Weekly review: Week ending December 12, 2014

Posted: Dec 14, 2014 - Modified: May 29, 2019| review, weekly

This was a good week for programming and packaging. On my consulting gig, I got back into the swing of making small prototypes on the social business platform we use. I've been practising writing short Javascript functions, and they make my brain much happier. I also coached the other developer on our team over lots of instant messages and a few WebExes, and she's picking up things nicely. I made progress on an annoying bug that has been plaguing us for a few months, too.

I've been working on getting more stuff out the door, too. I packaged the Emacs Chat transcripts as an EPUB/MOBI and sorted out a good workflow for publishing them. (Come to think of it, I should consider making a PDF version too.) While sketching a book, I noticed that "sketched book" is a fun way to refer to those visual book notes; since the domain was available, I registered sketchedbooks.com and set it up.

I want to get the hang of publishing things in chunks that are larger than a blog post. Collections are easy to start with. The next step would be to work on things with outlines and chapters and flows.

My energy's slowly starting to return, yay! Slept more than normal – average of 9.3 hours a day – but that was because I was in bed for about 17 hours (!) last Sunday. I should be back to my regular ~8.3 hours of sleep a night soon.

Blog posts

Sketches

Link round-up

The Simple Shift That Lets You Earn More from Your Writing: Learn from more lucrative variants of your field.
Beware The Man Of One Study: Being careful about interpreting research.
Reconnect with an Old Friend by Sharing Things You’ve Learned: I've started doing this in response to people's "How are you?" More fun, and can lead to more interesting questions. Also good opportunity for reflection. Someday I might even use the idea to proactively reach out.
NBP074 – Be the Best Version of the REAL You, with Jeff Goins: Making the most of the in-between moments
Post Mortem: Takeaways from the “Thing-a-Day” Challenge: Dealing with low energy, accepting yourself, finding motivation, dealing with distraction. Good stuff. I do this too: start with a question, give yourself space, follow the trail, and create small things.
How to Learn Hacking (esr) – Submit small, exploratory patches to open source programs. Includes how to develop your design sense of code by paying attention when you get the itch to restructure something. Hat-tip to Lifehacker for the link.
What Happens If I Use Two-Factor Authentication and Lose My Phone?: Good reminder to set up backup methods.
Babel and org-mode for devops-like work.: Cool use. Reddit has helpful comments.
Guide to taking notes at work: Thorough. Hat-tip to Lifehacker for the link.
Debugging with yasnippet: Ideas for using yasnippet to simplify debugging Javascript. Hat-tip to Irreal for the link.
10 Books To Help You Create a Great Semi-Retirement: Second-act resources
How We Can Improve Our Decisions: Interesting link to this post on decision journals, which has a template for entries. I should make a snippet with this and use it to document my decisions.
Prototype with Proteus: Prototyping tool to consider. Related: Suspenders.
The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing: Start by discarding. Tidy by category, not location. Decide on what to keep, not what to throw away.
Excel to the Next Level by Mastering Multiple Occurrences: Microsoft Excel cleverness.
Tab Completion for Prose: I don't use autocompletion in Org Mode buffers because I end up typing the whole word anyway, so the autocomplete bothers me a bit, but maybe this tweak can help.
Sacha Chats with Karl Voit: Irreal always has great summaries. =)

… good haul this week. =)

Focus areas and time review

Business (34.5h – 20%)
- Earn (17.5h – 50% of Business)
  - ☑ Earn: E1: 1-2 days of consulting
  - ☐ Earn: E1: 1-2 days of consulting
- Build (13.1h – 38% of Business)
  - Drawing (7.7h)
    - ☑ Sketch JFS book
    - ☑ Make cover image
  - Paperwork (0.3h)
    - ☑ Actually submit tax return
  - Packaging
    - ☑ Format Emacs Chat transcripts as EPUB and sort out Org to EPUB workflow
    - ☑ Set up mailing list for sketchedbooks.com
    - ☑ Set up sketchedbooks.com – temporary site for now
    - ☑ Set up proper redirection so that I can do clever things with the URLs
    - ☑ Figure out EPUB workflow for publishing Emacs Chat transcripts
    - ☐ Set up EPUB workflow for Read Lisp, Tweak Emacs
  - ☑ Set up Authenticator
  - ☑ Set up app password so I can read Gmail from Gnus again
  - ☑ Fix OAuth login for Google – Quantified Awesome
  - ☑ Add Javascript for locating a blog post in my outline
  - ☑ Clean up disk space
  - ☑ Re-enter comments into Disqus
- Connect (3.9h – 11% of Business)
Relationships (7.3h – 4%)
- ☑ Chat with Sahil Sinha
Discretionary – Productive (18.3h – 10%)
- Emacs (4.4h – 2% of all)
  - ☑ Finish transcript for Emacs chat
  - ☑ Revise transcript for Iannis Zannos
  - ☑ Revise transcript for Emacs Chat: Karl Voit
  - ☐ Patch https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package to mention :ensure t
- Writing (10.1h)
  - ☐ Write about skewed notes
Discretionary – Play (6.6h – 3%)
Personal routines (29.9h – 17%)
Unpaid work (6.5h – 3%)
Sleep (64.9h – 38% – average of 9.3 per day)