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Thoughts on work and family

Work, or rather my job, has been taking up entirely too much of my mental power lately, and I am operating at my limit. My limit. I’m basically running myself ragged at this point. I’ve already been responsible for taking care of the kids from the time they wake up at seven in the morning till the time my wife gets off work at five o’clock, and managing my work responsibilities, and now I’ve got the added responsibility of overseeing an employee. I feel like I’ve got another child.

I’m not quite as overwhelmed as I have been in the past as I’m doing a lot better at limiting my workload, but it’s damn near impossible to take care of the girls and work at the same time during the day. I’m just going to start taking every other Friday off.

I had a pretty heated argument with my boss today about things. We’ve been together for eight years this winter, so like any married couple we’ve learned how to fight with each other. I basically abdicated responsibility for this employee several years ago after attempting on several occasions to manage him, but each time found him unable to follow my directions. I don’t know if I’ve become a better leader or if he’s become more focused, but I feel like we’ve turned a corner in the two weeks since he’s been reporting to me.

There are definitely more tools at my disposal this time. I’m basically using Microsoft Planner — a kanban board — to limit his work in progress, and have been micromanaging the shit out of him this entire time. I don’t trust his judgement. He’s been managing two separate business segments and has had absolutely zero accountability. And my boss wants to complain about him taking advantage of us, while it’s been his failure to hold him accountable that has gotten us to where we are now. The employee has been put on part time work, and we’ve brought in an HR representative to put him on notice. So yea, he’s focused now.

I think the real difference between this time and the last attempts I’ve made at managing this employee is that I’ve gotten Boss out of the way. We’re not giving conflicting, or changing priorities. If something goes on the board, it gets finished. Done. Done. Done. It seems like we’ve been operating in a state of constant anxiety, where everything is urgent and important, and today I actually felt somewhat relaxed in that I didn’t feel the need to follow up with this employee every two hours.

The things I’d found out, the way that Boss and this employee had been operating, frankly boggled my mind. So much of what had been allowed was completely unacceptable, and I’ve managed to turn things around pretty quickly.

My own projects however, have been put on hold, mainly from exhaustion, and the absence of the time needed for me to do the deep work needed to get things done.

The kids have compounded things this week as well. I’ve been forced to shift how I deal with their academics. I usually let them work on their school at the same time, either independently while I get stuff done or while taking turns. Since I’ve been using RemNote’s spaced repetition with them, I’ve had to be more hands on, so I’ve been letting one of them take a turn watching a show while I work with the other one. We haven’t been doing a lot lately, but I really need to sit down with both of them or they’ll get frustrated and complain that something is too hard. So sitting with them and working it out together seems to calm things down a bit and allow me to really work with them on something.

I think I may be helping Elder a bit too much with her math. I’ve been drilling her on vocabulary lately, but I’m not really happy with her math skills. She still counts a lot, even for basic things like 8-2, so I’m going to be adding some more flash cards to her routine. I even write a short program to generate the cards needed.

# Addition
x = range(1,10)
y = x 
for i in x:
  for j in y:
    print(i,"+",j,"::",i+j)

# Output
1 + 1 :: 2
1 + 2 :: 3
...
9 + 8 :: 17
9 + 9 :: 18

Changing this for subtraction and multiplication is trivial.

Beyond that though, she’s still flying through some of the questions on the Khan Academy tests, mixing up addition and subtraction, and I should probably let her make more wrong answers.

Still, I’m mostly happy with the way things have been going, even though there’s been some behavioral problems. I’m still being my usual hard-ass self, but they are being creative and playing, and most importantly, not watching a lot of TV.

Tomorrow though, I’m turning off my desk phone, closing my email and messaging apps, and I’m not checking anything until after lunch. I have got to get some project work done, and I want to take the kids to the beach.

The weekend starts early tomorrow.

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Vaccine coming or permanent pandemic? COVID Day 148

Vaccination

Early this year, as it became apparent that COVID-19 was going to cause a serious pandemic, I remember reading someone who proposed that people start keeping pandemic diaries. These type of first-person accounts would be important from a historical perspective, as they were useful for figuring out what had happened during the past pandemics like the Spanish Flu. I began taking it in all seriousness, and have published twenty-six entries so far, trying to detail my family’s experience.

