Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Tag: Focus

  • Engaging focus and creativity

    At some point this morning, I’m going to work on setting up subscription options for the weblog here. It’s possible at some point (that is rapidly approaching) a lot of people are going to be leaving Substack. I’m 3 years into weekly publishing on Substack with The Lindahl Letter. Separating the weblog into a managed stack of newsletter technology made total sense at the time. We will see how that one plays out probably within the next 30 days. To that end I am going to start getting some things ready just in case [1]. 

    We are three days into my latest plan to engage in the act of writing daily in a weblog format. It was a wonderful plan to think deeply about what to do and what to create each day. I’m not directly writing out a stack of 5 big things to work on each day. That list is getting made, but I’m not directly working to blog about it. Instead I’m trying to warm up my writing processes and get things ready to go at the start of the day. That might sound like a productivity hack, but it is something a little bit different. I’m trying to zoom out a little bit and allow my focus and creativity to engage on bigger concepts. 

    For the most part I’m considering 2024 to be the great year of code writing. At the end of the year in 2023, I started sharing out more code efforts on GitHub and that will continue moving forward. This upcoming week I’m going to spend some time doing a bit of a code walk on a few Google Colab notebooks. That should be a fun thing to work on this week. It’s entirely possible that videos also get created for a desk tour and my current guitar pedalboard setup. My video output is going to increase. Everything is all set up for recording. Having things set up does not guarantee that video recording will occur, but the right things are in place for that to happen. 

    Footnotes:
    [1] https://wordpress.com/support/paid-newsletters/

  • A really big Monday for focus

    October has arrived. I’m not sure why that is a milestone that matters, but sure enough it seems like it got celebrated a bit. Last night I watched the entire Chiefs vs. Jets game via the power of OTA broadcast. I stayed up well past my bedtime to watch the game. The game became closer throughout and stayed that way until the very end. It was a little anticlimactic to watch Mahomes slide to victory, but it was an example of good clock management. 

    Last week I converted a bunch of posts from the weblog to private. I’m sitting at 156 published and 2,237 private. Right now 4 posts are staged up from the Substack content on the weblog. I did go back and make sure all the Substack content stayed open, but a lot of just random notes have been dropped into private mode. No real way exists for somebody to subscribe to the private content. 

    Five big things for 10/2/2023:

    1. Right now I have 18,150 Salesforce Trailhead points. I need to earn 6 more badges and 16,850 more points to reach Expeditioner rank. Today I’m going to complete a Salesforce badge or at least a few modules https://www.salesforce.com/trailblazer/nlindahl 
    2. Work on a chapter of the Feedback book
    3. Learn more about the Google Cybersecurity Certificate [1]
    4. Sketch out block 145 of The Lindahl Letter
    5. Complete and package the week 40 survey

    I’m going to admit that some of the Salesforce Trailhead content I prefered to read on my phone. It’s possible that I don’t really like to read across very large spans on my monitor. 

    Footnotes:

    [1] https://grow.google/certificates/cybersecurity/#?modal_active=none 

  • It’s ok, you can just stop using search engines

    Just type in the website you want to go visit. Are you in need of some news? Just go to your favorite news website and read whatever that proprietor is sharing as the latest news. I’m not talking about drifting over into the world of private search. I’m just saying you can probably live without using a search engine to help you move along with your day to day tasking, projects, and or adventures. Maybe you moved to a new place or something came up where you absolutely have to use a search engine to help move things along. Sure, I get that one off or specific need, but for the most part generally speaking it’s ok you can just stop using search engineers in your day to day life. Nobody ever puts a search engine on their everyday carry list of things you need. Maybe just skip that next random search for something.

  • Some things that just keep moving along

    Earlier this week, I went ahead and purged out all the inactive emails from The Lindahl Letter. It was actually a strangely liberating moment of bulk deletion. It’s still a little weird that WordPress is not able to just send over posts right to Twitter anymore. I’m assuming somebody will work out a plugin for that type of thing. At the moment, my solution remains that after publishing I’ll just go to the post and click the share to Twitter option. I’m not entirely sure why doing that is worth the time it takes, but it is another one of those oddly rewarding types of things that will probably keep happening. 

