#Gtd

Writing on happiness seems hubris in the face of COVID, 2020 generally, and the possible existence of spiteful Greek gods, but even in the face of setbacks people often ask me why I’m happy, so a post on how that came to be seems topical in these times of needed resilience. It wasn’t always this way.

One of my life goals isn’t “to be happy”. You could argue I have an unstated meta-goal for me not be unhappy, but I’ve always thought being uncomfortable, frustrated, feeling stupid, unappreciated, or upset at times is unavoidable if you want an interesting life. Which is one of my goals. More on those later.

This is the first of a series posts on lessons learned in running large data teams and large-scale data projects in SE Asia. This first post focuses on organization structure, the second on foundational practices, and later posts will talk about way you can improve your own teams as they grow.*

Not too long ago, Data teams were a new, novel thing when suddenly everyone wanted to “do AI” and “Big Data” and no one knew how to hire or what to do. A common approach was to hire a whack of PhDs with quantitative backgrounds, put them off in a corner, and have them do “Data science” expecting magic to somehow happen.

I’m happy to announce the open source release of harsh today.

Harsh is habit tracking for geeks . A simple, minimalist CLI for tracking and understanding habits. Build great habits. Break bad ones.

Why? Habits, both good and bad, make us. We are what we do habitually. And what we do habitually ends up being what we accomplish .

You can grab harsh most easily via homebrew on OSX or linux with a simple:

Besides habits as a form of process-based productivity, ruthless prioritization, and limiting of work in progress (or scheduling) doing proper weekly reviews and planning has been the basis of the main GTD gains I’ve noticed the last 6 months.

I’ve started experimenting with a 3 daily slot system and a 7+1 bucket review method every week that has been unexpectedly more effective, and felt it might help others who struggle with similar problems (too much to do, a constant onslaught of new things to prioritize and do, and never enough time to do it). Plus, it involved a bit of code to help with visibility and tracking and a siple system that is portable across systems (or paper) so felt post-worthy.

I read. A lot. And, I’m often asked to recommend books. For business books, I find myself endorsing the same titles to people all the time. Books that give timeless advice, confer skills never learned, or have insights to deal with our rapidly changing business environments in practical ways. These are ones that made big differences for me in an overhyped landscape of business books.

What makes you effective in modern business environments? What skills were you never taught explicitly in school that you need to acquire? A good education is about learning how to learn. Most people reading this will have that. Most aspirants need guidance and material that is going to help them. This was the basis of my thinking on this list:

Tracking finances and budgeting is unsexy but is the base from which flows investing, capital, and wise use of credit. It clarifies activity, priorities, obligations, and opportunities. Making money work for you is a minor superpower. It, if you can excuse the pun, pays dividends.

And it makes most sense in your hands, rather than a SaaS or bank. Many apps and online services give financial visibility but ultimately tie you to a (paid) upgrade cycle, ecosystem, or upsell where you lack control of your financial data and insights. Most make it difficult to get your data out once it’s theirs.

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.

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.).

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.