Most of the books I've read about productivity or writing treat distraction as a bad thing. Juxtaposing The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Nicholas Carr), Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Cal Newport), and Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman), I find myself leaning more towards Burkeman's acceptance of limits and lack of control. I'd rather figure out how to embrace these shallows than to write off large portions of my life: parenting a young child with all the attendant interruptions (which I am learning to welcome) and preparing for eventual old age. I'd rather be here so that the kiddo can send me notes by post owl (paper airplane) than go behind a door that I can shut. I love that she wants to show me book passages that she found funny and that she wants to ask me what-if questions about Harry Potter and that she wants to snuggle.

The people I hear from reassure me that this splitting my attention because of parenting is okay; it's because I'm choosing something that's higher priority for me at the moment; it's temporary; it's worthwhile. As the kiddo often reminds me (because I often say it out loud to her, with love and affirmation): I signed up for this, I only get so many years of this.

If we're lucky, we get old. Some don't. Some people stay sharp, like the way Leslie Lamport's still writing in his 80s. (Writings) My mom struggles with energy and forgetfulness and physical decline, so that might be closer to my experience; I can be pleasantly surprised otherwise.

• Toot about embracing the shallows and some follow-ups and replies
• What did I learn from this experiment with semi-retirement? (2017)
  • I got to enjoy tons of autonomy for a few years. Even then, I didn't do the things I feel a little wistful about, so I don't need to feel like time or attention is holding me back from working on those.
  • I realized that it wasn't just about getting things done. There are many ways to live a meaningful life. Even a small life is fine.
  • Accumulating gradual progress is good.
• Braindump from radiostudent.si interview with Lio Novelli and Jurij Podgorsek: Emacs, focused time (2023)
  • Embracing the shallows might help more people get into and stay in the things they're interested in.
  • The things I do to adapt to temporary shallows can help me in other situations too.
• Dealing with thought fragmentation, reducing mental waste (2018)
  • "It was useful for me to let go of wanting to focus." - hah, still learning this lesson
  • It can be useful to think of both trimming waste as well as building on strengths.
• Working with fragmented thoughts (2015)
  • Index cards can be a useful size for a thought.
• High energy and low energy activities (2013)
  • There are plenty of things I can do when I don't feel like thinking much.
• Dealing with distractions (2013)
  • Sometimes my mind has a hard time with unfinished things. I can go with it. I can work around it. I can also structure things to be much smaller so that I don't have as many unfinished things, or write it down and trust that I'll eventually get back to it when the time is right.

So, accepting that this is what I've got, what do I want to do with it?

I can take it all in. It's okay to just be.

When I want to do things, there are plenty of things I can do from here.

One of the things I've learned while doing Emacs News is that even things I can do in the shallows can be useful. Organizing information and passing it along does not require deep reflection or a quiet mind.

I can read in short bursts here and there, take notes, and share them. How to Take Smart Notes (Sönke Ahrens; my notes) reassures me that I can take short notes as I read, and those notes can build up into something useful.

Most of my Emacs tweaks are short. They also accumulate. More things become easier and easier.

I've been tweaking my drawing workflow to be comfortable with parts of pages instead of feeling like I need to fill in the whole thing. I used to draw on a Nintendo DS, index cards, and a Samsung Note 8. A small canvas makes it easier to feel like a thought is complete, but I can do the same even with the A5 size of my Supernote. I just have to give myself permission to stop.

Now I am learning to write small thoughts. They aren't amazing insights, but they're enough for me, and sometimes they resonate with other people.

I wonder about the different kinds of shallows I find myself in:

• I can be on my computer; there's stuff going on in the background; I might be interrupted, and I'll need to wind up soon anyway
  • Writing: could get better at:
    • Collecting links and resources
    • Listing thoughts for further development, collecting snippets
  • Coding: could get better at:
    • Keeping it small
    • Adding tests
    • Sharing notes
    • Checking for previous implementations or related stuff
  • Correspondence: could get better at:
    • Keeping track of things
• I can draw.
  • Untangle my thoughts: pretty easy to think of a question to ask myself; try using my tosketch tag
  • Read a book and take a few more notes
    • Maybe share more granular notes?
• I can read or write on my phone while I'm waiting for someone.
  • Tends to be dominated by current questions; could get better at reviewing things that I've added to my to-read list.
• I can talk out loud because I'm doing a chore or errand by myself and no one else is around. Audio braindump workflow - could get better at:
  • Quickly reviewing a list of questions (:todump: tag)
  • Getting ideas of out of the transcripts
• I can listen to something while I do chores or errands. Could get better at:
  • Skipping podcast episodes I'm not that interested in
  • Finding podcasts I like
  • Making and storing notes
• I can't be on my phone, but I can think about things.
  • Nice to have a background question I can return to in those moments, and then I can capture a note or post a toot that I can flesh out eventually.

By doing everything with the clear purpose of writing about it, you will do what you do deliberately.

