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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
A few weeks ago, two of our officemates (this guy and this guy ) did a Level Up Lunch on visual notetaking and the Bullet Journal technique.
I like to think I am someone who seriously get things done, but I have to admit I was struck by the simplicity and clarity of the system and the possibility that even while I am great at getting things done with Taskpaper , I do recognize that I still pile things into and roll things forward into future weeks arbitrarily, often just removing the problem I had with days getting overloaded with other systems, to future weeks with Taskpaper. I really liked the idea of the Monthly versus Daily calendaring, as well as the Event logging that seemed inherent in bullet journaling. And, well… it’s always good to shake things up, so I decided to take the plunge. I’m on the cusp of the 45 day mark, so I felt I should share my findings so far.
And make glorious and interesting mistakes. Some great advice from the ever-wise Neil Gaiman.
Cool kinetic typography from Nanna Påskesen
via the Farnam Street Weekly newsletter