Some of the first estimates that I read near the start of the lockdown said that we were looking at potentially eighteen months to two years of lockdowns and restrictions before either a vaccine was available for mass production or the disease mutated into a benign form. It’s hard to believe that we’re only five months in at this point. Other predictions about a second wave, worst that the first, have been accurate, but it will be some time before we see whether my initial napkin calculation of five hundred thousand dead will be close.

Several readings of psychology show that human mental outlooks seem to return to baseline six months following a life-changing event. Lottery winners and those suffering new para or quadriplegics lose the elation or despair that circumstances have brought them after half a year, and I myself have noticed how much has become normal that seemed absolutely stressful back in March. Life becomes normal. This has popped up in my readings of stoicism as the hedonic treadmill.

This normalization has been one of the worst things about the Trump era, but I’ll hold off on the political ranting for now. In general, people just became too stir-crazy to adhere to strict lockdown procedures for more than six weeks, and began sliding back to normalcy. We’re guilty of it ourselves. At one point, after raising my voice at the kids, I told Missus that we had to go let them play with their friends, or else we would have no choice but to send them to daycare. I’ve refused to consider sending them back, mainly for financial reasons, less so for the health risk. But aside from moving to an isolated area where they can roam free, there’s no way we can keep them locked away from everyone.

Our isolation pod that we previously formed with our neighbors seems to have become a bit more diffuse over the past few weeks. The girls can still play with their friends down the street, the T’s, but I’ve stopped being concerned about what they do with their time. The most we can do at this point is just wash our hands and wear a mask when we go out, and just stay away from large groups.

Adults I see out in the world without a mask are assumed to be either a sociopath or an idiot. I’m not sure which is worse, those that go without masks or those that leave them down under their nose while they wear them. It’s a stark contrast between going to Barnes and Nobles or Lowes, or heading into stores here in the city versus our trips out to the mountains.

Yesterday’s news said that Putin announced a Russian vaccine was available and that he and his daughter had both received it. Apparently the Chinese have one and have been giving it to their military and scientists working with the disease. There’s been some reports of pushback from the scientific community with regard to safety, but I’m still on the fence as to whether it’s just propaganda at this point. Still, there seemed to be a response from the financial markets, as this hope of normalcy returning caused gold and crypto to dip.

I’m not holding my breath of any resolution here in the US soon. Umair pointed out that Trump would do nothing to stem the virus while he was in office, and by the time Biden would be in place to put measures in effect it would be too late. COVID would be a permanent part of American life until a cure or treatment is found. As I’ve oft repeated from him, American passports are near useless now as most countries with stable COVID rates have banned US travelers.

Our main concern now is the upcoming school year. I’ve practically given up looking for a new job, given my belief that finding a better full-time job which will let me manage the kids will be nigh impossible. That may be my fear talking, or laziness, as most all of my day is taken up with managing the household. I spend most of my time working, reading or writing and taking after the kids. For now, we look for ways to compound our existing finances, mainly bitcoin, cut our expenses, and minimize our lifestyle. I hardly spend any money on myself, and am starting to save up some free cash for the first time since we bought the house.

Schools are going virtual for the first seven weeks or so, and we’ll have to see what that looks like for Elder. My main concern is that she’ll be tied up, leaving me with Younger, which may interfere with my job to the extent that I’ll have to place her back in daycare. I’d rather pull them both and homeschool them, to be honest, but I can’t seriously say whether that is more for my benefit of theirs. Probably mine.

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Evening pages

Today is international cat day, which is fitting given the fact that our family is now bigger by two young tabby cat brothers, Bodie and Utah. We picked them up yesterday evening and they are currently having the run of the master bedroom and bath while we acclimate to each other. Another day or so and we’ll let them start having the run of the rest of the house. They’re lovely, and very affectionate. Utah likes to nibble on fingers a bit too hard, but other than that they are very nice with the girls, although they are a bit mischievous.

