Month: April 2023

The last day.

Sleep as usual is the trade-off item for me. I missed the cut-off time last night because I was doing most important work and was on a roll — so I kept going.

I was doing MIW late in the day because it was a busy day at work and I didn’t slot my normal 100 minutes into the front end of the day.

And (the real reason) I had a chunk of time that I used to start next week’s newsletter instead of devoting the time to MIW (the videos).

So it’s a cascading effect of a full day and poor priority handling when the opportunity came up. And all of that culminates with “late to bed” and of course that has a cascading effect on the next day.

In related (to MIW) news: housekeeping matters. I am keeping all of my files and resources in a semi-well organized folder. I am slowly creating a standard system for developing webcasts.

I read a mini biography of Hergé yesterday (author of the Tintin stories) and how he burned out from overwork, then built Hergé Studios with artists doing the time-consuming work, freeing him to conceive stories and ideas. Inspiring. I’m slowly trying to get that system assembled piecemeal around me—not successfully, so far. Meaning: I cannot count on reliable execution, even at the basic levels.

What I am doing, by trial and error, is this:

• Create a separate identity with a throwaway Gmail account.
• Set up a dedicated free Notion account to organize my thoughts, plans, templates, etc. there. Obsidian turned out to be a mess for me.
• Data files for now reside on my laptop. I do not like the GDrive aesthetic experience.
• Slowly and methodically I am finding resources I need: websites and email newsletters right now. The only topic I am deliberately seeking is “how to do email newsletter.” Other tangential stuff I will grab opportunistically, but I’m only looking for one thing.
• Fake email address or iCloud hide my email used to get newsletters.
• NetNewsWire used for RSS. Toying with Readwise Reader too because how do I get a blog post out of RSS and into Notion? This is a technical problem I have not yet solved: newsletter or web stuff into Notion.
• Notion has the Plan Initiation Document and a high level project plan under development.
• I do not have a good method of capturing product I have produced for re-use and repurposing.

The immediate goal is “build the subscriber numbers for the email newsletter.”

Ok. Time to sit with my laptop and put in the MIW.

Early to bed, early to rise. I would love to sleep longer—I never feel completely rested. Ah well.

Friday and it’s showtime today: webcast day.

Let’s reflect on the Pentathlon. 100 min per day MIW gets things done. It also sucks up a big chunk of the day. It is two 30-minute cycles with a 10 minute break in between.

I wonder if I can set up the early to bed arrangement and get up early, let’s say 5 am. I have a workspace set up. Biology, feed the dog, some water and some coffee and I can get an hour + of quiet work before the house starts to stir.

That means early to bed.

It’s a plan worth developing.

And in other news . . .

And on the other hand . . .

It’s time to write the newsletter today. The MIW routine is getting me ahead of the curve for the videos but I have to catch up on the newsletter. And get ahead. I’m not enjoying the JIT lifestyle.

In a perfect world, Fairy Godmother style, poof!

How does “poof” happen?

• List of topics so I don’t go through weekly Phineas and Ferb moments
• 500-600 words instead of 2,000 – 2,500
• Scheduled time to write, à la MIW
• How to write has no friction, meaning all my tools and resources are immediately at hand

I have a stand-alone Notion instance and a folder on my phone with the tools for the big project (not well-executed yet but good idea). The newsletter is part of that project. The resources and plans should go there. With a folder on my laptop for the companion files—drafts and finished product, resources used, graphics created. That is how I’m handling the webcasts.

Boom done. The five minutes a day writing process didn’t pay off with a blinding insight, just a pragmatic suggestion from the brain. Thanks you, brain.

Today is an all-target day. I’m going to hit everything. Boom.

The discipline of a “get to bed by 10 pm, lights out” deadline is useful to me. I would otherwise futz around and go lights-out later. I have a simple brain that needs simple instructions.

There is a parallel between having good taste and being good at a job such as mine, I’m starting to see. It’s not immediately obvious, because mine is a technical occupation, relying on a mental bank of decades of technical experience and constant study.

But there is a distinction between a technician and what I do (he said, modestly and humbly). 🙃 it’s the distinction between a woman who believes that buying Gucci creates style and a woman who assembles a wardrobe around items, regardless of brand, that are Good.

I am not exactly how to articulate this yet but it is part mastery (and self-awareness, for example, of knowing why an old Jaguar is beautiful and a modern Camry merely pedestrian, as if sketched by a seventh-grade boy, bored in math class). Hell, even a modern Jaguar is better than a modern Camry, though vastly inferior to its forebears. The bloodline has been diluted by successive generations of interlopers marrying into the family.

