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.
Tag: Focus
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.