I spent most of the day recovering from my party time last night. I eventually turned in at 2:30AM after drinking a sixer of El Guapo and a bit more, but the day was pretty chill and free of drama. I still managed to clean up, cook several meals, catch up on my reading, and practice piano. It’s dusk now, and I’m not sure I have a long writing session in me tonight. We’ll be putting the girls to bed soon, and I may read or watch some tutorials or training videos if Missus decides to turn in early.

My second batch of homebrew IPA was not ready yesterday as I had hoped. I failed to account for the fact that yeast can’t carbonate the bottles when they are in the fridge, so I’ve taken them out to sit at room temperature for another two weeks. In the meantime I got sucked up in the homebrew subculture a bit, starting with this customer review of a Mr. Beer refill that reads more like the diary of a mad scientist. I started wondering what the hell they were talking about, and eventually found myself fantasising over some of the five gallon kits over at Midwest Supplies. Missus will have my head if I make this my new hobby. (Ooh, they even have Kombucha kits!)

And in a bit of good news, I was checking my bank account and saw an eight hundred dollar transaction listed on a credit card that was associated with my main bank account. A credit card I’ve never used. I was a bit freaked out at first, then realized that I had accidently made a payment to it by mistake instead of my main card. I made a call to get the charge reversed, and now I’m back to the point where I’ve got all my bills ready to pay for the next month. It is quite the feeling of security.

So, no alcohol or video games for me tonight. I think I’m going to play around with Notion and see if I can make a net worth tracker. Integrating it with some APIs would be nice, but don’t think I can call scripts from within Notion. We shall see.

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TGIF

What a week. I’ve taken my work hat off for the week, at least as far as Zombie, LLC is concerned. There may be life left left. I’ve taken over responsibility for the service management of our federal contract and managed to turn the whole thing around in a week. It’s remarkable what I can get done when my boss isn’t getting in the way. Limiting our work in progress has helped tremendously. I’ve been able to keep our tech focused, and have worked out several kinks in our process that should streamline operations, including some major issues that shouldn’t have been tolerated in the first place.

And furthermore, I’ve managed to keep the kids focused as well. We seem to have come to an understanding about the relationship between their academic and other work and television. We haven’t had too many problems this week.

I’ve been shouldering a lot this week, man, have I ever. I’m looking forward to relaxing tonight, and getting this post out of the way is the last thing I told myself I’d do before I take a look and see how my second batch of homebrew has turned out.

In about an hour we’ll be heading out to get ready for the arrival of the newest members of our family. I’ll be heading to the pet store with the girls to grab a litter box and other supplies, and the Missus will be heading to the shelter to pick up the cats. Then it’s beer, video games, and the last two episodes of Dark before I call it a night.

Tomorrow, my focus is on the deck project, for which I’m about ready to order some lumber, and do some light house and yard work. The only other thing I want to do this weekend is finish my Substack and get that ready to publish on Monday. I’ll probably fill the rest of my free time with reading, and maybe plan a trip out with the kids to the beach or a pool somewhere.

Well there, it’s quarter after four. Close enough to five for me. Cheers.

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Evening pages

Today has been a whirlwind. Missus actually got up before me this morning, which never happens, and we had a little quiet time around the house before the girls got up. It was nice. I got an early work call which set the tone for the rest of the day. I’ve been busy all day, and have a couple minutes before dinner while the girls are out shopping for cat supplies.

Yes, I said “cat supplies”. We’ve been talking about getting one for some time, and have been looking at candidates from the local cat shelter for almost two months now. We went there yesterday and wound up adopting not one, but two cats. Utah and Bodie, yes, named after the characters from Point Break. And they’re polydactyls, one has six fingers on its front paws, and the other six on the back. So the girls are out right now buying litter boxes and toys, food in anticipation of them coming home with us tomorrow. The kids couldn’t be happier. Me? Meh. I’m more of a dog guy, but don’t want the responsibility of having one.

The girls spent most of the day play acting scenes from Moana all morning. We were watching the Broadway Junior version of it on YouTube yesterday, so they laid blankets out on the floor for the ocean, and stuffed pillows in their shirts to be like Maui. Elder found a basket she could fit on her back and was dancing around like a crab to Shiny. It was super cute, so I’m planning on them doing a performance for Missus and I later this week, if they can stop arguing long enough to figure out who is going to be who.

