The Thinkulum

Productivity

😎

I’m getting an early start on my personal Kanban system. Since my new motivation to keep a schedule is still alive, I’ve had some extra time in the morning for side projects, so I’ve been spending it on getting into Kanban sooner. So far I’ve assessed my history with Kanban (mainly a more limited and less informed attempt in 2022 that didn’t stick) and assembled the sources I’ll draw from. One of them I listened to this week, Scrumban by Corey Ladas (intro article), a book dense with insights that uses the kind of analysis I live on to helpfully compare Kanban to other approaches. With my new understanding of the framework, now I’m seeing kanban systems pop up everywhere, such as the reservoirs I visit on my walks, which are buffers that helps the pipes manage the flow of stormwater through the system. There’s also my cooking routine, where the throughput is limited by my freezer space, number of food containers, and demand, since I make meals faster than I can eat them.

Zettelkasten has come up in my life again thanks to Tiago Forte’s very good summary article of Sönke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes. I listened to Ahrens’ book a few years ago and didn’t really know what to do with it, but this time my mind has been stirring with improvements I can make to my notes in Notion, so it may be time to revisit the book soon, since it’ll affect how I write tasks for my Kanban board.

The 80-20 Learner by Peter Hollins is helping me optimize my learning. As with Scott Young’s Ultralearning and Josh Kaufman’s The First 20 Hours, I listened to it to help me learn more efficiently when I’m trying to get through large bodies of material, like entire math courses. It was short but gave me some food for thought. I especially want to explore the idea of writing out my thoughts on a topic before I learn about it (1) to focus my learning on my questions, (2) to give my new knowledge a firmer tree of existing knowledge to attach to, and (3) to make a bunch of guesses to be wrong about, since mistakes are how you learn.

My new weeknote writing schedule is shaping up. I got through much more of the content before Sunday this time. The process still has some issues to work out, such as the amount of time I spend writing, but it’s an approach I can work with.

Math

😌

I started my math iteration. To kick things off with some planning, I decided on the textbook to use (Intermediate Algebra by OpenStax), the learning techniques I’ll try (the 80/20 principle; just-in-time, mnemonic flashcards; and writing by hand), metrics for measuring success (flashcards and assessments), and some things I won’t include in the project for now (adding to my math programming cheat sheet, updating my math relearning pages on the wiki, and doing anything with my math student simulator).

Then I started on the first chapter, and … I’m still not learning algebra—it’s a review of prealgebra. But I’m having a good time anyway with the work journaling approach I’ve picked up since my last foray into math, which lets me work more consciously and record thoughts that may become essays at some point.

Mental calculation is one of my lifelong tensions around math, and Arthur Benjamin’s Secrets of Mental Math gives me some potential ways to relieve it. I don’t have much math anxiety, but when it does come up, it’s because I’m expected to do math in my head. Yet in past iterations of my math relearning project, I’ve been too impatient to do the examples on paper, so mentally is how I’ve done them. That works for the most part, but with more complex concepts like fractions it’s a strain to keep track of all the details. That probably means I should just slow down and do them on paper, but Arthur Benjamin tells me to a certain degree there’s a way to have my mental cake and eat it too.

Everything in life is related to everything else, and that’s especially true in math, so it’s interesting to see that these relationships mean there are tricks that make arithmetic calculations easy enough to do in your head. It was also good to see that when the tricks don’t make things easy enough, even mathemagicians use the familiar mnemonic techniques.

Nature

🙂

Friday’s walk brought some rare sights. (1) A clear view of a green heron, which I’ve only seen once before. (2) Chipmunks galore, when they’re normally in hiding or rushing out of sight. I think summer must be the time to spot them. Earlier I even caught a glimpse of one scurrying into a hole by the back entrance of my apartment building. (3) A lily pad with an actual flower.

 

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Movies

🤔

I finally watched Don’t Look Up, and as a person who is always wondering if he cares about the right things, it was a sobering movie despite its humor. The movie is about all the ways society confuses itself into self-sabotage when disaster looms. All the people in the story who were missing the point and being willfully ignorant and playing chicken with reality were frustrating and depressing, and afterward I listened to Isaiah 20-24 from my reading plan and realized we’ve had these problems for a while, so the movie made the Bible more darkly real for me.

It also made me realize that your priorities in life make assumptions about what’s secure in your context and what’s not, and that’s why when disaster threatens to sweep everything away, the normal activities people are preoccupied with sound irrelevant and absurd. It’s what Maslow’s hierarchy looks like when you “meet” your needs by denying they aren’t being met.

Mostly the movie made me wonder what preventable (non-climate) disasters I might be ignoring and how it would change my behavior if I didn’t ignore them. But it also highlighted another layer of choice we get to make even when our more consequential actions fail, the choice to connect authentically with the people around us. Whatever the film’s flaws, I thought it got the main characters’ final scene exactly right, and the way they spent that moment was just the way I’d want to spend it.