I like looking for ways to reduce manual work or looking-up. I tend to have a hard time with tedious, repetitive tasks. I also keep an eye out for things I've been meaning to learn.

Small steps make it easy to squeeze in things here and there. I know my brain's going to suggest half a dozen things along the way, so it helps to start as small as possible and capture most of the other things in my inbox for later. That way, I can get to experience the benefits right away without feeling lost.

Another advantage of picking really small tasks and using Org Mode to capture the rest of the ideas is that I can try to avoid the Ovsiankina effect.¹ I spend most of my day taking care of our 7-year-old, so I squeeze in my focused-time tasks early in the morning before she wakes up. Sometimes I have little opportunities to work on things throughout the day, like when she wants to read a book or watch a video. She might do that for 15-30 minutes before wanting to connect again. If I pick the wrong-sized task or I don't dump enough rough notes into my inbox so that I can get the open loops out of my head and trust that I can pick things up again, the unfinished part pulls on my brain and makes it harder to enjoy time with her. Then I get tempted to let her binge-watch Minecraft or Rubik's cube videos² so that I can finish a thought, which doesn't quite feel like good parenting.

Lastly, I don't usually understand enough about my needs to build something complex from the start. Trying things out helps me discover more about what's possible and what I want.

Thanks to Emacs's amazing community, there are usually relevant functions or packages that I can borrow code from. I mostly have a sense of things from the blog posts and forum threads that cross my radar because of Emacs News, and I should probably get used to skimming the descriptions in the "New packages" list because that can help me find even more things.

When coming up with possible approaches, I also sometimes think about other related ideas I've had before. Filing those ideas into the appropriate subtrees in my Org files sometimes helps me come across them again. If I can take a small step that also gets me closer to one of those ideas, that's handy.

I also like to think about next steps and possibilities. For example, even if I spend an hour or two learning more about data visualization with Org Mode and plotting, that's something I can use for other things someday. This works pretty well with keeping things small, too, since small parts can be combined in surprisingly interesting ways.

In the course of writing this blog post, I learned how to use URLs in Graphviz, learned how to include inline HTML for export with @@html:...@@, used position: sticky, figured out how to highlight the SVG using JS, used CSS to make a note that should only show up in RSS feeds, and submitted a pull request for meme.el that was merged. And now I want to figure out sidenotes or at least footnotes that don't assume they're the only footnotes on the page… This is just how my brain likes to do things. (Oooh, shiny!)

I might take years before revisiting the same topic, so good notes can pay off a lot. Also, when I share what I've been working on, sometimes people e-mail me or comment suggesting other things that are nearby, which is a lot of fun. The ideas I come up with are probably too weird to exactly line up with other people's interests, but who knows, maybe they're close enough to what other people work on that they can save people time or spark more ideas.

Inspired by Mats Lidell's EmacsConf 2023 talk on writing test cases, I've been working on writing occasional tests, too, especially when I'm writing a small, function to calculate or format something. That's a good way of sketching out how I want a function to behave so that I can see examples of it when I revisit the code. Tests also mean that if I change things, I don't have to worry too much about breaking important behaviours.

How can I get even better at this?

• Popping the stack (untangling interruptions and ideas): When I let myself get distracted by a cool sub-idea, I sometimes have a hard time backing up. I can get back into the habit of clocking time and practise using my org-capture template for interrupting task so that I can use C-u with C-c j (my binding for org-clock-goto) to jump to a recently-clocked task.
• Braindumps can help me use non-computer time to flesh out notes for things I'm working on or ideas for next steps.
• If I skim the descriptions of new packages in Emacs News (maybe even the READMEs instead of just the one-liners), I'll probably retain a brief sense of what's out there and what things are called.
• Vector search across package descriptions and function docstrings could be an even more powerful way to discover things that are close to something I want to do.
• Using elisp-demos to add more examples to functions can help me look up things I frequently use but don't remember.
• Figuring out more modern IDE features like refactoring support, on-the-fly error checking, and code navigation could help me code faster.

So that's how I tinker with Emacs for fun: start with something that mostly works, keep an eye out for opportunities to make things better, use tinkering as a way to make doing things more fun, look for things that are nearby, and