Work is really a blur. Between managing the helpdesk, onboarding a new telecom partner, and trying to manage our printer tech, I barely have time to deal with my own projects. I’ve got to migrate 11 users’ Apple IDs off of a domain so we can federate it with Apple Business Manager, and I’m trying to figure out how to design a build workflow for C++ ARM and DSP modules, not to mention handling all my other stuff. I was pissed during the day I think I yelled “that’s not my job” at my boss at one point on the phone today. Whew.

As far as side projects go, I’m not getting a lot done, that’s for sure. I did write up a contract template for my web hosting clients that I’m happy with, but I’m going to have to start cutting some costs if some people don’t pay up this month. Basecamp is going to have to go, and I’ve got several other smaller vendors that need to go, like my Adobe CC account that I’ve used once in the last six months.

Other than that, I’m looking forward to relaxing tomorrow with my latest batch of homebrew tomorrow. I ordered another refill and have been researching some bigger kits and working on upping my game as far as quality control goes. Missus will have a fit if I try to buy two hundred dollars worth of vats and supplies though. Maybe I can blame my mom for buying me a kit in the first place.

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Back in the saddle

I’ve been pretty good about my habits while we’ve been sheltering in place during this great lockdown. I meditate and write every day, but I’ve been breaking my streaks when we take these trips out of town. There’s no place like home, as they say, so I’m glad to be back in my comfort zone.

Journaling in RemNote before I start writing in the morning seems to be weeding out much of the minutia from these posts, and will probably make them more pertinent to others, although I don’t think anyone is reading this regularly. I haven’t paid much attention to traffic from it other than the number I see when I log into the dashboard. That’s fine for now. I need to finish writing my Substack newsletter, but the day has already slipped away from me.

The girls were very troublesome this morning, and after they left to go to their grandmothers I got sucked in to work management. I didn’t get much of what I wanted to get done. Mostly I was micromanaging one of my co-workers, who I’m now having to manage because he’s incapable of any critical thinking. It’s insane. And and I delved into the operations a bit more I figured out that my boss has made some pretty bone-headed decisions around how things are working between the two of them. It’s insane. My boss is focused on this subcontract work that we’re doing for another firm, supporting printers at local facilities. My co-worker, E., who is responsible for doing the work, doesn’t even have clearance to get on the facilities, so my boss has to meet him and take him. And I’m not even getting into the situation around the dispatching. My boss is all in the middle of it. It’s no wonder why we’re dying, he’s having to micromanage E. instead of hiring someone who can think for themselves so that he can work on growing our business. Totally insane.

On the bright side, I did have some fun today. I stopped at Barnes and Nobles over the weekend to pick up some rainy day games, and came across a copy of the Hamilton piano and vocal score. I was planning on picking up a copy on Amazon, but they were out of stock, so of course I went searching online and found a copy via Reddit. I started searching from there and found an archive of Broadway Junior songbooks. Broadway Junior are condensed versions of classic and Disney musicals, and I found a trove of the Disney piano and vocal books. For Frozen, I found the soundtracks and accompaniment tracks on YouTube, as well as a community theater that had put the actor scripts up online. I was showing the girls and we were singing along with them, and I think it’s going to be awesome. Elder has been telling me that she “hates” playing piano and that she just wants to sing, so this is perfect. She even asked me if we could recruit the neighborhood kids to put on a show. So cute.

I seriously spent way too much time thinking about this today, and I have a feeling I’m going to be spending way to much time with the kids, listening to these over and over.

Even for a Monday, I am really exhausted. We’re also preparing for a tropical storm hurricane Isaias to get here in a day or two. It looks like it’s making landfall, which is good for us cause I’m not worried about wind and rain so much as I am about storm surge. We should be fine, but I had to move all of our outdoor things into the shed and the garage, which was tiring. And I’m going to have to do some grocery shopping tomorrow, which is probably bad timing on my part. Well, at least we have plenty of frozen meat in the freezer, canned vegetables and rice in the pantry. Plus, my latest batch of homebrew will be ready next weekend, so I think we’ll be fine.

