Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Category: Backlog management

  • So many writing thoughts

    My thoughts are at a crossroads at the moment. I’m trying to figure out exactly what to focus on at the moment. Normally, my Saturday morning writing schedule involves writing the next edition of the Lindahl Letter weekly publication. My backlog file has 146 items in at the moment. I should probably spend some time working on that backlog list and both pruning and sorting it based on what research notes still deserve attention. The other thing I need to spend some time working on today is a review of my 5 year writing plan. That however begets more and more writing about the process of writing and sorting, planning and review, or potentially backlog pruning. None of those things are extremely exciting or dynamic in terms of being presentable. Maybe that is ok sometimes, but being the primary element it is probably not that acceptable.  

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  • A backlog without any order

    A lot of news stories are picking up the news about Platformer moving off of Substack this weekend. I’m still looking at Ghost and trying to figure out if I just need to watch a couple videos about getting started on that platform. I’ll be really curious to see what happens here in the next 90 days. Yesterday, I shared my 3 year recap of publishing on Substack as both a podcast and a post. Right now I’m looking at the backlog and trying to figure out what order I want to set for the next few posts. I committed to writing my 2024 predictions post, but outside of that I just have over 100 topics in a backlog that are not really in any particular order. 

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  • The subscription system is now running

    Yesterday, I was able to complete my first subscription based post here on the old weblog. It took me a few minutes to learn how to insert the first paywall blocker widget. I’m not ready to engage in the active process of daily writing and publishing within the weblog. I’ll make sure the opening paragraph is always ready to be visible and that the rest goes a bit deeper after the paywall. It’s a strange thing to consider, but I figure that this could be interesting if the newsletter had to move over to the weblog. Right now it looks like Substack might be making some changes and could keep existing throughout 2024. A lot of turbulence has occurred and that makes me wonder if people might jump to some alternative if one presents itself. Now would be the time for a great online writer migration. 

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  • 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 reflective Saturday

    Right now we are sitting at a recorded and processed backlog level of 3 weeks on the Substack. That 3 weeks of backlog is scheduled to run until Friday, September 15, 2023. Based on my normal routine for the weekend I should be recording week 139 right now during my Saturday morning. This morning The WAN Show was back (no comment) and I have the content ready to record for block 139. Instead of picking up the Marantz professional sound shield live vocal reflection filter from under my desk and starting to record on my Yeti X from Blue microphone I took a step back. Blocks 139, 140, 141, and 142 are actually written and ready to record, but they could be better. This morning I’m going to read all 4 of those blocks and give them a round of editing and expansion. That will be a part of the reworking content process that is important.

    Recently, I have been way more likely to push the entire backlog back a few weeks and drop in new topics. That is in part a function of not wanting to put a new topic so far out in planning and review. Having a new topic that grabs my interest be shelved for over a year while the backlog is consumed in front of it just seems wrong. Right now that backlog goes out until block 226 which is really a problem for future Nels. Sometimes you have to be willing to mix things up and change up the backlog. It’s a healthy part of the agile process. I’m even going to create a new category for posts that is going to be about backlog management.

    Throughout the next week I’ll be working with LangChain and building some Colab notebooks related to using and understanding all the use cases currently in that space. I’m going to spend time every day working on a single block of content within the backlog as well. That should end up yielding some good content building and a lot of focus on getting things done. For the most part the process of recording the audio, video, or other elements is distinctly separate from the writing process and is normally a part of my weekend routine.