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The command line still provides vastly more power and flexibility than GUIs for numerous tasks. Comfort on the command line is often one of the things that distinguishes great engineers and data scientists I know.

I’m often shocked when I look at other peoples’ desktops and see a bazillion icons in their docks and taskbars. A GUI app for every conceivable eventuality. Many of them, just shiny wrappers around very simple programs. This contrasts rather sharply with my own minmalist philosophy which has been as simple as three program icons in the Dock: Finder, iTerm, and Firefox (and in Solus, just Firefox since Guake is tucked out of the way, see below.).

With a Macbook 12" update unsighted in two years, and Apple releasing a revamped Macbook Air last year, I started considering whether my next laptop needed to be Linux. Surprisingly though, the issue became not so much Linux as the OS, as PC laptop hardware available. Early 2019, this is how I saw my options.

My trusty Macbook 12" 2016 has been a shockingly excellent laptop for my needs: ridiculously light (<1kg) with a bright retina screen and enough memory and storage to get everything I need done (8GB RAM and 512GB SSD respectively). Completely silent since it has no fan, and with the nice reliability side effect that comes from not a single moving part, my only complaints to date have been about battery life and a processor that could have been a tad punchier (though perhaps thermally incompatible with fanless cooling). I’ve been super happy with it (and do most processing heavy-lifting in the cloud anyway) so despite my initial worries about purchasing one in 2016, my complaints have been very few. More than three years with a laptop is a record. Laptops rarely survive 18 months under my cruelty.

This was my attempt to remix org-mode with my Taskpaper flow to try to get all the benefits of org-mode for note taking, tracking and being date-aware.

While I still owe Taskpaper a huge debt for making GTD effective for me, I’ve talked before about how it not being date-aware, having repeating tasks, and lack of customization, as well as it not being great for tracking over time, led me to try org-mode.

I’ve been using this hosting setup for three years now to make my blog fast, cheap, secure, SEO-friendly, and using commodity cloud resources to host it. This is the HOWTO.

I have to admit to being impressed with sites that load with preternatural quickness and a bit judgey about technical influencers whose sites take forever to load. Sure, devs are not designers and backend guys are generally not great at frontend optimization, but I still find it the littlest bit inexcusable. Add loading slow to not using https, broken links/images, or a site not being mobile responsive, and well… I think that’s borderline sloppy.

Want extra hours every day to focus on what’s important and get things done? This is how I carve out roughly two extra, productive hours and an extra productive day out of my weekdays.

Pick Systems over Goals, and… Track!

From both Scott Adam (yes, the Dilbert guy) and James Clear (Atomic Habits), think systems and habits rather than goals. Goals are the good for direction, systems create progress. Habits compound, goals fade (or get achieved).

Every year I like doing a refresh on my Desktop tools posts 2018 here and 2017 here . I’m constantly tweaking and clarifying my toolchain to try and eek a bit more productivity out of my tools.

I’m still on my trusty, early-2016 Macbook which is now going on three years old, but I’m mow at the point I could probably move over to Linux with little disruption. Also, investigating ways to do things cross-platform has really added better arrows to the quiver. Strangely, now the issue in moving to Linux is finding a laptop as good, light, and powerful as the Macbook I currently have (and additionally, is fanless and silent.).

From the 40 books I polished off in 2018 these are what I think you may want to add to your own lists and why. There’s also a Do Not Read list to save you valuable time.

For some reason, I have this impression that the books I read in 2018 were less impactful than those I read in 2017, but drilling down on the list, that’s not really true. The ones I did find amazing though were much more eclectic and a much less consistently thematic than my 2017 list. Probably the biggest problem I had in 2017 was reading books that other people or the industry raved about and which I thought were mediocre or higlhy derivative and a waste of my time. I also lament (really!) for the fact it’s impossible to find what I consider a truly compelling programming book in any area I tried to learn more about.

Emacs org-mode’s focus on plaintext organizing files is surprisingly powerful. However, archiving files to keep thing lean and fast becomes important as your corpus grows. To fit with my GTD style, I took an alternative approach to org-mode’s native archiving and automated it.

My GTD style heavily revolves around a daily org-journal file that collects notes and TODO items into a rational structure for reference and tasks tagged by various semantic grpups, critical to moving forward my 100+ person team. Separate from project files, habits, or my repeating tasks org-journal daily files end up being the meat of moving forward and tracking things across the large organization.

The Emacs org-mode system from last post is supported by a fairly simple, robust email flow designed to GTD and keep me at Inbox Zero and not overwhelmed with mail or have things fall through the cracks. This is how it runs.

For about ten years now, I’ve been using this system which I’ve modified slightly to work with what has become the default mail client for most companies, Gmail, and recently to my experiments with moving to org-mode as an organzier. It is pretty extensible to any offline client you’ll use (or Taskpaper as an organizer) as long as it integrates with Gmail. It’s a combination of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system and a riff on Gina Trapani’s Trusted Trio approach.

Productivity gains compound. So, every year I experiment tweaking my GTD system to get better at goals, planning, and, well… Getting Things Done. This is how things have gone otg-more so far compared with the Taskpaper system I’ve been using for most of the previous five years.

TLDR

Emacs (and by extension, org-mode) has a different philosophy than other tools. The idea is to do everything in emacs, which is a bit out of line with the unix philosophy I’m used to of one tool doing things well (eg. vim) and being able to string them together. It has taken a while to get used to, but after years of vim, I have to admit, I am kinda sold on the idea of an interpreter in your text editor (sorry, vim) though I am not completely sold on emacs itself (though worried I may not be able to move back from org-mode, org-habit, and org-journal anytime soon.). As an experiment, it’s been positive. Is it life-changing? Possibly. Am I sticking with emacs and org-mode? Let’s see.