A+ is 8 (almost 9!) and is starting to learn how to procrastinate. I think this is a fairly new development now that she's got more classwork and more ideas about how she wants to use her time (not doing classwork). That's cool. I procrastinate, too. Part of my job as her parent is to help her learn how to procrastinate well, and to let her practise while the stakes are low: while she's dealing with schoolwork, instead of when she's making critical life decisions on her own.

This is hard for both of us, but mostly for me. I keep getting the urge to try to keep her on track. I have to remember that it doesn't work out if I'm the one pushing. She resists. Also, she doesn't get the practice in managing herself.

I think it'll work out better if I help A+ learn to tune into and manage her energy. That might look like 5-minute breaks and the occasional snuggle, or reading during class and then catching up on work. As she experiments, she'll get a better sense of when she should pay attention and do things at that moment because they're going to use those things in a discussion or because the opportunity isn't going to be available later.

There'll be failures along the way, like underestimating how much time a task will take, not managing energy well enough, or making the wrong choices about attention–but that's just feedback for the experiments. Failure is low-stakes at the moment: a reminder from the teacher if she hasn't gotten started on the class activity, some negotiation about when to do things if she ran out of energy the night before, a worksheet we take our best guess at because we don't know what the instructions were. She'll make mistakes along the way, but that will help her learn. As long as she gets the work done, that's cool. And if she doesn't get the work done, then that's an opportunity to debug and improve.

Her virtual school teachers are more on the synchronous "everyone should be working on this slide for the next ten minutes" side of things, so we'll see how long we can get away with this flexible approach. I hope eventually she'll get the hang of getting the work done and then reading, but that's probably something she's going to figure out with experimentation.

It's great seeing A+ start to learn how to manage herself. I made a menu of activities before, but now she often thinks of activities herself. Earlier in the schoolyear, she wanted the breaks to be playing 20 minutes of Minecraft with me. Now we've gotten that down to 10 minutes of Minecraft or videos, and sometimes she even chooses 5-minute breaks instead. She sets her own timers. Now that we're experimenting with the Simply apps for piano/singing/drawing, she sometimes uses that for her break. Going through a bite-sized lesson or practice session gives her energy and makes her feel great about herself, especially if she's picking a song like How Far I'll Go from Moana.

Sometimes A+'s breaks are a bit longer because she wants to help out with something around the house, like baking cookies. (It's funny how much her motivation to help increases when there's a piece of homework in front of her.) Practical life skills are worth it too, and we talk about what she gets out of those activities.

We also talk about dopamine levels and the effect different activities have on our energy levels. We talk about how things like music can shift how we're feeling and help us get ready. She can tell when she's ready, and she can tell when she's too tired to work. (Goodness knows that getting better at detecting when I'm in the negative productivity zone is useful as a coder…)

Someday she'll be able to manage her own checklists. In the meantime, I can help make lists (and resist the temptation to add pressure to them). Someday, all her breaks will be self-regulated. In the meantime, if she wants snuggles as a break, she gets them. Someday she'll have a variety of breaktime activities that she can use to manage her energy. In the meantime, I can update the menu as her skills grow and her interests evolve. Someday, she'll be able to work longer and take shorter breaks, maybe something like Third Time. In the meantime, it's okay to start where she is. Someday she'll be in tune with when she has the most energy in the day, and plan her tasks accordingly. In the meantime, I can share my observations. ("Hmm, we'll probably be tired after we get back.") Someday, she might even be able to strategically use procrastinating on other tasks in order to get her main tasks done. This is the time to experiment and learn.

One of the things that I appreciate about virtual school is that her classwork gives her fodder for practising the skill of figuring out how to get things done. Sure, the skills and bits of knowledge she develops by doing it are handy, but she can learn that whenever. The process of getting stuff done (including things you might not particularly enjoy doing, but which need to be done anyway)–now that's a generally useful thing. If we choose to homeschool, I'll probably want to come up with something similar so that she can keep practising.

Speaking of feedback, I wonder how I can make something that'll help us estimate and then track how much time a task actually takes, without feeling the pressure of a count-down timer or a missed goal. I occasionally track my time on tasks using Org Mode effort estimates and clocking, and I like to approach it with curiosity instead of stress. My tasks are usually not repetitive, so it's more about calibrating my sense of effort. It might be interesting to help her start developing that sense too. She's already used to timers on her watch. This is more of a stopwatch thing, but maybe something less frenetic than a digital stopwatch or a Stackmat timer. Or we could use her timer and then treat it as a check-in reminder… I don't think she's quite there yet, but it could be something to try later on. Something to grow into.