Anyway. It’s a useful exercise to self-reflect and ask self, “Self, explain to me why this is Good. Deeply good.” Grasping to find the words to explain the inexplicable is a worthwhile discipline in the same way that training for the half-marathon is worthwhile: self-discovery.

And most important, when you find Good, seize it and treasure it. Do not accept its cheaper imitation, the OK. Do not compromise. Be opinionated, unapologetically.

Vampires slink away when confronted with the brandished cross.

Yeah. Up early. Couldn’t sleep.

I will hit the targets today.

I’m going to have to get MIW in place when I can, in increments.

Now. Let’s get to real work: shedding loads. First, as soon as I get finished with these five minutes will be an email to reject a new project in order to preserve sanity.

Second, review products waiting for me to close out a long-dormant client. Grab them from the server so I can look at them at my leisure.

Some sort of mantra: kill what needs to be killed, throw away what is not immediately useful. Keep pedaling on everything else.

https://viewfromtheiowaporch.blogspot.com

She wrote, then stopped. Or maybe she started writing elsewhere. The last post is from 2014.

Maybe she forgot the password to log in, so she walked away. Maybe she thought no one was listening, sighed, and turned to mundane day-to-day life.

There is a real person there. A soul. A yearning.

Thank you for writing 25 blog posts. Maybe that’s all you needed to do for yourself—get a few thoughts out of your head and get on with life on life’s terms.

You made my day a little better, nine years after you stopped writing.

You’ve been choosing this life you have all along.

If my life is unacceptable to me, it’s my own damn fault.

If my choices have created a life that is unacceptable to me, what does that say about my choices? It says that I made my choices to be acceptable to others, at my own expense.

What does this mean for today?

What choices do I make today?

I choose, today, to build my heart’s desire. One step at a time. Either it will work or it won’t—but I want to give it the opportunity to blossom and bear fruit.

Then let everything else fill in around that.

Hit all targets yesterday.

Thinking about why I make things as hard as possible. (Do I?)

Newsletter. I could make them shorter. Easier to read and assimilate a thought and easier to write.

Webcasts. I could make them shorter. Easier to find time to watch them and faster to make.

Run. Longer. Ever harder. Go go go. Why am I committing to a half-marathon?

Why not think about the alternative? Try with this week’s newsletter. Shorter: 1,000 words instead of 2,000 or more.

It’s like those Jim Clair emails before I gave up. Get to the point, Jim. Same for mine?

And keep the snark out. Snark is lazy.

Sleep time. Missed it by 3 minutes. Got plenty of rest though, due to a Saturday afternoon nap. I’m up early and it is a run day. And there is work to do.

At this point the five minutes of writing a day feels rote. Maybe that’s part of the exercise: to keep emptying the bucket when you think the bucket is empty. So I continue to write immediately when waking up, mostly vapid. Keep on it, even when it produces nothing of value (like today). The value is in the thumbs hitting the keys on this phone.

I have no further words to express any feelings because the feelings are dulled by the prospect of work all day, on top of a 10k.

Starting the day with water rather than coffee seems to make the wake-up process smoother.

At the suggestion of a friend, I am making two lists: a Fairy Godmother list and a Stop Doing This list. Let’s see what happens.

The Fairy Godmother list is something you wish, however farfetched. Do you want to be king? On the list. Time is irrelevant. Effort is irrelevant. Talent and physical attributes are irrelevant. Do you want to be a nuclear physicist? Done.

He has a way of asking questions—he demonstrated and I don’t remember how he did it—that quickly zero in on what you really want beneath the fantasy of being the king philosopher powerlifting nuclear physicist who is lighter than air and can fly.

The other list, I forget his name for it, is a Do Not Do list. A list of things you never want to do again in your life. This could be fanciful stuff, as above. But most likely these are real things in your life.

So, the extreme poles of dreams of a perfect life. Beneath the dreams is a reality. Find it. within those fancies and impossible whimsies are concrete actions. Do them.

Testing continues for the easiest way to do this. I’m trying simple lists in Reminders on my phone. I want something as low friction as possible.

Let’s see what the lists reveal. Obviously, simple pie-in-the-sky dreams and whiny complaints do nothing. It’s what lies beneath the surface of the positive and negative fantasies that matters, and is actionable. And, when addressed, will make the difference.