I like chapter 5's focus on keeping writing in mind. I want to push most things towards writing and drawing (posts, code, whatever; public as much as possible) because it's a good way for me to remember and to learn from others. It's a reminder to not try speeding through my to-do list; it's good to slow down and write about stuff.

I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.

I always work on different manuscripts at the same time. With this method, to work on different things simultaneously, I never encounter any mental blockages.

During my discretionary time, I usually follow the butterflies of my interest: working on what I feel like working on, moving on to something else when I get stuck. Sometimes I will work on something I have to do because it's got to be done, but those moments are rarer. Amidst all those productivity books that exhort you to focus on a limited number of things, it was nice to know that Luhmann also jumped from interest to interest, that the process of accumulating these notes builds things up into clusters with critical mass, and that these good habits build themselves up through positive feedback loops.

I do all right capturing fleeting notes on my phone, but I want to get better at turning my fleeting notes into literature notes and permanent notes. I'd like to review them more frequently and spend some more time fleshing them out, with the goal of eventually turning more of those things into blog posts and code that I can share as I learn out loud.

I also don't really have a good way of putting topics "near" other topics yet. Categories are a little coarse, but maybe topic maps are a good starting point. It would be nice to have a quick way to put something before/after something else, though.

Writing a paper involves much more than just typing on the keyboard. It also means reading, understanding, reflecting, getting ideas, making connections, distinguishing terms, finding the right words, structuring, organizing, editing, correcting and rewriting.

I wonder if making these distinctions between the subtasks of writing will make it easier for me to break writing down into tiny tasks that can be completed and gotten out of my brain.

I want to get better at connecting ideas to other things I've thought about by linking to blog posts or notes. That might also help me build up thoughts out of smaller chunks, which would be helpful when it comes to working with fragmented thoughts.

Thinking about what's not in the picture is hard, and that kind of critical thinking is something I want to practise more. I can pay attention to the follow-up questions I have so that I can get a sense of where to look for more insights or what to experiment with. Questioning the way something is framed is also good and something I don't do often enough.

For example, I wanted to dig into this quote:

Luhmann’s only real help was a housekeeper who cooked for him and his children during the week, not that extraordinary considering he had to raise three children on his own after his wife died early.

I ended up doing a tiny bit of research on my phone and putting it into Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten and life with kids (the kids were in their teens at the time, so they were probably a lot more independent than A+ is at the moment).

• How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens (2017) - author's website
• Sketchnote: How to Read a Book - also talks about thinking about the Great Conversation between books
• Sketchnote: How to make a complete map of every thought you think (Lion Kimbro) - pan-subject speeds: fleeting notes; map
• Sketchnote: Write Faster, Write Better – David A. Fryxell - shuffling ideas on index cards feels related to the slipbox

I have >= 8000 posts in my blog, almost 4000 sketches (mostly public, many with OCR results), and lots of text notes in my Org Mode files, many of which are in a hierarchy and many of which are just a random list of entries.

There's also the episodic memory aspect of things, trying to remember using different cues. Might be fun to figure out what I can do with >= 16,000 text journal entries (usually a sentence, sometimes longer).

I like the idea of being able to search my notes with both exact and approximate matches. Semantic Search for Org roam | lgmoneda might be a good starting point. Khoj has a free self-hosted option that can be configured to use offline models and some support for Org Mode, but it might be too big for me to wrap my head around at this point. I'll probably write my own thing so that I can understand it and so that I can tailor it to the structure (or lack thereof) of what I've got.

I don't mind starting with just the retrieval aspect, since text generation is still a little iffy. I'd rather be able to flip through the titles and jump to the source information for now.

I'm partly looking for the modern equivalent of the Remembrance Agent, which I enjoyed using in Emacs before. It used a bag-of-words approach to look at a few hundred words around your cursor and suggest files/emails/etc. that were relevant in another window.

Slightly more far-off: it might be nice to be able to find something based on more retrieval cues and episodic memory, and to enrich memory.

Someday it would be pretty cool to have something help me remember where I left something. Video (SpotEM, Episodic Memory Question Answering) might be excessive, but maybe I could get into the habit of audio notes?

It would be good to have more conveniences for fixing commonly-misrecognized words, although that might also be handled with simple regex-based replacements (maybe like mbork's mrr-replace-mode).

It would be nice to automatically break up transcripts of braindumps or web conferences into topics. I currently do a bit of light structuring via keywords in my audio braindumps, but topic segmentation is a well-established area, so I should be able to figure this out once I set aside time for it.

I thought it was a little interesting how Dan Shipper used 10 years of journal data for retrieval-augmented text generation and question-answering (source) and how AI can make analyzing your thoughts and actions feel more like a conversation, but I don't think this is quite useful for me yet.

When I'm writing, my challenge is usually resisting going down the rabbit hole of more tweaks and instead reining things in so that I can finish the post. But if I do find myself wanting to write more, I think it might potentially be interesting to ask what kinds of follow-up questions people might ask about something, and then add links or more explanations.