On my side, I'm working on staying focused on our long-term goals. It's not about making sure this particular thing gets done now. It's about helping A+ develop ownership of the process and the ability to tune into herself: her interests, her energy levels, her decisions and experiments. I'm also here to help build her up by catching her doing well and celebrating those small wins. It's very tempting to try to use pressure and stress when I feel responsible for helping her develop a work ethic that's convenient for fitting in, but maybe there are other things that could work well for us. Practising letting her work it out–even if it means the occasional failure–will be important as she gets older and more independent, so I might as well learn that while the stakes are low, too.

It's easier to work with what we've got than to grump at ourselves for not being who we wish we were. It's like the way I've been learning to work with how my brain works, too. Our brains procrastinate. We can get better at doing it. Could be fun.

Does your brain tend to procrastinate too? What do you find works well for you?

One of the neat things about parenting is that I get to think about how to develop different skills. Today I want to think about planning ahead. I can see the beginnings of it developing in A+, like when she says, "I'm going to put on my boots before I put on my mittens because that's easier when you have fingers." I can see when it's more of a struggle, like when we've forgotten to bring the stuffed toy she wanted to take along and she's overwhelmed with frustration. I can draw parallels between that and the way I'm learning more about this skill myself, like when we use the Band-aids I've stashed in my emergency kit or when I've forgotten to pack lunch and have to find something that A+ will like within walking distance. Even grown-ups have a hard time with these skills. We've got plenty of examples around us of people working on improving that skill and people who struggle.

I like breaking skills down into smaller chunks so that they're easier to think about, practise, and learn. Breaking down the idea of looking ahead into anticipating, choosing your future self, preparing, celebrating, adapting, and experimenting makes more sense to me than treating it as one big lump. I want to think about these subskills in this blog post so that I can get better at them and so that we can swap notes.

The parts that are hardest for A+ at the moment are adapting and experimenting. That makes a lot of sense. That's when planning gets tested. That's when you get feedback from reality. That's difficult for lots of people, even grown-ups, and I have plenty to learn about those parts myself.

Experimenting: reflective practice

It would be counterproductive for me to try to cushion A+ from failure. I want her to develop her own skills, so I want her to make decisions (especially ones without long-term negative consequences). Some of those decisions won't work out the way she wanted them to, but that's life. Besides, "How can we make things better next time?" is a question that can build on both positive and negative experiences, so even the uncomfortable moments can be useful.

When things don't work out, it's very tempting to blame ourselves or other people, but that doesn't really help us more forward. I want to be able to see the ups and downs as data points in our experiments and as opportunities to improve our processes. I keep working on getting better at responding to my own oopses and my delegated oopses. Fortunately, I have lots of opportunities to practice.

From James Reason's Swiss Cheese model of human errors:

The basic premise in the system approach is that humans are fallible and errors are to be expected, even in the best organisations. Errors are seen as consequences rather than causes, having their origins not so much in the perversity of human nature as in “upstream” systemic factors. … When an adverse event occurs, the important issue is not who blundered, but how and why the defences failed.

Failures point to multiple ways that we might be able to learn and to improve our systems. Paying attention to those opportunities could save us from bigger mistakes later on. Finding bugs when developing means dealing with fewer bugs in production, and this is basically her development environment. Besides, there's a lot of satisfaction in improving our systems.

Still, it's hard to think when people are dysregulated. It's easier to take that perspective when things are calm and there's an opportunity to try something new. So in the moment, my job is to weather the storm and adapt as well as I can. After the storm passes, I can think about what would make things better next time around. When I notice that A+ is calm and ready to learn, I can invite her to think along with me. She still gets defensive if I use the past events as an anchor for reflection. She responds better if we're planning for something that's coming up soon. I can use avoidance sparingly ("last time, that didn't work out so well") and lean more on building on things that worked well. That kind of reflection will probably be mostly on my side for now, but maybe she'll grow into it eventually.

I keep a brief journal, but life with A+ doesn't usually lend itself to quickly looking things up so that I can pull in the appropriate anecdotes at the right time. The tough moments tend to be easy to remember because they're emotionally-laden, but since I want to build on positive experiences as well, I can:

1. slow down and notice things out loud in the moment,
2. retell it shortly after, perhaps during dinnertime,
3. capture it in my journal so I can look it up again, and
4. think of the next little step, or some cues or situations it might be relevant to.

It's also probably easier for A+ to learn from my thinking out loud about my own processes than about hers. Fortunately, life gives me plenty of opportunities to practise learning out loud.

We already have a habit around drawing a moment of the day, and I could probably add something like Rose-Thorn-Bud to dinnertime or bedtime conversations. A+'s teachers sometimes add reflection to their assignments, too.

