Posts

You’re awash in a sea of information. How do you pay attention to the vital information you need to? How do you acquire quality new information when the volume on everything is at 11? This is what I’m experimenting with from a GTD perspective to deal with the firehose.

Information overload is an insidious problem. It’s ridiculously easy to rabbit hole digitally. The internet is a vast resource, but it’s also a gigantic attention suck. Between links, email newsletters, messaging, mail, and on-screen information and notifications you still need to research and keep up to date in your métier and get work done. Filtering the signal from the noise is no mean feat with people demanding your attention to monetize eyeballs. Modernity is a constant stream of information shouted at you and you still needing to be productive.

Every year, I post on the software tools and workflows I’m using. I always pick up tips from seeing other people’s posts outlining their tools and workflows and it’s helped tweak and improve my toolchain to squeeze out extra productivity. This is what the end of 2019 looked like in tooling.

I’m always mildly surprised when I do this post how much my setup evolves over the course of a year. Sure, there’s innovation in software, and slow changes are often the hardest to see, but as I’m always trying to simplify things GTD-wise changes can be pretty dramatic year to year. For the interested, you can see the 2019 , 2018 , and 2017 editions of these posts as well if you’re digging for some better ways to do things, especially as we’re in the new year (and decade!).

It’s New Year’s Resolution time. Yes, they don’t work for a lot of people, but that’s generally a problem with execution rather than intent. This is what worked for me in 2019 and the keystone habits and strategies that made the past year better.

Sure, I get it. New Year’s is just a date and you can pick any Day 0 date and start to change, but there is something a little easier about picking Jan 1 (or the day after Chinese New Year, as I’ve done some years to hack a slow January return to reality.).

I managed to read 43 books in 2019. These are the ones you may want to read and why. There’s also a Do Not Read list to save you valuable time.

2019 started off really strong, with a bunch of 5 star ratings of books that I was seriously impressed with. I’m not sure if this is because I changed up my habit of how I add books to the reading list, but I definitely felt like I read better books on whole this year the last. I even enjoyed a programming book (Programming Crystal) which has not happened since Why’s Poignant Guide (though worried that was more about the language, than the book itself.).

With a little leave time around XMas and a flight back to Canada, I had a bit more time to play around with Rust, and managed to fix an irksome timezone bug that was plaguing habitctl, the minimalist habit tracker CLI.

I’m really enjoying coding in Rust. As a language, I find it makes sense, is performant, and its prescient compiler checking on types and such makes it hard to shoot yourself in the face.

Rust is addictive. Added a warning sigil feature into the Rust-based habitctl minimalist habit tracker CLI.

Continuing on from a couple of weeks back , I decided to add the Warns feature I’d been wanting in habitctl .

The original author has still not merged my feature PRs, so I’ve just continued to add in the features I wanted.

Up his week, I sometimes have this issue where I don’t notice a habit is about to be broken from being satisfied (or skipped). Mostly this is because the usual “?” sigil for the latest day ends up not letting you know if that would potentially be the last chance you have to not bfreak the chain in your Seinfeld chain/consistency graph.

One of the best things about open source software is the ability to scratch your own itch (and that it may even force you to learn a new language). Added a skips feature into the Rust-based habitctl minimalist habit tracker CLI.

I’ve mentioned before how much I like the habitctl command line habit tracker for its minimalism, simplicity, portability, and great consistency graphs that give me real information I can action.

Aspire to be a mensch. Be afraid to die until you’ve won at least a few small victories for humanity.

I was surprised when I migrated my blog and was looking over posts I’d written over the years to find I’d never actually written about one of my core goal principles every year: be more mensch.

Guy Kawasaki’s 2006 post How to be a Mensch articulated something I’d always felt but never translated well into words. It ended up informing a lot of my thinking about the type of person I wanted to be and legacy I want to leave, both in my life and in the lives and places I touch.

With Jekyll getting long in the tooth, and wanting to force myself to learn a new programming language, I looked at switching this blog over to Hugo or Gatsby. Gatsby won, but here’s what I learned.

While I still kinda lurv Jekyll, I’d been wanting to force myself to use languages I’m not particularly a huge fan of, Golang and javascript/typescript. A consistent (and accurate) joke amongst my staff is that I only really enjoy programming in languages that look like Ruby (Elixir and Crystal being the usual suspects here.).

Switch from goal-based approaches for what you want to accomplish to figuring out how to create habits and systems. Goals fade, habits compound.

When I look back over goals I’ve set myself over multiple years, what sticks has been the ones where I’ve been able to set up regular, disciplined habits and/or systems that have managed to contribute to their achievement.

This past year, especially, I’ve managed to do more of what I wanted to set out to do, and what I told myself were priorities at the start of the year, than I have in previous years. A lot of that has been about embracing habits and systems, rather than beating myself up on merely setting goals.