    I did watch the entire Succession series on Max (formerly HBO Max). It really was not a very long series, but it was interesting. It did make me consider buying a tablet, but it was not enough to actually push me over into making a purchase. I have a smartphone, chromebook, and desktop computer. That should be enough computing power to get things done. The majority of the work I’m doing these days is happening at my workstation with the stacked dual monitors. Working out of my office just makes sense when prolonged concentration is required.

    A few times since the launch I have put the Google Pixel Fold in my shopping cart and then given up on making the purchase. Folding phones which would sort of end up being half way between a tablet and a smartphone always seem like a good idea in theory, but the thought of the crease line is enough to stop me from making the purchase.

  • My routine is set up to produce 52 blocks of content per year

    Currently, my routine is set up to produce 52 blocks of content per year. Each week one block of content is getting generated. Within that cycle I have time devoted to writing on the weekend. Both Saturday and Sunday morning I wake up early and focus for several hours without interruption. We are in the third year of this 52 block creation format. The previous two years were moved into a manuscript format and packaged as books. Each of the blocks is shared out as a Substack post along the way. All of that is geared toward my efforts to learn, understand, and explain complex topics. That is the routine that I have setup and am implementing as part of both my daily writing plan and the research trajectory I have set up for myself. All that rolls up into my five year writing plan and I have been successful in adhering to the plan. 

    This pattern of production works for me and I’m ok with sustaining it. One of the things I need to really focus on doing is converting some of the blocks into research notes, literature reviews, and the seeds of academic papers. Last year I built a solid literature review in Overleaf and was able to share it out. Pretty much every part of that effort was rewarding. It was good research and the effort put into that made sense. This year we have moved from post 105 to where I am currently working on post 124. That pretty much means that 19 blocks of the 52 for this year have been expended. All of that effort did not yield another publication shifted over to Overleaf for extended sharing. At the moment, I’m deeply considering what that means to have spent the time and effort on that writing effort, but not have turned the corner from building blocks of content to creating publications. 

    All that being said, I’m trying to figure out how to take my remaining backlog for the rest of the year and either mix and match blocks to build something or change out some of the remaining blocks for the year to help support the mission of creating better literature reviews. I know that the best possible plan is to probably just sit down and write down the top 5 literature reviews toward the bleeding edge of technology I would like to read and then just produce the ones that do not exist. Working on things within that process is probably the right way to move things forward. Getting to a posture where my routine is generating the output I want over time is really the outcome I’m looking to achieve. Having a routine is great and it is the first step in the process. A good next step is understanding the outcomes of that routine. That is what I have been trying to think about within the last 500 words or so of prose.

    Each of those 52 blocks right now is created in a Google Doc and that is where the content stays within the 5 week planning and review cycle. For the whole year I work on content within that document and pull out completed works to share them in Substack. I’m trying to figure out if I should be publishing the content on the blog as well. No real conflict of obligation exists in doing that type of doubling up on posting the content. Generally, each blog post is created in a separate stand alone Google Doc and then that word processing document is just left in storage afterwards. That is very different from the 52 blocks of content where towards the end of the year I take the time to format the content back into a Microsoft Word document and prepare that manuscript for both editing and publication. From what I can tell, old Substack posts don’t really get a ton of traffic and at some point I’m sure that platform will cease to exist. My blog will exist until approximately 5 years after my efforts cease. I tend to pay in advance for domains and hosting.

  • My normal routine got a little bit out of rhythm

    Things within my normal routine got a little bit out of rhythm. For several days I turned off my alarm clock and just slept until either something woke me up or the day started off naturally. It has been a long time since that type of start to the day had even been considered. Even after returning to a normal sleeping schedule it took a couple of days to get back into the mode of starting the day with a little bit of writing. Yesterday it snowed at the end of the day which was surprising. The snow did not help me get back into the habit of daily writing, but it apparently did not hurt that pattern of effort either. 