I probably don't even have to worry too much about explicitly teaching A+ these skills. I just have to try to not get in the way of her learning them. If we learn together, I think we'll figure all sorts of cool things out.

I'm sitting in the same room as A+ as she attends virtual grade 3. She uses the computer speakers instead of her headphones. I feel there's a part of my mind that I can't access with stuff going on in the background, but I don't mind so much. Listening in is a good way for me to keep up with what she's learning in class. (Sometimes there are moments of unexpected hilarity.) I used to go off to a different room, but A+ likes to have me around. Might be like the body doubling that many people find helpful. In a little less than an hour, we'll have recess, so that's another constraint on how deeply I can get into a task or an idea.

Right now I feel like writing about a thought that I've been picking up and putting down over the past few days/years: embracing the shallowness of my attention at the moment.

I was curious about this passage from How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens:

[Niklas] 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. Five warm meals a week of course do not explain the production of roughly 60 influential books and countless articles.

As I am still figuring out how to fit my thoughts around my 8-year-old's desire for my attention (wonderful, time-limited opportunity that it is), I wanted to understand more about what that domestic situation might have been like.

It took a bit of digging, but eventually I found out that Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) and Ursula von Walter (couldn't find her birth year; I think she died in 1977, although some pages report 1971) had three children:

• Veronika Luhmann-Schröder (1961-)
• Clemens Luhmann (1963-)
• Jörg Luhmann (1963-)

which would've made them around 14-16 years (+/- a little, couldn't find months) old when their mother died in 1977. [source]​

So yeah, teenagers, whole 'nother kettle of fish.

The kiddo will be a teenager eventually and I'll miss these days, so I might as well make the most of them. Maybe reading/thinking/writing in small bits can help me still feel like I get to learn things I want to learn about, in addition to all the random Minecraft and Star Wars trivia I've been picking up. I am starting to be able to have a little more time to put together thoughts, so that's encouraging. Trust the process and just keep feeding the slipbox, people say. I hope I can get to it before things scramble my brain even further. We'll see in a few years.

Also, Niklas Luhmann's children ended up fighting for years in court over ownership and copyright,[source]​ particularly over his slipbox. He had transferred all his copyrights to Veronika in 1995 before his death in 1998 (71 years old) and didn't want his intellectual legacy split up, which the courts upheld in 2004.[source]​ It's tough when family fights over money, and even tougher if they're fighting for such a long time in the courts.

Anyway, still looking for more figures to learn from. Among other thoughts in the Art of Manliness podcast on treating your to-do list as a river, Oliver Burkeman pokes a little fun at the YouTube productivity influencer culture: "So much of that is dominated by young men who are still a few years away from having kids and telling you how to exactly nail your morning." He goes on to say that it's nice to have maybe 3 or 4 hours of focused time, but you shouldn't strive to be walled off and completely uninterruptible. It's good to be able to go with the flow. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf wrote about the challenges of chasing a fleeting idea, and the necessity for women to have your own money and a room with a lock on the door. Good Mom on Paper: Writers on Motherhood and Creativity felt mostly like people stretched almost to the point of breaking, but still managing to (mostly) survive thanks to the people around them.

I appreciate the homeschooling group we often hang out with. It's nice to know other people grappling with similar challenges.

I'm lucky that my thinking activities are discretionary. Neither food nor shelter depends on my being able to write code or think thoughts at this particular moment. I'm learning to go with the flow. I draft this as the kiddo is presumably sleeping in the other room. She had sent me off earlier with, "I think I'll try sleeping on my own tonight."

I've been really enjoying playing sungka with my eight-year-old daughter. We've been playing it for a number of years now. Usually she likes to start out with one shell in each cup and working our way up to seven shells in each cup over a series of rounds.

Over the last week, she's gotten a lot better at playing. In the past, she used to make her moves fairly randomly, and she liked having the advantage of starting off with a few extra shells in her home. Now she doesn't need that starting point, and she's beginning to plan ahead. She counts the shells to predict where she's going to end up. She recognizes common patterns like clearing out the cups closest to her home. She loves moving shells out of the way so that she can make a very large capture, cupped hands full of shells.

Sungka has taken over as her current hyperfocus. It's the game she asks to play with me when her virtual school is on a recess break. I enjoy playing with her. Even when I'm losing, I enjoy watching her become more dextrous as she drops the shells in one at a time, and I like watching her plan ahead.

I played sungka a lot when I was a kid around her age. I think the school had some sungka boards that people could borrow after class, and I played with the other kids until it was time to go home. I don't know if this is a game that I can bring to the playground. It'll probably be a challenge with sand and kids and lots of small pieces. I think this will just be a game for home and for us, but it's wonderful that I get to share it with her.

