Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Month: December 2023

  • Silently posting private mode content

    It’s pretty much consistently true that I can (and generally do) entertain myself on a daily basis without a lot of effort. A world of knowledge exists and people are churning out content at a pretty high rate. That is not entirely a good thing when I should be focused on research and writing. Right now I’m looking at my five year writing plan and thinking about just what needs to get done within that span. To that end, I renewed my Overleaf subscription and started working on drafting up some articles that I have pretty much researched, outlined, and left otherwise incomplete for years. 

    Today marks the first day in the new plan where I just moved all the content over to a private mode within WordPress. I’m still going to continue to blog on my own and just not share the content out widely with the world. This might seem like a strange plan of action to continue to write and make content and then just leave it hidden within the dustbin of weblog storage for posterity or really until somebody decomissings the server and the bits of content become nothing. That is probably just fine in the grand scheme of things. It’s entirely possible that I’ll flip the content back to visible at some point.

  • Thinking about buying a printer

    Yesterday, I jumped back into what was the wild wild west of blogging. After a couple decades of being an activity the world of blogging is really just a flood of small media outlets. Some eventually gained some attention and others did not. For the most part you have a lot of aggregators pulling links together and presenting them to people by algorithm. All those original sources of the links exist and those sites are up and running. Some of them have actual physical newspapers, magazines, or are purely digital forums. My words within this blog don’t really go anywhere. I have turned off most of the echo into social media. That entire effort is to just allow the possibility of writing out loud. I’m writing for an audience of consideration at the moment as these thoughts are written down. 

    Sitting down and spending a few minutes writing at the start of the day is something that I have done for years, but generally I have not just posted that content every day. That is an action that sort of stopped some time ago for a particular reason. A lot of my writing notes are a reflection of the moment and don’t really have an ongoing directional contribution to anything. It’s that lack of contribution to something beyond my general notion that writing should be additive overall instead of just adjacently observational. Yes, I could be writing more on a daily basis. No, you cannot really go back and recapture that writing time. Both of those things are going to be true and just writing about them (I’m aware I’m doing that now) won’t change the direction of the ship. Writing about the process of navigating a ship for days on end won’t make a directional change in the pathing. 

    You may have guessed from the post title today that I have been thinking about buying a printer. It’s probably not something that needs to be purchased. Over the last week I have spent some time considering color laser printers to print articles out and store them or something. I’ll admit that generally reading something that is printed out causes me to consider things a little bit differently. Some of the better papers that I want to keep for future reference are something that I want to print and annotate.

  • A weekly block of research and writing

    Each day when I wake up time could be devoted to writing. My knowledge, skills, and abilities need to be applied to something each day. I’m sitting at this crossroads where my attention is pulled between multiple things. It would be better to go all in on something. Bringing all my focus to one thing and really working on it would be a good path forward. It would be a clean and clear path forward. Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to go back to my three folder plan for publishing papers. That plan involves keeping three classic manilla folders with in progress academic papers. Based on the day and the time one of those folders would be the focus of the day and I would try to complete academic works to ultimately advance to the next paper. That conveyer belt of ideas is one way to keep moving things forward. 

    Over the last 3 years I have used an alternative format to that three folder strategy for writing academic papers. I moved to a plan where I keep 5 research notes in planning or review. Obviously, based on empirical evidence from that strategy it radically increased my writing output and ultimately my pace of learning. Within that set of heuristics it was a very successful pivot. Being all in on completing a weekly block of research and writing is probably not a path to an end state or an ultimate journey. For the most part it’s a clearly definable process that is both definable and repeatable. 

    Engaging in the process of daily writing and publishing a blog is really just about being reflective. For the most part, that type of writing has nothing to stand on or no basis for being recalled later for having value. It’s a reflection of what happened and as the written word it remains a form of art for what it is and what it will always end up being. That being said, it is probably better to spend time creating blocks of research notes or ultimately stacking those into articles, manuscripts, or other longer forms of written communication.

    Weblog update: After writing those last 3 paragraphs, I went into the settings for the weblog here and turned off the Newsletter option under Jetpack. That should reduce the sharing of this weblog content and ultimately allow it to exist as it does for the purpose of being a place to think out loud. I have two Substack newsletters that are written to exist outside the process of thinking out loud. They are structured content meant to be consumed in a different way.