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Post-vacation debrief

We’re back from our out of town trip, the family is up in the den, the girls are watching Frozen 2 for the umpteenth time, Missus reading the paper. I’ve been up for an hour planning my day out. We’ve got a lot of work to do to unpack from our trip, plus we have tropical storm Isaias tracking our way, and is expected Tuesday, and today is supposed to be the last day of sunshine for the next five days or so. Since it’s the first weekend of the month I have some other financial stuff that I have to take care of, including balancing the house accounts. There’s a lot to be done.

Our trip was pretty good. We left early enough that I didn’t have to drive past my bedtime, and late enough that the girls slept on the way up. They woke up when we got there and we had a bit of trouble getting them back to bed.

Missus’s dad loves to cook huge amounts of bacon for breakfast when we go up there, so we always wind up pigging out. He cooked what must have been two pounds of it and it just sort of laid out all day until we ate it, piece by piece.

We neglected to check the weather before we went up there, which is pretty big fail considering that we were up there for a canoe trip. The weather was forecast for rain all day Friday, but we managed to sneak in a quick forty five minute trip in the afternoon when the precipitation let up. We thought we were going to be holed up for the whole trip, so earlier in the morning we had left the girls with Grandpa to go for ice cream, and Missus and I drove out to a bookstore to pick up some games and activities. I grabbed Exploding Kittens and Munchkin. Missus got Yatzee and some other things for the girls to do on the car ride home.

On Saturday the weather cleared up, so the four of us did a full seven mile stretch on the river, and made pretty good time, less than three hours. We had a picnic near the start, and even let the girls float behind us for a while at one point, which they really enjoyed until they caught some shallow rocks on their legs. After we got home, I took a nap while the girls watched a movie, then we packed and headed home. The girls fell asleep almost immediately, and we got home just before eight.

I listened to some good podcasts on the drives:

Eric Vishria – The Past, Present, and Future of SAAS Software [Invest Like the Best, EP.183] There’s some really good explanations of API and SAAS services in here that I’m going to be sharing with people in my professional network. It gave me a lot to think of, both as an investor, as someone who is looking to build a SaaS platform, and as someone who provide services to SMB clients and has to explain what all this API stuff is about. Basically, when a person consumes a service, they use the UI, when another application uses a service, it consumes the API. It’s about the shift from business using software, to businesses being encoded in software.

Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster (#448) – The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss There’s so much to take away from this one. Feld’s quarterly off-the-grid vacations and digital shabbats were right up my alley, and his discussion of his relationship with his wife, their monthly life dinners and the way they deal with conflict in their relationship were all very interesting. Feld talks about his struggles with depression and OCD, as well as finding a therapist. And he knows himself, very well, and this self-knowledge comes through brightly.

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Lack of proper planning

I’m writing this from my father in law’s mountain home, it’s almost eleven PM. I’m doing this out of sheer habit, trying to keep my writing streak going. I was just pulling up in bed with a Kindle book when a voice in my head said: BLOG POST. And so I am compelled to commit something to the ether.

This morning was rough, I was woken several times in the early morning by Younger as her and Missus played Musical Beds throughout the night. The kids were mostly well behaved while I worked, then I shuffled them outside for a few hours while we got ready for our trip. I drove straight through for almost three and a half hours, non stop, driving over a windy mountain highway in the dark rain while the girls snoozed soundly in car. We got here just before ten, and now the kids are too rested too sleep, poor Missus is in the bedroom next to me, telling them stories or otherwise trying to get them to fall back asleep.

We obviously miscalculated this trip. We initially planned to come up here for a canoe trip, but the weather report says that it’s going to thunderstorm all day. So I fear we’ve basically driven all the way here just to wind up watching TV all day tomorrow. We even forgot to bring our board game. We packed the car to the brim with suitcases, laptops, and bags of food and a cooler, which seems to be overkill for a simple two day trip. At least it’ll be a day off from work, and the kids can spend time with their grandfather.