    This month has been truly bonkers in terms of language models being released by major players in the AI space. Things have been so active that I’m actually considering changing up my writing plan for the next few weeks to provide a bit of coverage. That change up probably won’t be something that happens, but it is interesting to consider. I may add some of these topics to the very end of my backlog to reflect on in a few months. Providing immediate reaction coverage is not really what I need to do with my time. One of the things that I find the most challenging about our news feed based communication system is that it values recency over accuracy. We have access to a steady and perpetual stream of news, but few things really get covered over a long period of time. 

    It is entirely possible that these new models being introduced right now will be impactful enough within the day to day lives of people working, making things, and otherwise engaging digitally that it has to become a part of things. Even Bill Gates jumped into the argument and noted that this current wave of technology is the most important change in decades. It is a lot to consider and my writing session here is drawing to a close. It’s about time for me to jump back into the curation of my topic background and give the road forward a deep bit of consideration. I will note here that it would just take an hour or so for ChatGPT to produce the content for my entire 2023 writing backlog. I like to think that my efforts would be superious and that ChatGPT could not match the depth of my reasoning and consideration, but some of the content being produced is passable. It reminds me not to produce middling prose and to really value the creation of deeper works of content.

    Maybe it would be a good time to shift my writing focus into a pure deep dive of polling methods, civic engagement, civility, civil society, and the social fabric of things that bring us together. I’m looking at my backlog and thinking that I should probably just go deep on some topics and blow out my backlog topics toward the end of the year. It would be pretty easy to just refocus a bit away from purely writing about AI and begging to evaluate AI and something else within the focus related to society in general. That effort will be easy enough to implement and we will see what happens here this weekend. I’m about 80% done with a couple posts that need to be finished up and recorded. Working those projects to a conclusion will let me set up the next phases of this writing experiment.

  • A golden window of writing adventures

    Things got off to a better start today. My energy level was higher at the start of the day. Rocky dog did kick off that day a few minutes before my alarm clock should have gone off. Apparently, the dog based alarm clock was running a little bit early. It’s entirely possible that next week will usher in a golden window of writing adventures. We will see how that one goes. I should have some really good blocks of time to engage in some active writing. That does not always equate to a higher degree of productivity. It just opens the window to it. That opportunity has to be realized to materialize anything. One of the things I want to spend some time working on next week is deeply considering my 5 year writing plan to evaluate where things are and what things should be changed up. 

    Throughout this month I have been pretty consistent about sitting down and producing some blog related content. Maybe a bit more of an ongoing narrative would be helpful. Perhaps at the crux of this problem is that each one of these missives is the opening part of getting started. Functionally it is a similar thing that happens every day as the process of going from being awake to being ready to be productive starts. That is what I’m attempting to rationalize anyway. An ongoing narrative would be related to the things that I’m interacting with and an explanation of things that are happening along the way. Probably the only way to really do that would be to make sure that a bunch of starter ideas are seeded in Google Keep throughout the day. At the start of the day instead of writing without a prompt. I really just open a blank page and begin to make my way into the writing process. Things would instead start out by grabbing the previous day’s seeds and beginning to work bringing form to those ideas. 

    That method of seeding would certainly produce an ongoing narrative that was essentially about my interactions with things. It would push this from being a more functional journal and into a more reactionary journal. For better or worse that might be a more interesting thing to consider for a couple of weeks. I pretty much did that during the million word challenge where I had a backlog and used that to help focus my writing efforts every morning. During the course of trying to produce 3,000 or more words per day for a blog that is going to be required. 

  • A few things that could be completed

    Yesterday, I got back into the practice of daily writing. My overall December writing output for this weblog was a little slow with only 6 missives so far making it all the way to publication. At the start of the day I had a 30 minute window of extreme clarity which was a pleasant way to start the day. With a bit of hindsight on that one I should have sat down and started working on something, but instead of taking that path I just let my thoughts wander around to see where things would end up going. My desk is set up with a computer, keyboard, and monitor for the express purpose of generating prose. Each day I start my efforts by sitting down and working toward the creation of prose. During weekends on Saturday and Sunday all of that effort is generally focused on producing the weekly content for The Lindahl Letter. Weekdays on the other hand are more about stream of consciousness based writing. Certainly that will veer into the creation of a variety of things. Sometimes I end up producing academic content or other times it might be the seeds of a short story. 

