Vergelegen, an important node on my Rome Glen – Vergelegen – Lourensford – Land en Zeezicht route.
It’s Monday evening around 22:31.
The track “Still on Fire” by Trentemøller is making my neurons fire in highly pleasant patterns while I try to gaze back through time at the days from Monday October 22 to Sunday November 4, and to gather my thoughts.
I have come to a decision:
The rest of this blog will be less melodramatic. Instead, I shall focus my efforts on puns.
(You should still listen to the track.)
Productivity and Focus
Vitamin-R – tomatoes for apples!
As a quick search will tell you, we here at the WHV headquarters are big fans of mytomatoes.com, an online pomodoro timer that keeps track of your pomodori in a truly low friction fashion.
Bonus factoid: mytomatoes was built and is maintained by Magnar Sveen, who is revered, at least in my circles, as a young Emacs god. Take a gander at his jaw-dropping dexterity and raw nerd power. The one where he uses Emacs to calculate the number of hours his videos have wasted around the world is especially good.
I digress.
Some of us need a constant reminder that we’re trapped inside a tomato with absolutely no way to get out.
mytomatoes lives in a browser window, and can easily disappear under the thousands of distractions trying to snatch victory from your ambitious little hands.
No friends. Nothing less than a permanent reminder on the main OSX menubar will do!
I initially made a small misstep with Be Focused Pro. This does satisfy the requirement of displaying a timer in the menubar, but also tries, unfortunately quite badly, to be a task manager, and to connect each pomodoro to a task that you have to create. (As an orgmode user, I have infinitely high expectations of any task manager.)
I digress. Again.
After 30 minutes of searching, I fortunately landed on Vitamin-R (the new version 3) on October 29. Since then, it has helped me to churn successfully through an impressive number of pomodori.
Why I’m probably going to buy this after the evaluation period:
- Vitamin-R is exactly configurable enough. I could get it to work exactly like I wanted, without having to wade through an overly complex UI.
- I get to log what work I plan to do during each pomodoro, and I get to edit this afterwards, but it’s incredibly low friction, i.e. no task creation and so on.
- It has a number of simple but useful charts that help me to do better each day.
Multiple-desktops seem to have been detrimental to my focus.
Back in the early 90s, I started using multiple virtual desktops on my humble Linux 0.99pl13 computer. Because the year of the Linux Desktop was never really to be, we had to console (nerd pun, sorry) ourselves with obscure features like this.
Fast forward a few years, and Ctrl-Alt-SOMENUMBER is deeply ingrained into my muscle memory. 1 is work, 2 is more work, 3 is Emacs (all hail her greatness) and related admin tools, 4 is email and other communication, 5 is browsing and 6 is utility browsing.
This means that a single neuron misfiring leads to my number 5 finger (index) lashing upwards, like some sort of digital (Latin pun intended, work with me here people) cobra, with thumb and pinkie deftly dance-dance-revolutioning over to respectively alt and control, which switches me away from my work (usually 1 or 3) to browsing, all of this in about 3 milliseconds.
This visual shock routinely causes the rider on my mental elephant to keel over backwards and fall from the large pachyderm.
Hours of web-browsing ensue, during which my already extensive knowledge of useless trivia is expanded, but no to absolutely no work is done.
This stage is usually followed by the guilt, and the crying to sleep, and the renewed chasing of deadlines the next day.
In my feeble but eternal endeavour to increase my focus, I recently tried to mitigate the effects of these misfiring neurons by disabling multiple desktops.
Yes readers, like many of you have wisely been doing all along, I am now limited to a single desktop.
Desktop One: I can’t switch there, because I am already here, right now.
Before I started this experiment, I searched for any relevant scientific literature, but came up quite empty. It could be because it’s a complicated thing to measure. People are very different, and the computing they do is very different.
Whatever the case may be, my experience the past two weeks has been positive.
In spite of neurons misfiring and muscle memory invoking key combinations, I have been staring quite dutifully at Desktop One all this time.
Two other blog posts that you might find interesting I don’t know let me know in the comments or don’t.
Between this and the previous WHV, I wrote two other blog posts that I know of:
- Importing all of your orgmode notes into Apple Notes for mobile access – This used to be a huge weakness of my otherwise amazing orgmode-based note-taking: I could not access any of my Orgmode notes from my phone. In the end, all I needed to do was to use Orgmode’s built-in HTML site publishing function to get hundreds of org files, including images, math, source code and other wisdom, into my Apple Notes, ready to search and access on the phone.
- PyTorch 1.0 preview (Nov 4, 2018) packages with full CUDA 10 support for your Ubuntu 18.04 x86_64 systems – The title says it all. The backstory (not in that post) is that I now have a private RTX 2070 With TensorCores(tm) !!!1!! at my disposal, with which I plan to do my part in bringing about the AI-pocalypse. (Actually, I just want the AIs to take away all of our driving licenses. Humans are truly crappy drivers.)
GOU#2 discovers parts of Buddhism in the car on the way to school.
On Monday, October 23, as we were on our way to school, GOU#2, age 8, explained something she had come to realise.
It’s about really wanting that certain brilliant and clearly amazing toy.
You want it so much, but you have to wait so long for it.
When you finally do get it, you play with it for a while, but you soon realise that it’s really not making you as happy as you thought it would.
I listened carefully to her story.
As far as I could establish, it did sound like a general lesson she had extracted, that is, not just about that one specific dud toy.
I explained to her and GOU#1 that that was a core learning from Buddhism.
We humans desire things, and we go to great lengths to acquire them, and once we have them, we usually realise that the happiness they bring is fleeting at best.
If we are clever, we see this pattern, and so we stop desiring things, instead finding happiness wherever we are right now.
Me?
I’m on Desktop One.