Work was interesting. Almost eight years in and we’re still trying to figure out the basics of dispatching and managing our workflow. I’m putting the hammer down with one employee and created a Kanban board just to track their work. I was being super micro-managery today, calling him every two hours to check status. This is after years of giving up on him as unmanageable. I said “thanks for working with me through this, cause if this doesn’t work, then we aren’t going to work. You understand me?” They said yes, so I’m going to give it another week or two, or at least as long as it takes to find a replacement.

I also decided to start working through some AWS training with an eye toward a certification. I figure it will be helpful to me just to know more about how to manage my EC2 instances, and who knows what else it will lead to. I had a call with a young entrepreneur who was trying to create a startup around business process as a service, BPaaS, or as I call it, business process automation, and it went pretty well, so I figure having a handle on AWS will be an advantage. I’m not going to be able to settle between AWS and Azure right now, given so much of my world is in the Microsoft space. AWS has its advantages; it seems price is much cheaper for starters. Having another certification certainly won’t hurt though. On a slightly related note, this cloud native landscape chart is completely overwhelming.

I can feel the fatigue setting in, and should be turning in now. I’ve got a glass of IPA next to me that I’m going to finish while I read about stoicism or something, and spend tomorrow trying to find some tranquility in light of the situation with the weather.

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Fight mind-set

pair of pink boxing gloves

Not tolerating failure

It’s the end of the day here, the kids are asleep, and I’m sitting down to write now because I had a dentist appointment and it threw my morning routine off. The trip to the dentist was my first since COVID, and I bring Elder with me, so I was a bit anxious about what to expect. I shouldn’t have worried, since we’re dealing with medical professionals here, so everyone was wearing PPE and we didn’t run into any patients, except for one lady who quickly exited past us as we were walking out. She wasn’t wearing a mask, but I forgave it as I figured it was just a lapse since she was coming out of her cleaning or whatever. It was a black woman, about my age, although I wonder if I would have had the same reaction if it had been a white person.

The office was understaffed for a couple of reasons, so the dentist himself did my cleaning, tearing through it in record time. We talked for a bit about what was going on, and he admitted problems they’d had with PPE previously, and that they were unable to get the disinfectants that they usually used.

The kids were ok today. Elder and I continued our stalemate for most of the day. She wanted to ignore me and read a book, which was fine except for the extent that I had to keep an eye on Younger as a result. She decided to play with some slime on the back deck, and now the whole thing is stained with the residue of purple paint and glitter. If I wasn’t planning on ripping everything up in a few weeks and laying down new boards I would have been mad. Elder’s defiance continued until after lunch when she began to realize that she wasn’t going to get what she wanted, TV, until she spent sufficient time studying, and I managed to get her to do some math work. I even got her to do piano this evening as well.

A few days ago I printed up the following image from a metalearning post on Medium. Elder has this tendency to get frustrated at the things that I try to get her to do, saying things like “I can’t” or “I don’t know how” whenever she doesn’t want to do something, usually the dishes or some other academic point that I’m trying to make to her. We fought over it yesterday when I tried to get her to go over it with me, and she finally sat down with me this afternoon. Missus was in the room, giving me side eye for “trying to force freshman level psychology on our seven year-old”. Elder got it though. I asked her which side of the diagram that she thought she was, and she said, “I’m this side (growth) for my teachers and mommy, and the other for you.” That kid.

Overall, it was a good day. I managed to keep the kids from tearing each other apart by interjecting at even the hint of conflict, and Missus was more available to take over during the day instead of locked away in the office like she’s been more recently. We spent some time preparing for our getaway to the mountains Thursday evening, I did some yard work and the girls got their bags packed. We’ll be spending a couple days away, going canoeing, and maybe a hike.

Work was OK. I finished a small job for a Zombie, LLC partner outside the Denver area, which is nice because having contacts out there would be great in case we ever want to leave where we’re at. The owner is an old software development guy, more upper management than coder, based on what he told me, but it was nice to show off what I knew. In this case it was just a simple, single server Active Directory setup, but I did most of the prep yesterday building a Desired State Configuration in Azure. I just ran the script and was done in an hour and a half.

