Manic Monday

Transcript:

Okay, this is kind of a random Monday thing, but I went through a whole bunch of brainstorming and thinking with Claude. Yeah, okay, fine — I’m going up against an AI. But there are still my own thoughts in there.

There was so much that I was worried about forgetting everything. So one thing I came up with was some touchpoints to do on a daily basis, to help me go with a certain system for tackling my backlog. The normal issue is that I make a system, but then like three days later, give up on it because I’m tired and don’t want to do it anymore.

The idea being — and I plan on printing this and posting it somewhere — first I’m going to check in with my own energy. If I don’t have energy, don’t bother doing anything. Come back to it tomorrow. If that doesn’t work, come back to it tomorrow. Eventually you’ll get there. So there’s no pressure.

After that, we pick one thing to work on. Don’t have to finish it, but the goal is to get it to a 70% finish — meaning I’m done with it as far as what I want to do, or as far as it’s interesting to me, or I’ve just hit the point where I don’t want to do any more work. And I should ship it at that point.

On that subject, I need to make a portfolio website — by which I mean a very simple blog where I post things in the most frictionless way possible. I only want to do things as quickly as possible and get out of the way. For each project I ship, it’s one more thing off my backlog. More freedom for me, et cetera.

And as I mentioned, I don’t have to finish it. I’m going for 70%, but I don’t have to get there right then and there. The point is, most of these projects — if I’m not quote-unquote done with them — are fun things, interesting things. Something I want to delve into or even share, like these logs. So that shouldn’t be a problem. It’s like, okay, let’s get into it. Oh, this is kind of cool, et cetera.

The why of the whole thing: I think it would be really cool to share some of these ideas and thoughts with the world. There’s this thing where I delve deep into thought, but it never really surfaces for anyone to see. So I thought sharing it would be worthwhile. It’d be nice to get some feedback — and yes, there will be negative feedback — but some people will go, “Hey, that’s pretty cool. I like hearing about your stuff,” or “Here’s some other stuff you can think about.” Et cetera.

Funnily enough, this whole thing popped up from me pinging Claude about personalities — being a Virgo, being a Wood Rabbit, being an ISTP. I had some Big Five results that I posted to it, and a whole bunch of things came out. I do have a strong perfectionism streak. The funny thing is I’ve given up on making everything perfect all the time — but I still see the path to perfection. I try to get things closer to it, but I’m okay with not doing it myself. I can definitely see when something isn’t perfect.

I also worked on organizing the ISTP audio logs. It was originally a slideshow presentation — “ISDPs Getting the Most Out of Life” — but I didn’t want to go through all that; I hit the end of that road. So that’s where these audio logs come in. I’m going to talk about those topics later, at least that’s the plan.

Claude helped me put together the presentation, and at some point I said, okay, I need to turn this into podcasts or whatever. So let’s reorganize them by topic — and that’s what we did.

I also took some steps forward in applying for jobs in quality assurance and tech support. I had Claude redo my resume and put together some cover letters. The resumes are okay now. Cover letters need some attention, and unfortunately they have fill-in-the-blank sections for each job — which, oh boy, is right against my nature. But oh well, I’ll let it go.

Yesterday I came up with some low-stakes tournament thoughts and ideas and emailed myself a copy. There’s quite a bit there. I really need to reread them before and after each tournament — before to remind myself, after to check whether any of those things came up. It’s actually a little similar to Benjamin Franklin’s journal, where he’d focus on one virtue at a time, trying to perfect it over the course of a week or month, marking it each time it came up.

There were so many things going on, and I thought, okay, I’m never going to remember any of this. So I made a file in Drive called “Master Plan,” which has those touchpoints I talked about earlier. At the end it says: when the system feels heavy — meaning when I’m about to say “ditch this, I don’t want to do it anymore” — I don’t owe the system anything. The inbox is going to sit there whether I touch it or not. Doing one task whenever I’m ready is better than ditching the entire system.

In other words: tomorrow, I check in. I don’t have to do anything. Come back the next day, ask the same question. Come back the next day, ask the same question. Just asking the question is enough. And these are still things I want to do, so that’s also not bad.

Since it’s all based on my own free will, the only “control” is a check-in — just a ping: hey, do you want to do some project work? I could say no from now to eternity. But now that I have a mindset where there’s a way to get these projects out of my backlog — at least done to the point where I’m done working, done being interested — I can release it and say, “Here’s what I have.” I can even add a postmortem: “I know what the rest of this looks like. Here’s the plan. But I’m not going to do any of it because it’s against my personality.”

“Oh, come on, you’re just lazy.” No, actually. I’ve been at this for years trying to do these things. I just don’t care enough to do it. So rather than hitting my head against that wall more — which I’ve been doing for years — I’m now working around it. Working with it. Okay, let’s take this wall and make it into a house.

That’s more or less everything I went through today. I wanted to capture it and some of my enthusiasm, as it were. We’ll see what happens the next day — or roughly Thursday, when I tend to lose interest in things.

There’s a dog barking. How nice. Fortunately it only lasts about ten minutes, three times a day — no big deal.

Anyway, that should do it. Hopefully I’ll release this soon, along with a lot of other stuff. Thank you.