Author: graham

Thinking about experimenting with daynotes a bit; Context: This blog originally started out as a way of posting weekly notes, back when I was gainfully employed as a developer-up-to-team-lead. It was a way to personally reflect on the challenges of the job, and a lot of the thoughts were me trying to figure stuff out as I went along, in a more open way.

Right now, I’m in a slightly different position – in some ways the work is still largely the same under the hood: make code run, talk to people, keep things progressing – but there’s also an opportunity to do something different. One of the main ideas, after all, of going freelance was to do my own thing, so it makes sense to apply the same mindset to the facets and side-effects that go along with that, like this blog.

From a legacy perspective, I keep finding myself wanting to take notes about the practical work I’ve done. I think that can be harder to do less interesting for me when the work is technical – although there can still be merit in writing up a particularly tricky challenge.

Instead, I’ll try making these notes a bit more about mindset and freelancing life in general, than about specific projects. This, like the job before it, is the current "life puzzle" I’m going through I guess – and perhaps these are also things that are more shared in common with others?

With that in mind…

Since last time:

• Wednesday: Woke up absolutely exhausted. The wife suggested taking a day off to recover which was a very sensible suggestion. Been through enough exhaustion to start becoming something of a tiredness connoisseur and knew that it was mainly social and mental exhaustion: I do like interacting with people, and can jump between things quickly, but it gets very tiring after about 2 weeks without a break. I packed some snacks in a bag, caught a bus out of town, and walked down to the sea. After clearing out 100 or so emails from my phone, I walked back over the hills into town, grabbed a bite to eat, and read for an hour.

• Thursday was slightly choppy as I was working from Brighton, but also needed to head home early to watch the kids while my wife popped out. I’m finding a small amount of time planning to work well though, and have made some decent progress on an ongoing project. For me, I’m noticing that a sense of satisfaction comes from the mixture of spending time on something, and achieving realistic milestones, as well as knowing where I’m at in the project.

• It was good to catch up with people again, including TC and a satisfying badminton session.

• I’m continuing to clear Things out. I feel like I need to undo a large amount of the stuff (physical and digital) that I’ve been acquiring over the last 20+ years.

Next steps:

• I want to carry on a few of the mental trends I’ve been following above, namely 1) relaxing into things, not necessarily to do less, but to do things more elegantly (which often equates to "Better", whatever that means), and 2) spending more time clearing things out. I’ve not read the book, but the
  title "Stuffocation" is a great one which I’m coming back to.

Hey, you know what? Maybe that’s it for now. I could do a braindump of the 101 things I’d like to do, but that’s 2 really important things I’ve listed, so why not stop there? Relax and aim for elegance. Less is more. Or, to come back to one of my favourite sayings, "Simplify, then add lightness".

Perhaps there’s something about how to stop myself not doing that. But then again, maybe writing this out in the open is just the first step to being more aware of it (typing slows down as I feel myself absorbing the reflections).

Since last time:

• a thousand things, an infinity of moments
• turned a year older, just like every day
• slept badly, either I’m too warm or too tired
• some good conversations with people I’ve never met
• a cafe full of cats
• cobwebs cleared from the summerhouse / second shed, evicted like a brutal landlord. two spiders were particularly well-sized, I hope they’re ok still
• some larger household items removed, finally

Maintenance done:

• photos stream pushed through from phone to laptop via syncthing, and older photos moved to external drive

Maintenance needed:

• hazel, the music server, seems to have broken
• battery still fu’d on my macbook, but I’m putting off getting quotes for a fix
• emails getting ridiculous

In the radar:

• lots of small actions required to keep things sensible
• trying to stick to my new, more rigidly proscribed time block regime
• finding time to stop, can it be done? Is it useful?
• robins and an intense flutter of magpie wings

Must be busy, as I’ve not been writing day notes. Today is sunny, and there are two mini chainsaws yelling outside of the front door. The heron at the pond matched the shape of a tree, and the paths are overgrown with nettles and cow parsley. I suspect this is a metaphor for something.

Since last time:

• Finished looking into GoGoCarto – it’s a nice tool, but may not do quite what is needed. "What is needed" is then the question.

• Doing more work in spreadsheets to organise my understanding of different projects and how they work. Something about 2D working seems to fit code documentation nicely a lot of the time, as if copying-and-pasting and flexible functionality are inherently non-linear.

• Attended a welcome event run by Arts Council England as our charity is now a National Portfolio Organisation, along with all the governance and reporting that goes along with it. Secretly excited by the challenge of overview and data here, although now working out how to make a bit more time for it.

• Eurovision happened, and I still can’t get Finland’s song ‘Cha Cha Cha’ out of my head.

Coming up:

• I’m thinking about a way to order my time better, as I still feel like I’m jumping haphazardly between things a bit too much. I think I might try blocks of 2-3 days for a project at a time – enough to get into some solid work, but that allows a bit of flexibility over a 2 week period.

• I also want to start building in deliberate breaks, what some might call "mindfulness" breaks, but for me, at least, it’s about giving myself the opportunity to step away from responsibilities for a moment. Mid-life seems full of these things, and TBH I’ve been jumping from one set of responsibilities to another for years now: Feeling responsible for my own path, for client deliveries, for parenting and family, and for company Boards, and it can be quite tiring a lot of the time. Ten minute breaks to stop thinking, even just once or twice a day, may go a long way.

• Thinking about both of these in terms of mini-metrics – I have a large spreadsheet for planning and timelogging, and it would seem to make sense to add it in to that somehow.

Nope, brain not keeping track of day of the week currently. That’s ok though, the sun is out and things are happening.

Since last time (2 days):

• Been assessing and writing up my state-of-play on a longer term project, in which a lot of under-the-hood refactoring work has been done alongside large amounts of codebase orientation. It was feeling … "messy" in my brain, so I took some time to summarise the key changes in infrastructure I’ve been working on, including why I needed to work on them. Coding can get like that a lot – you need to factor in and schedule time to see the wood again, and reassert why you’re where you’re at. It also means I have more clarity and transparency around communications with the client, which is hugely important on a project like this.

• I deployed a bit of work I’ve been looking at over the last couple of weeks. While I’m happy to take the end users through what’s been set up, there’s always the chance that a) they’ll forget how it works, b) I’ll forget how it works, and/or c) other people may be brought in to edit the content involved. So I spent a little extra time writing the steps up into a document, including screenshots.

• Both of the above have been good tasks to do alongside a slightly fragmented day involving bank meetings, shopping, and school pick-ups. Consolidate understanding. Set out plans. These things will stand you in good stead in a busy, choppy world.

• I also had a good day delving into code properly, really understanding (or not) some of the flow of WordPress hooks.

• I watched Eurovision semi-final 1 on Tuesday with son 1.

Today is rapidly hurtling towards tools-down time, but has been mostly:

• Trying out GoGoCarto open source mapping tool for a client. Chance to practice reading French a bit, as well as installing a translation plug-in. Docker install went very well and I’ve had some good initial success importing data and configuring the tool locally.

• Trying out a gitlab-to-Digital Ocean docker deployment for the first time, but just hit an error message.

• Last night I got MOP3, a Mastodon-to-POP3 bridge, set up, and accessing/posting Mastodon via a new Thunderbird account has been oddly soothing.

In terms of progress – well, see above really.

Also been thinking about this Progress section. Separate post needed, but I think there is merit in "micro-metrics", in the sense that boats might record a fairly simple set of data in their logbook (I assume – compared to today’s modern data capture, at least). Personal progress metrics for a week, lightweight and relevant. Yeah, something there…