year I’m spending more time on fewer projects, basically one project per quarter. Those are productivity, learning, math, and modeling. I’ll try letting other interests come in as side projects.

🤔

I started adding messages to my motivational album, and it was an effective way to keep my latest productivity principles in mind. These are reminders like “It’s easier to take care of it now” and “Keep the the end time in mind” (so I don’t get too absorbed in what I’m doing). The act of writing and displaying these principles has put me in a proactive mindset, and it’s led to some concrete changes. One of these was to move my phone and tablet chargers away from my bed to motivate myself not to lounge and surf randomly when I’m tired, since I hate draining the battery. I have to choose—work or rest, not some hybrid waste of time.

Spirituality

🤔

I started a one-year Bible reading plan for 2024, listening through the Oasis NLT audio Bible. I’m using the simple, chapter-oriented book order plan from BibleStudyTools, and I’m listening on the Life Bible app. The Audible version was having technical issues.

I used to push myself through the Bible in 90 days. But I would always end up with the same reflections, and this time I wanted to see if different insights would come up if I slowed the pace. The main reason for my Bible speedruns was that I didn’t trust myself to maintain a schedule long-term, but I knew I could listen to a lot of audio in a shorter time. Now I have better habits, and my approach is to tie my listening to those. I’m listening during one of my daily routines, usually the afternoon one, and then writing my thoughts afterward. So far the strategy is working well.

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