I wanted to see what else people have done in terms of combining Minecraft and Emacs. It turns out that you can control Minecraft from Emacs via mcf if you set enable-rcon=true in your server.properties (also a good idea to set rcon.password) and you configure variables like mcf-rcon-password on the Emacs side. It needed a little tweaking to get it to connect to a remote server, so I've submitted a pull request. Anyway, since Emacs can talk to Minecraft and I can write sequences of Minecraft commands as functions, I thought about turning my Minecraft command books into something that I could update right from Emacs.

Creating my own datapack was pretty straightforward once I figured out the directory structure. I needed to put functions in <world-name>/datapacks/sachac/data/sachac/functions. Inside <world-name>/datapacks/sachac, I created pack.mcmeta with the following contents:

{
    "pack": {
        "pack_format": 10,
        "description": "sachac's tweaks"
    }
}

Inside <world-name>/datapacks/sachac/data/sachac/functions, I created a command_book.mcfunction file with the command to give me the book. I updated my command book function to remove the / from the beginning.

I used /reload to reload my Minecraft configuration and /datapack list to confirm that my datapack was loaded. Then /function sachac:command_book ran the function to give me the command book, so that all worked out. I replaced the command in the command block with the function call.

The next step was to update it directly from Emacs, including reloading. First, I needed a function to give me the filename of a function file.

(defun my-minecraft-datapack-function-file-name (world datapack-name function-name)
  "Return the filename for a mcfunction file given WORLD, DATAPACK-NAME, and FUNCTION-NAME."
  (seq-reduce
   (lambda (path subdir) (expand-file-name subdir path))
   (list "datapacks"
         datapack-name
         "data"
         datapack-name
         "functions"
         (concat function-name ".mcfunction"))
   world))

I used C-c C-x p (org-set-property) to add a WORLD property to my Org subtree. For example, my snapshot world is at /ssh:desktop:~/.minecraft/saves/Snapshot. Then I can get the correct value within the subtree by using org-entry-get-with-inheritance. This is how I wrote the command book function for my snapshot world:

#+begin_src emacs-lisp :var body=mc-snapshot :var team=mc-team :var quick=mc-quick :var effects=mc-effects :var items=mc-items :results silent
(with-temp-file
    (my-minecraft-datapack-function-file-name
     (org-entry-get-with-inheritance "WORLD")
     "sachac"
     "command_book")
  (insert (my-minecraft-book "Commands 8.5" "Mom" (append team quick body effects items))))
(mcf-eval "reload")
#+end_src

So now I can use C-c C-c to execute the Emacs Lisp block and have my Minecraft world updated. Then I just need to right-click on my command block's button or run the function in order to get the new version.

I'm looking forward to learning more about mcfunctions so that I can write a function that automatically replaces the book in everyone's inventories. Could be fun.

A+ likes playing recent Minecraft snapshots because of the new features. The modding systems haven't been updated for the snaphots yet, so we couldn't use mods like JourneyMap to teleport around. I didn't want to be the keeper of coordinates and be in charge of teleporting people to various places.

It turns out that you can make clickable books using JSON. I used the Minecraft book editor to make a prototype book and figure out the syntax. Then I used a command block to give it to myself in order to work around the length limits on commands in chat. A+ loved being able to carry around a book that could teleport her to either of us or to specified places, change the time of day, clear the weather, and change game mode. That also meant that I no longer had to type all the commands to give her water breathing, night vision, or slow falling, or give her whatever tools she forgot to pack before she headed out. It was so handy, W- and I got our own copies too.

Manually creating the clickable targets was annoying, especially since we wanted the book to have slightly different content depending on the instance we were in. I wanted to be able to specify the contents using Org Mode tables and generate the JSON for the book using Emacs.

Here's a screenshot:

This is the code to make it:

(defun my-minecraft-remove-markup (s)
  (if (string-match "^[=~]\\(.+?\\)[=~]$" s)
      (match-string 1 s)
    s))

