Focusing inward on delivering requires a certain balance. My balance has been off recently. I got knocked off my feet and it impacted my ability to produce blocks of content for about a week. That type of thing does not normally happen to me. It was a new set of emotions and things to consider. Getting knocked down hard enough to pause for a moment and need to look around before moving again was a very new sensation. I’m not sure it was something that I was looking for or even prepared to experience. Really the only thing that put me back on the right track to success and deeper inward consideration (restored balance) was the passage of some time. It just took a little bit of time for me to internalize and move on to a new set of expectations. 

Each new day brings forward a set of time for creating blocks of content. My thoughts right now are around the consideration of making and maintaining 5 slots of building each day. To that end I have been sitting down on the whiteboard and writing down 5 good things to work on each day and trying to make sure they are attainable blocks to complete. At this time, I don’t want to put multi-slot blocks or all day blocks on the board for action and review. This is not the time for that type of stretching and personal growth by taking on highly complex activities. Right now is the time to make things clear, work on the clear things, and be stronger with that resolution every single day go forward. 

Maybe getting back to the absolute standard of sitting down at the very start of the day after drinking two shots of espresso and writing for a few minutes is the key to reframe my day. It is something that has been missing. It was missed. Perhaps it was missed more than I even realized at the time. I’ll admit to sitting down and watching about 4-5 seasons of the Showtime series Billions instead of actively writing and building. Alternatively, I could have been listing some graded sports cards on eBay and working to sell a few of them each day. Let’s zoom out for a second from those thoughts and consider what the next 30 days will uphold as a standard. 

One block of the daily 5 is going to be related to committing code on GitHub. I’m going to really focus my time and energy on making solid contributions to published code. Taking on that effort will help me be focused and committed to something that will become more and more necessary. Building code has changed a bit with the advent of LLMs, but the general thought exercise and logic remain pretty much the same. You might be able to take a wild run at something that was not attainable before and prompt your way to something magical. Generally you are going to go where logic can take you within the confines of the coding world as the framework is a lot more logical than it is purely chaotic in nature. 

5 good things for 9/15

1. Rework block 142
2. Commit something LangChain related in Colab
3. Work on https://www.coursera.org/learn/intro-to-healthcare/home/week/1
4. Review blocks 143-145
5. Start building voter data baseline package

Outside of those efforts generally as a part of my daily routine I’m producing a daily vlog via YouTube Shorts and striving to output a daily reflection functional journal blog post. I’m going to try to take some inline functional journal notes throughout the day as well. That is going to structurally end up with a sort of blog post being written at the start of the day and then a bunch of more inline bullets being created. Posting is still going to happen at the end of the day or potentially a day delayed. 

Delivering independent research is more important now than ever. I have spent some time thinking about the models of how that research is delivered and what value it has generally. 

Block 142 is pretty much ready to go. I’ll be able to record it tomorrow morning and stay on track to have a 4 block recorded backlog of content ready to go for my Substack. 

During the course of reviewing blocks 143 to 145 I considered if those are even the right topics to spend time working. They are probably fine elements of things to research. It’s not about producing timely content, but instead it is about making meaningful blocks of content that are not time sensitive. That of course is always a harder thing to accomplish while producing independent research.