#Gtd

I experimented with Improv last quarter to get me out of my comfort zone and a potential gateway drug to standup (and frankly, better communication). I’ve become a big fan of the form, had a blast, and surprised at how it’s spilled over usefully into business and real life.

Improv Itself

What the hell is Improv, anyway?

Usually the first question I get from people when I tell them I’m doing improv is some variation on this. Most people have heard the name, associate it with Saturday Night Live, Second City, Whose Line Is It Anyway? or some form of comedy but actually don’t know what it actually is.

My COVID Career Advice post had a key section on making yourself financially independent. It was more popular than I would have guessed and spawned backchannel chats with people on how best to get started on financially resiliency. This post is a round up of the advice I’ve given people who asked. YMMV. Nothing in here is rocket science, though it requires a commitment, some setup, and some habits (or discipline) around taking your financial health seriously. Behaviour change is key.

I experimented a lot with process during pandemic lockdown and with the shift to WFH. Successful experiments had tooling implications. While I do feel tools are less important than your actual process — process trumps all — some tools do make some things you want to emphasize or change easier (or conversely, your existing tools might make it harder).

The big changes in my flow came about from trying to come up with a more web-based, easier sharing and collaborative process than emacs org-mode allowed. I wanted a nicer, more modern writing experience, and abstractions to keep me better organized than a flat file or folder hierarchy. Additionally, I wanted to experiment with implementing a Zettelkasten after reading How to Take Smart Notes which a note-taking-as-thinking organizational system purporting to be conducive to learning, creativity, and content creation, particularly in the academic arena. So, I needed effortless bi-directional linking of concepts, a beautiful writing environment that organized itself but could be modified, and robust task management.

Interestingly, this post came about from me reflecting on how my tooling had changed in 2020 during the pandemic (blog post pending). Ultimately though, what it’s led me to believe is that while tooling is helpful (and incremental), process and systems trump all. No magic tool will save you if you have broken process (and good processes can be executed with simple tools.). So, choose what you optimize for. Certain tools will help you focus on certain things, but process improvements are what ultimately pay large dividends. I made a number of core refinements in 2020 during some semi-sabbatical time which needed a post to share and what worked (and is working) for me.

As mentioned in an earlier post , a comment on my emacs plain text workflow versus systems that emphasized collaboration and sharing (ok, really GDocs), and my coinciding annual re-assess sent me down a survey on the important versus the improvable in my GTD flows.

TLDR

After trying all systems in great detail for a few weeks of real-life testing, often side-by-side or duplicating days, I am still wavering between Notion and sticking with org-mode + org-roam (and a few other emacs improvements I picked up in research.). So, I’ll spend January using org-roam and Notion in a real life shootout to make the determination. Right now, I really seem to like writing in Notion, but managing tasks in org-mode, but I have to choose just one, I think. Roam I had to reject due to exceptionally weak and manual task management despite loving its in-context bi-directional linking (which I’m hoping emacs’ org-roam will match). Basically, I wish I could have the baby of all three of the systems since they all have different strengths (and weaknesses).

One of my biggest beefs with productivity and GTD advice on the internet is its provision by content creators rather than people who have, well… have jobs like the rest of us.

Don’t get me wrong, some of their advice is great and I’ve cherry-picked from the best and profited, but in a sense the connection between some of them needing to produce constant, monetized content (to the point I’ve even seen productivity people interviewing other productivity people) sometimes makes you feel like its simply not applicable to me in my context of my work and life.

Starting a new role is always a litmus test for any GTD system you have. What may have worked in old roles may not work in new roles (though the holy grail is a system that is adaptable anywhere). While my emacs org-mode system has served me very well from a task (and life) management perspective, it has its shortcomings.

With my new role, my workplace is even more Google docs driven than my last workplace, and vastly more collaborative and global (with the added challenge of everything being remote in these covid times). One of the shortcomings with emacs for me previously was sharing work, and I have to admit the idea of a more web-integrated, cloud syncing, browser-based workflow (as long as it will also work offline) is attractive. Since it’s getting close to that time of year when I review what’s working and what’s not (and my new boss nearly fainted when I sent him a plain text formatted table from emacs org-mode of my onboarding plan), I decided to look at the good and bad in my workflow and start some GTD experimenting over the last weekend.

The Financial Independence portion of my COVID career advice post was surprisingly popular. I’ve received a lot of other questions about more easy rules for getting to FI and money advice.

The ironclad law of taking care of yourself financially is you must spend less than what you earn.

Whether salaries, assets, dividends, and interest - that is your upper ceiling (Credit is not earnings. It is simply a way to move future earnings into the present by incurring cost to consume things ie. interest rate charges.).

Rofi Org-mode TODOs is a simple script for use with the Rofi dmenu replacement to hotkey and then directly enter emacs org-mode TODOs and dispatch and append them to an inbox file. It’s simple, very fast, and designed to help you stay in flow while having ubiquitous collection of your TODOs for your GTD flow.

This first release in Python simply takes the text and tags from your input, formats the TODO in the proper format for emacs org-mode with a proper :DESCRIPTION: drawer with creation date, and appends in the proper format to your inbox file. Future versions will parse for notes, deadlines, or scheduled items, but this first version is functional and works right now. You can grab it here on Github

The pandemic has thrown a lot of people’s roles into uncertainty if not eliminated them entirely. While not everyone will have a choice because of financial or right-to-remain circumstances, it’s a good time to remind yourself that taking charge of your career is still an important aspect of life design. Choices here have effects that reverberate through your current and future quality of life. Play the long game.

There’re 3 things you should be keeping in mind if you’re thinking about a next role: