Monthnote for 7/2025

Welcome to my first monthnote! They won’t all be this long.

Games

I hung out with some friends for a board game day Fourth of July. Leah and Nick hosted, who I know through Jeremy and Heather. It had been ages since I’d really played anything, so I felt some of the usual performance anxiety games give me. But the day went well. I enjoyed expanding my circle of acquaintances, I took my few game difficulties in stride, and Leah and Nick introduced me to Tiny Epic Dungeons, a cooperative game just simple enough to be my speed.

Reflecting on the gathering beforehand reminded me that in principle I find games to be a fascinating and inspiring concept. It sent me a little way down a new stream of game design exploration. To start with I listened to a very interesting collection of storytelling party games edited by James D’Amato called The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book. Definitely worthy of some study. I could even see myself playing a few of them, like Post-Match Interview, where you’re a sports reporter asking an athlete weird questions (video semi-unrelated).

Spirituality

I considered what it looks like to impose a loving will on your circumstances. This was another stream the game day sent me down. When I’m in an uncertain situation, my default mode is passive observation or fearful paralysis. What if instead I actively looked for ways to care for others? It feels like a subtle shift, but to do it right would take an imaginative rethink of what’s possible in many different situations. It would be a long-term background project, but the idea has stuck in my head, so it might happen.

Productivity

Practical Process Automation by Bernd Ruecker turned me on to BPMN diagrams. In my casting about for ways to map out pieces of my life, I had always dismissed BPMN as a poor man’s UML activity diagram—a lightweight format fit for business communication but not serious technical thinking. But this book showed me that BPMN is not only serious but executable and comes with the kind of modeling process I’ve also been casting about for. So now I’m looking for the right software to try it out with. Given that the book is practically an ad for the author’s own BPMN platform, Camunda is an obvious choice, but it’s a bit heavy for casual experimentation.

I returned to my old practice of working on projects in my car. One of my persistent productivity problems is that I’m too tired when I get home from work to want to work on anything else. But it occurred to me I’m usually not tired until the moment I get home and walk in the door. It’s like a Pavlovian response at this point. So what if I sat in my car and worked before I left the parking lot? I tried it, and it was like a miracle cure for my sluggish project progress. I accelerated from one catch-up blog per week to one every couple of days. And it had the side effect of revving up my mind for more activity in general. It was truly a missing piece in my productivity system.

I started making more use of the iOS Shortcuts app to manage and track my activity. I created a Log Activity shortcut to quickly note an activity to add to my schedule tracking spreadsheet. Then the big one—an Interrupt Social Media shortcut that triggers whenever I open a social media app and periodically reminds me it’s watching. Then after a few reminders, it tells ChatGPT to ask me what I’m doing so the conversation can motivate me to get something done. The shortcut was hard to get working consistently, but it does help curb the scrolling.

I returned to pondering chaos productivity. This is the idea of getting things done by working on them at random times. Usually, for my own peace of mind, I strive to be orderly, but opportunism has its benefits. My renewed interest in the approach was inspired by several trends from that month: my car sessions, my chatbot activity (see below), Simon Willison’s posts about vibe coding on his phone, and my iOS Shortcuts development, which really had to happen on my phone and took place whenever the need struck me. Working this way highlights the need for strong visualizations of progress, since the sense of lostness I get from haphazard work is what keeps me unsatisfied with it.

I turned my attention to the topic of working under pressure. This topic gets a lot of airtime among software developers but less in the general productivity community. It came up because a project at work got jolted awake, and I figured I should learn to deal better with sudden, short deadlines. For reading on this theme, I started with The Deadline Effect by Christopher Cox. The first half was okay, but it grabbed my attention with the last few chapters on Scaled Robotics, Best Buy, and the Air Force. My main takeaway from the book was that the key to hitting deadlines is being extremely prepared.

AI

I began using LLMs a lot more as sounding boards for my ideas. It was part of my mind’s reawakening that month. Instead of immediately filing away the random ideas and questions that flitted through my head, I’d drop them into a chat window and follow them with the model a few steps. Examples from ChatGPT:

Automated Code-Doc Sync – a way to detect pieces of your code’s documentation to update.
Cueing in Creativity Research – approaching creativity as an associative exercise.
Knowledge discovery techniques – ways to uncover relevant knowledge in rapid problem solving.
Micro-RPG environment ideas – creating a game out of your natural surroundings, inspired by Jeeyon Shim’s bio in The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book.
AI-powered puppet concept – a wish I had growing up that my Kermit the Frog puppet could talk when I moved its mouth.
SIGBOVIK Overview – info on the parody computer science conference plus some paper ideas ChatGPT would submit.
Modern reexamination examples – potential additions to my Mining Ancient Thought project.

I agreed to participate in a month-long hackathon for AI products. When my coworker invited me to the team, I happened to be listening to Learning LangChain on my lunchtime walks, which may have primed me to say yes. I’d never done a hackathon, so I was slightly intimidated but also interested to see how this would go. The actual hacking would take place in September, but before then would be some planning meetings.

Nature

My leg was feeling well enough that I returned to my daily walks. I’d been feeling like the year was passing me by, so starting them up again was a relief. The heat still kept me indoors many days, but I managed to have some adventures throughout the month.

I identified some water bugs. Spring used to be my favorite season because that’s when the world wakes up and becomes green again. But while I love seeing all the baby animals, my new favorite is summer, because that’s when everything has grown up and become its most visible, so I have the most interesting things to discover. Last year I learned some of our waterways are teeming with mysterious bugs. This year with my better phone camera and Seek’s updated model, I’ve been able to identify some of them. The ones I mainly wondered about were these squirmy little red worms, which Seek put into the genus Tubifex.