My Personal Devlog
– Cool tagline, right?
So, I’m just getting myself organized–rather slowly, as intended. I was originally going to return to the Infinibee plan, however I was looking over the premium perks again and noticed that Bee Plus has the benefit of automatic safety buffers, and weekends off? It might be double the price but that’s worth it just for that, in my opinion. So that’s a problem I had originally that I’ve already solved.
Thoughts of the Week
I doubt this section will be as long for any week after this. I just have a couple years of gunk I need to get out of my system.
- Crafting a Mission Statement: I’ve always been a fan of having a personal mission statement that dictates what you ought to do when the going gets tough and you need something important to remind you not to follow the path of least resistance. I’ve uploaded the mission statement I’ve been using for the past ten year, and looking to revise it.
- The Unified System: I need to figure out an analog and digital workflow that’s consistent, cross-platform, and that I enjoy using. I have so many different documents and files scattered all over the place, so I should create a workflow template on here as well soon.
- Project Journalbar: I set up a GitHub repository with Jekyll to quickly hack together a quick blog for my beejournal. I managed to score the domain journal.kim for $2, so that’s what I’m calling the project.
- Less Meta, More Bettah!: I have a bad habit of initally setting things up but not following through. I need to stop dilly-dallying planning stuff out and actually do the work needed.
- Microsystems: I need to figure out meaningful ways to track small yet important things. For instance, I’m a lot more motivated to work when I play music and ambiance, but often forget to start playing something before I start working.
- Microreminders: A solution to microsystems might be microreminders, as in setting up an alarm on my phone for things instead of creating an entirely new Beeminder for them. I definitely need one to remind myself to check-in on Beeminder, in particular.
- Bee Agnosticism: In the longterm, I need to failsafe system to maintain my good and productive behavior in the event of Beeminder vanishing. Although I hope this never happens, the only practical solution I have right now would be a spreadsheet, which would be far less intuitive and a lot more work.
- Passion Prioritizes Tradition: A weird goal that’s interesting always outranks a traditionally-speaking good goal that you don’t actually have much interest in.
- Museum of Beejournals: I want to start going through other beejournals as helpful indication of good precedence and systems-over-time. Maybe create a best-of page on my blog, or something.
- Character of Will vs. Want: Trying to figure out the dichotomy between what I want versus how much effort I’m actually willing to put in to obtain it. Work harder–but also adjust my expectations and want less.
- Behaviors vs. Systems: In a similar vein, finding the behavior behind a task for a system is not as straight-forward as it might initially seem, whether it actually turns out to be more difficult or easier.
- Seasonal Themes: An interesting idea that I stole from CGP Grey’s latest video is for seasonal themes as a replacement for New Year’s resolutions. This seems like a fun idea, though I’m not sure what my Spring 2020 theme would be, except something boring like perseverance.
- Concrete Anti-Weasel Obligations: Do I need to journal-write daily? Why? If I don’t have an amazing answer, the monkey-mind will win and I’ll figure out a way to weasel out of it. (Mixed animal metaphors, aside.) This is why distilling my systems down to the essential is so important–as well as having a mission statement of the values that I require myself to fall back on.
- System Harmony: Something I forgot to mention before, is the reason I chose the initial five systems that I did was that they harmonize well with each other. If I’m doing coursework, then I’m pushing a commit to GitHub, and all of that’s beeing added to my productive time.
- Universal Fineprint: An idea I borrowed from other, smarter Beeminder users. I have a universal fineprint page set up so that I know for a fact when a derailment would count as non-legit, though I optimistically plan to have no derailments at all.
Current Goal Check-up
- /Productivity: I had a few days of minimal screentime, which look like a lack of productive work. Been thinking about tracking my distracting time again, but it seems way too easy to weasel out of.
- /Courses: Got three courses done this week! Probably going to be getting a lot more done when classes start.
- /Github: Been doing a lot of work here, including this blog itself. Safety buffer is way too high, and luckily can be set to auto-adjust.
- /Blog: Going to turn all of this writing into a blog post sometime this week.
- /Poetry: Been struggling a little creatively with the whole restart. Might change this in the future, or import all of my old stuff back on.
New Goals
- /Daily: A simple meta-system to check in with my other systems on Beeminder on a daily basis. Only one day of safety buffering. I could incorporate other daily tasks (Eg. using my bullet journal) into this, though I feel like that has too much weasel-potential.
- /Journalbar: Tracking the number of weekly updates I post to the Beeminder forum and my Jekyll blog to record my progress on Beeminder and in life.
Pesky Obstacles
- The data for my old systems that I’ve revived are all messy thanks to how much I fudged numbers in the past. My apt punishment for this is that I’ll slowly have to adjust them to be correct without screwing the data up enough to cause derailment.
- Very petty grievance: Trimming a large amount of safety buffer off a graph makes the whole design of it far less aesthetically pleasing. This is currently a problem, since I’m implementing atomic habits. Oh well.