On moving your life forward
From Art of Manliness: Stop Living Life “Paycheck to Paycheck”:
When you metaphorically live life “paycheck to paycheck,” you do just enough each week to maintain your current existence. You take care of the urgent and outstanding tasks the neglect of which would disrupt the status quo, but you never take action on things that would improve and progress your situation.
Even with Taskwarrior to help me tackle my TODO list, I feel the pain of living “paycheck to paycheck”:
I have the numbers to show that I’m getting lots done. Somehow I feel like I’m treading water. There’s always more. Both the great ideas and the big goals grow stale as I address the urgent issues that must be done now.
What is the recommendation to get out of that loop?
All it takes is completing one single to-do — one single task that moves your life forward, even slightly — each week.
Okay, I can do that. Well, sort of. I’m still trying to build some kind of idea what “forward” means for me. However, I can make a point of completing one task a week that’s been pushed aside by the high-priority, immediately-due attention grabbers at the top of task next.
Activity Log
hackers.town: 2019-10-30 Wed 06:41
I have one of those sunriser alarms. Especially as days get shorter here in Seattle, the gradually increasing light is a nice gentle brain prompt that wakeup time is soon even though it’s still dark outside. It starts with a low soft light, Loud Dog immediately begins whining at you to feed her, and the light gradually warms up until the alarm goes off after twenty minutes.
But you of course have been out of bed for 19 minutes already because of the dog.
The sunriser alarm was fantastic, until my cohabitants included early rising pups.
hackers.town: 2019-10-30 Wed 07:17
Brain’s wired tighter than a guitar string today, so having a cup of kava tea for stress.
Next to my morning coffee.
Which, yeah. I know. But I can only do so much.
Twitter: 2019-10-30 Wed 16:03
I’ve been clicking and reading links to Deadspin for I don’t know how long
TIL they’re supposed to be a sports site or something?
https://twitter.com/thedailybeast/status/1188897954284949507
hackers.town: 2019-10-30 Wed 17:12
Once again the brain hasn’t started when I was hoping it would and I’m just gonna roll with it because I have tasks due.
(which is to say it started now-ish when I was hoping for a few hours ago but hey at least it started)
Twitter: 2019-10-30 Wed 19:04
The dip in advertising revenue from whatever doesn’t find loopholes in the ban will likely be made up for by requiring greater rates on remaining ads thanks to increased “engagement” by wage trolls.
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1189634360472829952
hackers.town: 2019-10-30 Wed 21:25
just over here trying to use tmux commands while app focus is on the browser don’t mind me
hackers.town: 2019-10-30 Wed 23:19
sure mypy is nice but Go scolds me right away when that’s the sort of thing i want
hackers.town: 2019-10-30 Wed 23:53
Maybe it’s because I have a history using programming languages with – uh – “quirky” syntax, but I’m more and more of the opinion that a language’s syntax is far less important than its tooling (and community).