    Right now at this very moment I’m looking at the week ahead to try to figure out exactly how much time I have to spend on a few things that could be completed. It’s that time of year where all the loose ends that could be closed out before the end of the year get a bit of consideration. Certainly far more things require a bit of doing than could possibly be completed. The other core problem around that path forward is that sustaining effort to close out things that could be completed is actually harder than it sounds. Generally, if those things were going to be self powered to resolution they would have been compelling enough to be closed out in the first place. Giving a second round of effort to something might be enough to close things out or it could just be effort to force a false start death rattle. Either way things end up a few of them are going to get a bit of time devoted to them here in the next few days. It is that time of year where chasing down windmills with a titled lance and absolutely no horse happens. 

    >>>>>>>>>>

    Read: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2212/2212.11279.pdf which is also kept at another website here: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-history.html

  • My winter season recap edition of prose

    About a week ago on Tuesday, December 20, 2022, my immune system was defeated by the onset of some flavor of SARS-CoV-2 in Kansas City. Our drive back to the house in Denver to set up a quartinee fort was pretty uneventful. It has been almost a week now and I’m just now mentally clear enough to sit down and write in a stream of consciousness fashion. Sometimes people talk about a fuzziness or a loss of concentration that happens and it was certainly a factor. The first couple of days brought chills, fever, headache, and some type of respiratory crud. It knocked me off my writing game for a solid week and a couple days in that stretch I mostly just stayed in the same spot. Really the only lingering system was a loss of taste which is hard to describe to someone, but is really a bummer of a thing to experience. Mentally I know what the orange slice or my espresso shots should taste like, but everything is dulled and muted. That new taste experience continues and I’m hopeful it will slowly cease over the next couple of weeks. 

    We made the best of the Christmas season for sure, but it was one where I lived my best quarantine life and stayed in the guest room. Fortunately, nobody else in the family at the house came down with anything which is really wonderful. That includes the dogs as well who were super happy to see us, but did not come down with anything. It was a Christmas full of cold and snow on an epic and pretty large national basis. A massive winter storm swept the nation with talk of massive changes in temperature. Denver had a 47 degree drop in temperatures across a two hour span for a totality of things getting 75 degrees colder. We had negative temperatures for two days and it was miserably cold. The aforementioned dogs did not think it was funny at all and were lightning quick to pop in and out of the house for the minimal amount of required business. 

    Things have now warmed up and as you can tell by this brief missive of somewhat lucid prose I’m back at the keyboard working on some things. On the brighter side of things 2023 is almost here and this next week will be one of reflection and intellectual adventure. I’m going to be able to spend some time trying to focus now and review my five year writing plan.

  • Just blogging along over here

    This is my third weblog post in as many days. You might be ready to call it a streak. Right now I’m on a little vacation from Twitter for the weekend and this has actually increased the amount of time that I would spend writing. I’m spending some of that extra time and focus on trying to figure out where to map out the next set of my writing endeavors. Getting a solid roadmap setup for the next 90 days of writing output will be a really important part of the puzzle. Moving into the new year I’m going to have to refocus on finishing up some AI related content roadmapping for the 3rd year of The Lindahl Letter. I’m really close to sending off the first two years of that content to an editor. I’m hopeful that massive tome of delightful written content ends up distributed in print later this year or potentially early next year in 2023.

    This morning my productivity has been pretty good so far. I was able to get a good portion of next week’s Substack post written. Tomorrow I should be able to finish up the draft on that one which will keep me roughly a week ahead of the publishing deadline of every Friday. Recording the audio for the November 18, 2022 podcast was easy enough. I’m still not a big fan of how the Audacity audio editing software changed up the menu’s recently. Within every single podcast editing experience I run a noise reduction transform to remove room noise, a noise gate to remove anything small, and a loudness normalization to help make the listening experience better. Outside of those audio transforms I of course try to edit out any of the major breaths that show up during the recording of raw audio for a podcast.

    My weekend routine is really driven by that writing, editing, and recording pattern to meet the drumbeat of that Friday at 17:00 hours publication deadline.