Today was also a bit amazing cause Boss actually agreed with me and seems to have decided to finally dump our problem employee, E., after what seems like three years after I first said that he has to go. Boss asked me to manage a couple projects, and I did my best to do so for the past two weeks, but E just refuses to check in with me, which forces Boss to get involved managing him. I told Boss this was the same pattern of behavior that we had fallen into several times before. If I’m going to manage someone, then I have to manage them, not him. And the time that Boss spends managing someone is lost time. Boss is our bottleneck. I think today he finally realized the E. is going to lose us a lucrative contract, so he told me I was right and that he was going to contact a potential new hire. Thank goodness, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

I’ve been continuing with RemNote today, just getting into the habit of recording some of the things I read, trying to get into the habit and figure out how to use it. I also spent some time looking at videos for Notion, and I’m leaning more toward cancelling my Basecamp subscription. I think the only thing I’ll actually miss is the communications features, since I like having that record instead of relying on text messages. For now I’m just using it for work related documents, while I give RemNote a proper chance, but Notion does so much more I think it will wind up cutting out several other apps I’m using, such as Google Drive. It reminds me a lot of Airtable, the way Notion’s spreadsheets resemble databases. Even the font’s look the same, so I’m fairly confident that there’s some sort of relationship there, even though I can’t confirm it.

Since I’ve been working on this tonight, I think I’m going to take a break from working on Substack and pull a couple other cards out of the kanban that I can knock out. Tomorrow night I’ll be on the road, so I’m going to really have to make an effort to get my posts in while we’re out of town.

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Personal Knowledge Management tools

Experimenting with digital brain software

It looks like I have a bit of a new obsession this week: the digital brain. Note taking apps like OneNote and Evernote have been popular for some time, but the latest generation of apps have added backlink features, a sort of hypertext link between notes, creating nodes and graphs between individual items in the list. I was first introduced to Roam Research through Yak Collective, but found the fifteen dollar a month price tag a barrier at this point. There are a number of competitors out there, including Obsidian, Notion, and RemNote, which all have slightly different features and use cases. None of them are strictly productivity apps in the way that OneNote/Evernote are, but are geared more toward creative work than task management.

Reading through a Reddit post on RoamResearch alternatives is quite disorienting, as there are a number of alternatives out there, and I felt a bit lost. Obsidian seems to be one off the best offerings out there, and I had made a half-hearted attempt to use it a few weeks ago. It doesn’t support blocks as linkable objects, which seems to be a requirement for a good Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system. Obsidian does have nice Markdown features. Data is stored locally, which can be a plus or a minus, depending on your needs. I took a quick look at Notable, which seems like a slimmed down version of Obsidian, but only took a cursory look at it while I was watching a YouTube video on the others.

I’m now moving forward with RemNote. It’s geared toward students, and the spaced repetition features are interesting to me as someone who’s used Anki in the past. I’m not sure that it’s the best to use for straight up writing and editing like RoamResearch is pitched as, but I’m going to give it a shot for a few days and see how things work. I may also take a look at Notion, since it seems like it has some interesting features and may be more suitable for some of the work and personal projects that I have been working on. I don’t see dropping Trello’s Kanban boards for it yet, but it may be nice to save that hundred dollars a month on Basecamp if my consulting work doesn’t take off from here.

I hate getting caught up in all these tools, spending more time experimenting with different platforms. In a way, it’s a distraction from actual work, but on the other hand, it can be viewed as sharpening an axe before taking the first swing at a tree. Trying to find a mix of physical and electronic tools that works well together is a challenge. My Kanban wall of Post-Its in the dining room went completely untouched yesterday, and I’m tempted to tear them all down right now and start over in Trello or somewhere, but having something physically present, and prevalent in the room seems important, and is something that I don’t want to do away with just yet.

The Zettelkasten system kept coming up in my searches yesterday. The word literally means “a box of notes” and was used by a prolific sociology researcher, Nikolas Luhmann, who wrote some seventy books and published over four hundred papers during his career. He attributed his success to his Zettelkasten system.

I’m hoping that a mix of one of these note taking systems can help me organize my thoughts, and that Kanban can help me prioritize my personal, professional, and familial projects. I’m going to give RemNote a shot for a couple days, maybe play around with Notion for work. And maybe, just maybe, do something about these Post-It notes.