(defun my-minecraft-book-json (title author book)
  "Generate the JSON for TITLE AUTHOR BOOK.
BOOK should be a list of lists of the form (text click-command color)."
  (json-encode
   `((pages . 
            ,(apply 'vector
                    (mapcar
                     (lambda (page)
                       (json-encode
                        (apply 'vector 
                               (seq-mapcat
                                (lambda (command)
                                  (let ((text (my-minecraft-remove-markup (or (elt command 0) "")))
                                        (click (my-minecraft-remove-markup (or (elt command 1) "")))
                                        (color (or (elt command 2) "")))
                                    (unless (or (string-match "^<.*>$" text)
                                                (string-match "^<.*>$" click)
                                                (string-match "^<.*>$" color))
                                      (list
                                       (append
                                        (list (cons 'text text))
                                        (unless (string= click "")
                                          `((clickEvent 
                                             (action . "run_command")
                                             (value . ,(concat "/" click)))))                                    
                                        (unless (string= color "")
                                          (list (cons 'color
                                                      color))))
                                       (if (string= color "")
                                           '((text . "\n"))
                                         '((text . "\n")
                                           (color . "reset")))))))
                                page))))
                     (seq-partition book 14)
                     )))
     (author . ,author)
     (title . ,title))))

(defun my-minecraft-book (title author book)
  "Generate a command to put into a command block in order to get a book.
Label it with TITLE and AUTHOR.
BOOK should be a list of lists of the form (text click-command color).
Copy the command text to the kill ring for pasting into a command block."
  (let ((s (concat "item replace entity @p weapon.mainhand with written_book"
                   (my-minecraft-book-json title author book))))
    (kill-new s)
    s))

With this code, I can generate a simple book like this:

(my-minecraft-book "Simple book" "sachac"
                   '(("Daytime" "set time 0800")
                     ("Creative" "gamemode creative" "#0000cd")))

item replace entity @p weapon.mainhand with written_book{"pages":["[{\"text\":\"Daytime\",\"clickEvent\":{\"action\":\"run_command\",\"value\":\"/set time 0800\"}},{\"text\":\"\\n\"},{\"text\":\"Creative\",\"clickEvent\":{\"action\":\"run_command\",\"value\":\"/gamemode creative\"},\"color\":\"#0000cd\"},{\"text\":\"\\n\",\"color\":\"reset\"}]"],"author":"sachac","title":"Simple book"}

To place it in the world:

1. I changed my server.properties to set enable-command-block=true.
2. In the game, I used /gamemode creative to switch to creative mode.
3. I used /give @p minecraft:command_block to give myself a command block.
4. I right-clicked an empty place to set the block there.
5. I right-clicked on the command block and pasted in the command.
6. I added a button.

Then I clicked on the button and it replaced whatever I was holding with the book. I used item replace instead of give so that it's easy to replace old versions.

On the Org Mode side, it's much nicer to specify commands in a named table. For example, if I name the following table with #+name: mc-quick, I can refer to it with :var quick=mc-quick in the Emacs Lisp source block. (You can check the Org source for this post if that makes it easier to understand.)

(my-minecraft-book "Book from table" "sachac" quick)

item replace entity @p weapon.mainhand with written_book{"pages":["[{\"text\":\"Daytime\",\"clickEvent\":{\"action\":\"run_command\",\"value\":\"/time set 0800\"}},{\"text\":\"\\n\"},{\"text\":\"Clear weather\",\"clickEvent\":{\"action\":\"run_command\",\"value\":\"/weather clear\"}},{\"text\":\"\\n\"},{\"text\":\"Creative\",\"clickEvent\":{\"action\":\"run_command\",\"value\":\"/gamemode creative\"},\"color\":\"#0000cd\"},{\"text\":\"\\n\",\"color\":\"reset\"},{\"text\":\"Survival\",\"clickEvent\":{\"action\":\"run_command\",\"value\":\"/gamemode survival\"},\"color\":\"#ff4500\"},{\"text\":\"\\n\",\"color\":\"reset\"},{\"text\":\"Spectator\",\"clickEvent\":{\"action\":\"run_command\",\"value\":\"/gamemode spectator\"},\"color\":\"#228b22\"},{\"text\":\"\\n\",\"color\":\"reset\"}]"],"author":"sachac","title":"Book from table"}

Then I can define several named tables and append them together. Here's one for different effects:

Some commands are pretty long. Specifying a width like <20> in the first row lets me use C-c TAB to toggle width.

Here's what that table looks like in Org Mode:

Here's how to combine multiple tables:

#+begin_src emacs-lisp :results silent :var quick=mc-quick :var effects=mc-effects :var items=mc-items :exports code
(my-minecraft-book "Book from multiple tables" "sachac" (append quick effects items))
#+end_src

Now producing instance-specific books is just a matter of including the sections I want, like a table that has coordinates for different bases in that particular instance.

I thought about making an Org link type for click commands and some way of exporting that will convert to JSON and keep the whitespace. That way, I might be able to write longer notes and export them to Minecraft book JSON for in-game references, such as notes on villager blocks or potion ingredients. The table + Emacs Lisp approach is already quite useful for quick shortcuts, though, and it was easy to write. We'll see if we need more fanciness!