Getting back into gear and slowly winding up Real Life Stuff™ again after taking a break from all that for about two weeks. It was very restful. As a consequence, the first day where I was actively engaged with everything again hit me like a sack of bricks and I have a hunch I will sleep very well tonight. Other things going on:

• Migrating more of my hodge-podge of small utility programs and fish functions I accumulated over the years to emacs, which seems to finally have clicked with me (working inside a lisp machine is amazing)
• Catching up on my pocket queue (130 articles left, it was a good idea to bunker all that material, honest)
• Working through Haskell From First Principles, slowly but steadily. Setting aside the first hour of the day for doing just that and learning has worked wonders, and so every morning has 06:30 - 07:30 spent on learning whatever project/book I am working on at that time. I might want to widen that window eventually, but so far it’s working very well, as my concentration is perhaps the highest it will be that day.
• Preparations for contract negotiations
• Paperwork. Oh my god, so much paperwork.

And of course, the mountains of stuff I have forgotten that will provide a rude awakening during this week, but established systems make me confident that’s not going to be more than two or three things.

I took the time to learn a little Go and write a small little tool I wanted to have for a while now.

I was impressed with how easy Go was to pick up (between google and godoc, basically everything was covered), and with the standard library. It’s definitely a useful tool in the box for “I need to write a small service that does something trivial”, a spot that used to be taken by Python or similar.

Other than that I’m mostly trying to care for myself and recover.

Thanks for asking about this, I have so many things to say about. I’m going to explain the methods I use, and then the tools I use to accomplish them. Please skip ahead to the last paragraph to learn about a GTD tool I’m working on.

The TL;DR: I make use of all of the following techniques in order of importance: Getting Things Done, The Checklist Manifesto, The Pomodoro Technique, Eat That Frog, and Chain Calendaring (or Seinfeld Calendaring), and a regular Calendar. Without giving details, I’m just going to say: when I am at my best, these systems keep me at my best. When I am at my worst (I often call it “the dark place”, non-suicidal, thank you for worrying about me), these systems keep me alive and enable me to get back to my best as quickly as my brain will allow.

Calendar every time I need to be somewhere that is not my house or office, it goes in my calendar. I assume I’m at the office 9-5, and home otherwise. Everything else goes in the calendar. If it doesn’t make it to my calendar, I absolutely will not do it, or even remember that I was supposed to until days or weeks later.

Chain Calendaring keeps me motivated to do things every day that my brain would tell me I can just do tomorrow. That’s nearly everything that would improve my life and make me a better person, really. Sometimes I break all of my chains when I’m in a dark place: starting my chains back up is one of the first things I do when I turn the corner.

Pomodoro (do focused work without distractions for a set period, and reward yourself with a break after) and Eat That Frog keep me doing the things that I don’t want to do. Basically anything and everything about my jobby job, especially in times of darkness, but only slightly.

Checklists ensure that I will not forget to do things because I’m tired, in a hurry, or otherwise just not entirely with it. For instance, I have a checklist for my morning bathroom routine that includes “squeegee the shower doors and floor” because when I’m in a hurry or tired or cranky I will skip it, and it builds up. I have checklists for everything. Before I had a “boxing gym kit list”, I forgot one thing every training night and I haven’t forgotten a single thing since I started following the list. (Yes, I tracked this retroactively by looking at my chat histories with both my wife and my boxing partner.)

GTD is the big one, and this is the one that keeps me sane. Or at least, lets me allow myself to slip into dark mode periodically. When I’m at my best, GTD means that I’m always doing the thing I should be doing when I should be doing it and forgetting nothing. When I’m at my worst, I go into limp mode, and every thought I have goes into my inbox for triaging when I’m not at my worst anymore. Sometimes after turning the corner, I have a thousand items in my inbox. Sometimes I have two months of unopened mail in my physical inbox. (Right now my digital inbox is hovering around 300 items, and I have three weeks of unopened mail, but I’m starting to turn the corner.) Getting the thoughts out of my brain and into an inbox means I can get through my dark times faster and without spiraling out of control because I know that when I’m ready to deal with it, those things will all be there and I won’t have forgotten anything.

Now, tools. I deliberately left this for the end because the methods are the things that keep me sane. The tools come and go, and I’m currently switching mine up anyhow, but I have good news on that. My calendar is synced to my devices via nextcloud, and I use native applications on all of my devices. For chain calendaring, I currently use a paper calendar and draw in different coloured sharpies. I use my phone’s timer for Pomodoro. My checklists nearly always go on index cards because they’re the most durable, and I put the checklist where it needs to be: one’s in my gym bag, one’s in the bathroom on the shelf, most are next to my chair.

But, I’m replacing all of those with custom tools I’m building myself on Nextcloud because that’s the world I want to live in.

For GTD I currently use Nirvana, and a physical inbox. I don’t like it, and I hate that it’s hosted and owned by someone else. So I’m making my own GTD system (and other tools) which are backed/synced via Nextcloud. My GTD app is called FocusFrog, and I hope to have the MVP finished some time before the summer is over. One of the things that it will prominently feature is an inbox aggregator, so you can give it API keys or credentials for GitHub, Trello, Jira, your IMAP server, etc, and get a single view of all of the many inboxes in your life. Because I lean on my systems for everything, if you make positive noises about FocusFrog here, you’ll get an individual item in my “Launch FocusFrog MVP” project that says “tell username on losters about FocusFrog MVP” with a link to your comment. Because that’s the only way I can function in life.