Learning
😎
For my project to create a first draft of a dictionary of mnemonic substitute words, I finished setting up the TransPhoner software and tinkered with it enough to see that parts of it will be useful. This week I’ll define more of what I need and begin programming a tool to assemble the dictionary.
I listened to Harry Lorayne’s well-known introduction to mnemonics, The Memory Book. It’s much less academic than the other learning books I’ve been reading, but it’s a nice intro and crammed full of examples of mnemonic substitutes, which is the main reason I bought it.
After that I listened to Barbara Oakley’s highly recommended compendium of study techniques, A Mind for Numbers. It made an excellent bookend to my collection of learning books, gathering many of the topics I’d read about in other places and applying them to a specific scenario, a student taking math and science classes. She writes in an engaging style and includes contributions from a lot of teachers and students about what works, which makes STEM learning feel like a big community endeavor.
Life maintenance
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I bought three cookbooks for my minimalist cooking project: Betty Crocker One-Dish Meals, Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4/Day by Leanne Brown, and The Four Ingredient Cookbooks by Linda Coffee and Emily Cale. Next I want to pick out recipes to try and put together a shopping list of common ingredients to keep on hand.
I got the results of my lipid panel, and for the first time in the 12 years I’ve been tracking them, all my numbers were good! The TLC diet is actually working.
My online computer backup service was going to be tripling its price on Thursday, and I’d procrastinated on finding a new one, so I did some emergency shopping, and fortunately there was a clear top choice, so I spent a few hours switching to IDrive. Even with my 300 GB of files to upload, it all took much less time than I was expecting.
Productivity
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I listened to Transforming ADHD by Greg Crosby and Tonya K. Lippert, a book of techniques for regulating emotions and behavior to achieve more of the kind of life you want. Though I don’t think I have ADHD, for a long time it’s been a struggle to get and keep myself on task, so I thought it’d help to learn advice for people with even greater challenges. The book’s advice sounded promising, so I’m looking forward to studying it more closely and trying some of it out, especially playifying tasks I procrastinate on and headlining the stories I tell so the point doesn’t get lost.
The book emphasized the need for adequate sleep, and that’s something that’s been slipping again now that I’m past the excitement phase of my new scheduling system, so this week I’m training myself to see 9:30 as a hard stopping point for my evening activities rather than a negotiable one.
People
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My family had another nice Zoom call in which, among other things, we talked about cooking, such a reliable and fun conversation topic.
